Park City, in Utah, used to be a silver mining town, but today it lives on tourism, especially during the winter ski season. The town’s Kimball Art Center – where the annual Sundance Film Festival is held yearly at the end of January – was inaugurated in 1976 by Bill Kimball, an art enthusiast who turned a rundown garage into a non-profit center for the arts. The project presented in the competition to renovate and expand the existing building reflects all these layers of history and proposes – aside from the interior renovation of the existing building – a 25 meter tall volume inspired by the Silver King Coalition Building, an iconic mining edifice with an imposing wood structure that was destroyed by fire in 1982.

Its location at the intersection of the two busiest streets in Park City generates a sculptural volume that addresses both contexts: it lines up along its axis with Main Street and then swirls as it rises to welcome visitors arriving from Heber Avenue. Inside it a spiralling wood staircase follows the perimeter of this twisting architecture, which seems to be in constant movement and leads visitors from the ground floor to a large terrace with panoramic views of the town.