Ballman/Khapalova Architects

The Waltemath Foundation is a non-profit organization in Hooper, Nebraska established by the abstract painter Joan Waltemath.

Joan bought a building on the corner of Main Street as a place to paint — the ceilings were tall enough to fit the 14-foot paintings she was developing at the time. When the big paintings were finished an architectural collaboration began. The project quickly evolved into a place not only to work, but also to show art, engage with the local community, and contribute to the longevity of the small agricultural town, while becoming a kind of pilgrimage site for the extended art community.

With the idea to explore their unique dialogue built over the years at the Cooper Union I.S Chanin School ofArchitecture, Ballman/Khapalova and Waltemath worked from concept to realization only to find at the end that images of the project reveal a profound underlying dialogue based in harmonics and architectonics. Waltemath’s work lent itself to this collaboration insofar as many of her geometric works were derived or inspired by floor plans. Ballman/Khapalova turned these significant points of intersection into an integral form of architecture. 

The design of the building began with the First and Second Floor structural and light grid drawings by the architects  which respond to Waltemath’s 1990 drawing of harmonic progressions 1,2,3,5,8… from 1990-3at 10 x 9 3/4 ft.

As Waltemath tied the use of grids to the human body Ballman/Khapalova worked to unite the site to the surrounding environment.  Grids became their lingua franca. Using the surrounding agricultural landscape of the Jeffersonian grid, and a grid internal to the building itself, the intent was to tie the building to the land dealing primarily with the variations and permutations that occur as an ideal grid meets the real conditions of nature, program, and material.

Over a two- to three-year period architect and artist continued to explore the dialogue between plan and painting as the project took form. Ballman/Khapalova’s  First and Second Floor Fields and Elements renderings of the completed design, when colorized took on an uncanny resemblance to Waltemath’s Torso Roots series.
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Currently under construction, the project continually reveals new points of synchronicity.  When completed as a viewing space, Waltemath’s work itself will activate this unique collaboration between artist and architect.