This article addresses a dormant farm site in which a body of work is being developed in effort to examine the past character and future shape of Iowa's inherited landscape. The content of this exploration was generated in response, and as an addition, to David Heymann's essay "Precise, Anonymous, Enigmatic" published in the 1990 winter issue of Iowa Architect. In that critically perceptive article, Heymann traces the evolution of the Midwestern landscape by examining farm buildings within rural Iowa. Central to the evolution that Heymann cites is the specific topography due to wind erosion. Heymann uses this dynamic to illustrate a perceived stability given the tectonic nature of farm building construction and associated spatial configurations. If the centerline of Heymann's thinking is that instability in land morphology (though difficult to optically register) has produced a tectonic perceptual stability, the conceit of this essay Is that such stability no longer exists, and that a shift in the scales of economy has yielded an outwardly visible tectonic instability. Thus to Heymann's transformation is added the inverse consequence and thereby directly linking the visual evidence of an unstable (derelict) building set to the intellectual evidence of an unstable ground plane. This relationship of figure to ground is the basis for staging a series of intensely modulated spatial reconstructions within an antiquated seed drying facility that, like Iowa's farm buildings and land-use practices, is intrinsically grounded In the spatial and cognitive confines of its surround.