thesis abstract

Throughout the technological advances of humanity, architecture has been the means with which we can consider previous generations, understand their priorities, trials, and ethics. Places with past look to buildings to tell their stories; however, what is to be said for those places that cannot be understood in the same contextual dialogue? What sort of translation is necessary to register the changes and developments in energies? When the future reminisces, what will exist in order to understand today? I am looking to define a more particular architecture that is directly responsive to the conditions as they are – reacting to the relations between organisms and their environment as well as the dynamics and physical history of the earth.

Over its existence, the landscape of southern Louisiana has prevailed as a palimpsest of history, gradients of soil deposition registering a subsurface cultural diversity different from the conditions above. Throughout millennia, the meandering courses of the Mississippi River have scoured the surface of the earth, repeatedly shifting, leaving traces of geological histories embedded within the state. This history lies dormant, buried beneath the tides and currents, the beauty shadowed by the muddy waters and the people on the surface blinded by the darkness. The actions, thoughts, ideals, and opinions fundamental to a Country lie suspended in these layers – surfaces of past supporting a society continually less aware. Amidst the stratum, migration of underlying energies leaves traces and residues behind, fusing as they settle in sought reservoirs. The River, an omnipresent power to view, reveal, transform, and challenge that which it alone can see, is the viable catalyst for exposure.

Throughout the recent centuries, the Country has attempted to solidify the River’s flow. Previously, the changing courses of the River have varied as much as the identities now spread throughout the Country. The perceived authority demonstrated by the Country has established a screen of normalcy, shielding the current inhabitants from the traumas of vulnerability. Today, the will to power propels the controlled remnants of present cultures into the Gulf; here, they vanish into open seas, preventing their former proliferation as a wetland barrier dividing the powers of multiple worlds. The control of the Country eradicates the barrier that formerly protected the Country itself.

The contextual surfaces in which the River is embedded currently hold the flows in place. Barriers and control structures attempt to keep the waters at bay, the muddy divergences in check. The growth and survival of wetland conditions are suffocating in the River’s restriction. Still, the River will never permanently settle into one path – something of this magnitude, energy, intensity, and lure cannot be subdued. The River was never meant to be constrained. I aim to unlock the guidance and energies latent in these surfaces of past; I aspire to develop a system of unfolding these layers, utilizing the unexpressed reality found in the cultural and physical histories, to inform sympathetic architectural territories. In my eyes, the River and its future existence are the articulation of the varied, coinciding, interwoven history.