submission :

first draft hand in. masters thesis.

i have been attempting to create a landscape of event and experience;

therefore, every aspect of my work should assist in that endeavor.

part one of three.

the tenacious anthology of the mud.

to be followed by :

the exploratory instrument of territory.

the transmogrification of the vessel.

then they were tangible.

in articulating my position regarding the real versus the simulation, some of the drawings after they were brought out of the virtual. still working on them, and the others.

the characters.

these characters, these people, each a mixture of legend, perception, and reality, become the rules that define this journey along the mississippi. each has their own goals and agenda. each is from a different time and place within american culture. each has their own priorities and intuitions. each has a philosophy to offer.

the characters have deep memory that span time from a century to millenia. each has their own method of creating within this workshop and provides different arguments and ways to use contemporary technologies. each provides different solutions to issues that we are currently dealing with, through their history from a particular aspect of american past.

how can each apply their knowledge to the condition of the here and now, creating new possibilities for understanding and development.

kingfish oldreive

found while walking down the mississippi amongst boat shoes. he knows of the progress. the understanding of human needs and desires. the fundamental motives of fear and love. attempts at infrastructural development, the buildings of roads and bridges. expanding rights and freedoms. a circus performer turned politician. the history of louisiana.

satchmo louis.

joining following a supply stop in new orleans. the sounds of his music enticing along the street. bringing the history of struggle and hardship, spirit of human survival. yet full of energy and life. origins in africa. the history of slave trade and the civil rights movement. knowledge of hard work and maintaining faith in others.

yagen haricots.

she joins after canoeing up to the vessel amidst the journey. heading north on the river towards the legendary cahokia in present day illinois, attempting to find histories of this former sprawling metropolis waiting for her within the surfaces of past. knowledge of agricultural methods native to the indigenous chitimacha of southern louisiana. trying to find her ancestral origins.

menlo park.

an inventor. a scientist. an experimenter. a self taught man from a background of skilled artisans. expertise in multiple fields. joining at the formations of the river. bringing the geological memory of the mississippi and the history of america through westward expansion and industrial revolution. a machine himself.

relationships and parameters

through creating a general understanding of the spatial relationships of each part of this vessel, i needed a set of parameters around which to create the structure. so, a set of characters. people in this story of mine, a mixture of legend, myth and reality. each with their own priorities, instincts and passions.

this architecture is not a utopia, but a watercraft for stories. using oral traditions within the workshop. how does each character bring their history, the understandings and technologies of their cultures and pasts, to the contemporary. how does that inform the way we construct today.

revised.

Throughout the technological advances of humanity, architecture has been a means with which we can consider previous generations, understand their priorities, trials, and ethics. Each investigation into these histories provides an interpretation of that particular shape of the contemporary, the customs and methods concerning the time for cultivation. The attempt to reconnect fragments of past, legacies of former civilizations and moments in earthly existence, is the antithesis to defining an understanding of our present. However, in order to place the works being realized today, we must also articulate the state of the here and now and, consequentially, inquire into that condition as a force shaping these actions. Endless amounts of information and turbulent eddies of correspondence pervade within present humanity. The availability of pedagogical details and the potential alacrity of the discussion encourage a deep consideration of the implications arising with each endeavor. As saturation of knowledge provides an understanding hidden within established histories, I aim to contribute an architecture that is responsive to the conditions as they are – reacting to the force of the contemporary.

Over its existence, the landscape of southern Louisiana has prevailed as a palimpsest of history, gradients of soil deposition registering the varied energies influencing conditional surface development. Throughout millennia, the meandering courses of the Mississippi River have scoured the crust of the earth, repeatedly shifting, leaving traces of geological histories embedded within the state. Throughout the recent centuries, the developments and technologies of our civilization have attempted to solidify the River’s flow. A system of control propels the perpetual current, the remnants of place along with it, out into the gulf, preventing the deposition of sediment and the former proliferation of the resultant wetland barrier. The growth and survival of these wetland conditions, the shield that previously protected this southern state, is suffocating in the River’s restriction. The evolution of the contemporary, the environment for the contribution of this culture, provides the foundation for an imaginative and developmental form of architectural investigation.

Capitalizing on the flood of information and persistence of data inquisition, the condition of this time emboldens a burgeoning record of possibilities; nature and culture are mutually reliant in the current aesthetic. The capacity to investigate natural history demands an appreciation of human energies; simultaneously, the construction of a continued human existence requires an understanding of nature and its guidance. The ever - present determination of communication and the resultant collaborative endeavors across disciplines, including but not exclusive to physical boundaries, stimulates that potential. I am working to develop a structure of unfolding these layers of cultural and physical history, attempting to understand the forces that shape them, and subsequently using the direction latent in these surfaces of past to inform sympathetic architectural territories. The diversity of available information in conjunction with a desire for contextual appreciation provide an alternative means of articulating the work of the present. Inventive architectural practices and unrestricted aesthetic responses nurture the location of ideas within the flow of contemporary culture.