Landscapes of Attachment

Landscapes of Attachment: Figuring Contradiction and Change in Rural America proposes a mediating role for architecture in contemporary American small towns and rural communities. Small towns have a problem with change. As a society we place contradictory pressures on small towns, both to change (to save themselves from economic extinction) and to not change (to preserve their societal role as places of nostalgia). Architectural interventions in small towns commonly follow one of these two extremes, either treating the town as tabula rasa or attempting to preserve and restore it to a former (often mythical) heyday.

 

I propose a third role for architecture, that neither protects from or instigates change, but instead accepts change as inevitable and prepares the town to cope with changes to come. The resulting buildings are a sort of architecture parlante wherein each building speaks change within the life of the town and the occupants.

 

A large brick house which a couple was unable to sell as their marriage collapsed, now stands inverted, two halves of the former building serving as two separate homes which occasionally must look at each other, even as their inhabitants attempt to look in opposite directions. Just as the divorce has opened the private lives of the couple up for public scrutiny, so the house lays bare the life within.

 

In this mode of working, each building contains an inherent reckoning for the town about the choice of how to react to change. The buildings present their own changes without judgment, and in so doing they model a more honest relationship to change. A 110-page booklet containing the work done on this project is available here.

 

(Thesis project, M. Arch, U.C. Berkeley - FALL 2017-SPRING 2018, Ronald Rael, instructor, Tom Buresh, secondary advisor)