Okay. Hi, my name is Jennifer and this evening I would like to present two projects which
present an ongoing series of questions constantly provoking my work and I think because as architects
and designers we need to be stirred by something and I'll note a few of my obsessions tonight.
This is Hale County located in the black belt region of Alabama, very much a poverty stricken
landscape where the late Samuel Mockbee brought students here from Auburn University to learn
about architecture by stepping across thresholds like this and challenging the status quo.
Ultimately it is a curious landscape. Someone's imagined paradise is portrayed in this
side yard tent construction with the title Hilton spray painted in all caps. While observing this
rural context I found myself illustrating contradictions of the deep south in the framework of a 15 inch
by 15 inch collage. And one example is Mammy's cupboard. It's a restaurant housed inside a 28
foot tall skirt of an African-American woman whose complexion has faded in the sun since its
construction in 1940. I believe on October 5th I consumed blueberry lemonade, coconut
pie, chocolate pie, lemon pie and all in one setting I think I had a falling out with sugar.
And if we get back to the architecture this is the design build program that Mockbee set
up and it's called the Rural Studio. I resided here for two years both as a student and an
instructor and with three other colleagues our thesis project a master plan and a pavilion
was conceived and built within ten months. We were 22 years old with real clients a real
budget consultants and we were serving a community. We were intimately exposed to 173 acres of
flooding landscape with where Tupelo and Cypress trees reside in an oxbow lake backing up to
the Cahaba River. The pavilion is situated in an old WPA park in the 1930s. The deck is made out
of cedar wood and floats 18 inches above the ground and undulating aluminum roof hovers
amongst the trees. Difficulty in construction began with making six foot deep poles in the
ground for slip friction footings and ended with hanging sheets of plywood above our head on
tears of scaffolding. And if I drive down enough dirt roads in the south I find people living in
vulnerable places on bends and rivers enthusiastically engaging with moments of buoyancy because at
some point the inhabitants are driving their flat bottom boats instead of their pickup trucks to
the front door. Mark Twain called the mighty Mississippi River the crookedest river in the
world since it was one of the so since one of part of its journey uses up 1,300 miles of to
cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in 600. So as a way of coating this forceful
body of water the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired Harold Fisk to draw up its fantastic meander
belts. And this brings me to the second side of interest where the states of Mississippi and
Louisiana are divided by the river. Another extremely vulnerable land near to a town called
Waterproof Louisiana. Evidence of a situated, sorry, saturated land can be realized from the
aerial view. A winding river, a residual oxbow lake, deteriorating sandbar islands and a men-made
dyke system. A resilient infrastructure is inserted into its shifting landscape. A collection of
buoys bob up and down the river just near to Waterproof. These bulbous shapes contain a
pre-filtration device which the rainmaker can attach one of its hoses and distribute water
throughout the land by way of its mechanical leg. The alarming sal precedes the glide along
the levee road on an abandoned railroad track warning others of severe weather. For example,
a tornado, a thunderstorm, a fire. The ultimate emergency advisor, an alarming sal, needs
access from its royal throne instantly to the track at all times. The collector of curiosities
is a creature of flight made up of metallic scales who comes the river from above only
during fantastic weather to collect and return with its daily findings. Its habitat can be
compared to a junkyard in the south and doubles as a one-mile-long tornado shelter for its town
citizens. And there must be an antagonist. Meet the flood instigator, extremely destructive
when angry. This is not at all helpful to the poverty-stricken population of Waterproof. For
the creature, it causes great hardship by jumping in the river and causing an overflow of the
levee and thus flooding the land over and over. Each of the creatures describes represents a
social and political situation as well as Byzantine characteristics of an ever-changing site. And
the project is a narrative calling for an imaginatively sustainable infrastructure for the
United States. A network of floating hydraulic mattresses could be inserted in the Oxbow Lake
providing an option for refuge if we must live amongst the water, which we do. And in the
condition of Katrina, these places became the attics and rooftops of homes. Other proposals could
be a levee deconstruction facility or a clothesline architecture where we are constantly drying out
the engulfed. And what do these buildings' conditions look like in an archaic relic along
the river? At the same time towns and cities, sorry, at the same time that we're sustaining towns
and cities, can a civic architecture be suggested? Recently we witnessed in Metro Atlanta boundaries
were ignored when building along the water's edge, specifically where subdivisions were built directly
in the flood plain in neighborhoods of Estelle. How shall we rebuild in the same place or somewhere
else? Dramatically different, I suppose. This entire conversation of water is an old one,
but somehow relevant when our country is deciding where to spend stimulus money. If we switch
seamlessly between the built and the imagined, one must be reminded of the flood. It will happen,
it will leave a mark on our structures. Let's embrace it.
