Architecture Program
Date of this Version
Spring 5-8-2010
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This thesis deals with two widespread issues facing contemporary society and the environment which it finds itself: 1. It is often assumed that what and where one calls home is straightforward, that our sense of home and identity are singularly rooted in a local place. Rather than being seen as an integral aspect of social life, mobility has been regarded as a special and temporary phenomenon classified under such headings as migration, refugee studies, and tourism. But increasingly, modern forms of dwelling, working, and playing involve circulating through a geographically extended network of social relations and a multiplicity of widely dispersed places and regions. 2. Trends in pollution and mass fertilization of crops have lead to low levels of oxygen in the Mississippi watershed. As a result, one of the largest hypoxic dead zones in the world occurs at the Mississippi River outlet in the Gulf of Mexico. Fixed infrastructure river communities and remedies have proven to be detrimental to the needs of the diverse and changing river environments. In response to the current cultural sense of place, an increasingly mobile lifestyle, liberation from boundaries, and neglect for the land to, Riparian Efformation proposes a flexible future architecture which caters the mobility of a network of people to negotiate with a specific environmental force: hypoxia on the Mississippi River.