Master of Architecture graduate thesis at Rice University School of Architecture. Advisor: Nana Last.
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What is architecture in a world turned upside down?
What is design in the path of destruction?
What is a landmark on shifting soils?
What is a trail when each new trace erases the one before?
Appalachian Trail 2.o is a proposal for the diversion of the Appalachian Trail into the coalfields of southern West Virginia. It is a reinvention of the guided experience. As it negotiates the perpetual churns and heaves of mountaintop removal mining, it unearths a simulacrum with more permanence than its reality. In a conflation of the material and representational, it upturns divides distancing culture, design, and form and gives ground to an “architecture brut.”
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