Immanent Appalachia: Insurgent Practices of Circular

Abstract

Due to its unique tectonic history and extreme biological diversity, East Tennessee is a place defined by the incredible abundance of natural resources and the inevitable environmental degradation in the exploitation thereof. What we share most truthfully and vividly in the commons of Appalachia are the myriad forms of catastrophe wrought by extraction economies. Representing a body of scholarship undertaken as the Tennessee Architecture Fellow in the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design, the work began by investigating the means of production within three dominant material regimes of East Tennessee – the lithic, metallic, and xylological – this project locates three sites as the ‘theater of operations2’ for the development of architectural ‘mock-ups3’ (Figures 1-3) which address the consequences of extraction by inducing circularity in flows of material and labor. Evoking histories of abundance, craft, and community of pre-modern and indigenous4 Appalachian cultures while working directly with material harvested on site, each mock-up seeks to conjure an immanent geopoetic5 agency, generating unique assemblages6 of meaning, feeling, and place in proto- architectural relationships between structure and surface. Speculative fabrication protocols introduced digital precision (Figures 7, 8) to traditional, high-participation means and methods of manual craft in order to manage the inherent complexity and eccentricity of non-standard parts in structural assemblies while foregrounding issues of automation which loom large in the region.