The Backstory

It is hard to pinpoint exactly where this adventure began. Probably down by the creek at my dad’s cattle farm. From a young age, I’d always been fascinated by complex problems. Serving as the right-hand woman on my father’s projects from car repair to home construction, my mind lit up when given a complex task to problem solve. While I was studying architecture, I became drawn to large-scale infrastructure problems. When classmates were detailing wall sections, I was scouring Pamphlet Architecture and landscape architecture blogs trying to understand new ways buildings could more symbiotically coexist with the natural environment. My eyes would stray from the assigned task and get lost in the stories of seasons changing, rainfall events, and migration. In my final year of undergraduate, I became consumed by the machined landscape burying my face in Ed Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes. My thesis project traced the marks carved into the ground of transportation from lake to mill along the waterfront of Cleveland, Ohio, and speculated a future where the landscape marred with the residue of steel, piles taller than buildings of loose ore waiting to be smelted in the local iron mill just down the river would be transformed into a waterfront beckoning play. The river called to me with its stories. The story of the 1969 fire was the one that locked me into this site. It was the impetus of the 1971 Clean Water Act because the river actually caught on fire. Yes, you read that right, the RIVER caught on FIRE. This was due to the number of flammable chemicals that floated along its surface as ships traveled down its serpentine path. This was a wake-up call, so it seemed, and yet 41 years later, the lake and river were continuing to be polluted by the iron ore and more open-air industrial material storage sites. (Read more on this project here.)

Fascinated by the dynamism of infrastructural systems, I chose to continue my research as a Master of Architecture student focusing on hybridized urban infrastructure. In my 2 years of study, I explored food production and distribution along Philadelphia’s western waterfront, water resource management in Gowanus for the Gowanus by Design WaterWorks competition, and uncovered a buried bayou from the early 1900s in Memphis, TN that has fallen victim to blight from its risk of flooding. DEEP SURFACE examined the historical layers of the city including development patterns, waterways, and infrastructural systems which I called the “deep surface” where I discovered the Gayoso Bayou, a waterway separating downtown Memphis from Midtown that had been pushed underground and made into a flushing channel to the Mississippi River. My thesis explored the environmental, ecological, social, and economic impacts of daylighting the bayou to create a dynamic system that could help with safe wildlife migration, serve the migratory birds along the Mississippi flyway, and become an asset to the community through greenways and parks.

Since graduating, I’ve been voraciously reading the work of scholars from across the world on symbiotic urban development as we continue to be drawn to urban centers as a population. Climate changes have put stress upon already fragile systems of infrastructure built to accommodate the projected population of their time of construction and not capable of responding to the rapid nature of current development. In an effort to continue this exploration, I applied for a Fulbright-Nehru U.S. Student grant in October of 2019. On the most roller coaster of days—March 13, 2020—I found out that I was a finalist. That day, I sat in awe of this opportunity as I canceled my travel plans to Hawaii as we entered what we thought was a “three-week lockdown.” Twenty months later, four deferrments later, I have a plane ticket in my hand for February 5th, 2022 to go to India to explore the ecological and social potential of hybridized urban infrastructure in the peri-urban region of Bengaluru. Working alongside the brilliant scholar, Harini Nagendra, I’ll be mapping the transformation of the city over the past 50 years and how the rapid development has fragmented ecological corridors and erased socio-cultural urban commons to accommodate the nearly 12 million person population. Projected to increase by 4 million by 2031, it is imperative that we act now. In the next post, I’ll share my research statement and personal statement that were part of my Fulbright application package.

l—ttle b—rd