RURAL RESILIENCY

from Interdisciplinary Portfolio

by Sarah Kenney

MARKET, INVISIBLE

REFLECTION, ABSORPTION, DIFFUSION IN CUTBANK EDGES OF HARDIN COUNTY

STUDIO: RIVER STUDIO

ADVISOR: BRADFORD COLLETT, TENNESSEE RIVERLINE

ADVISOR: PIPPA BRASHEAR, SCAPE STUDIO

COLLABORATIVE CONCEPT, INDIVIDUAL DESIGN

FALL 2021

Resiliency projects in landscape architecture generally prioritize urban protection; however, problems related to instability and climate change affect peri-urban and rural landscape equally. These different conditions are reciporical landscapes - urbanism relises on ruralism in many explicit ways - and the vitality of cities depends on protection of the countryside..

This project is a rural resiliency landscape that protects riverine communities in Hardin County, Tennessee. On river edges, cut banks are on turbulent cuves where the river’s current runs the most quickly. This turbulence removes soil, destabilizing the river’s edge, causing mass wasting when there is sediment fall out.

This project uses methods from acoustic design to reflect, absorb, and diffuse turbulent currents and protect the communities on cut bank edges. The boardwalk provides areas where christmas trees and large landscape waste can be deposited. These trees will diffuse and absorb turbulent flow, protecting the river’s edge. The soil that builds up here will form seasonal tide pools.

Intervention Context

PERFORMATIVE BOARDWALK AND DUNES

DUAL BOARDWALKS FORM PATHS FOR TREE WASTE DISPOSAL

Site Plan Form Finding

PERFORMATIVE BOARDWALK AND DUNES

DUAL BOARDWALKS FORM PATHS FOR TREE WASTE DISPOSAL

DEEP WATER FISHING PIER

OVERLOOK PLATFORM

Flow Analysis

EXPRESSIVE

BOARDWALK AND DUNES

METHODS FOR STABILIZING CUTBANKS

STRAIGHT

BANKED

BUFFERING TIDE POOL

CRESCENT

DOCKED

WETLANDS ACCESS

05 POST-CONTEMPORARY BATH HOUSE

The Return Of Public Bathing In A Water Scarce World

STUDIO: KNOXVILLE 2070

ADVISOR: JAMES ROSE

COLLABORATORS: INDIVIDUAL PROJECT SUMMER 2021

She remembered the news that morning. Stories of deserts and dust storms, of homes destroyed in wildfires and farms without a harvest, of the stresses of rationing and wars for the right to wetlands had played on a tin drum long ago beaten to death. Feet rising to meet the surface, she let her head fallback toward the water, and as she did so, the words above the main entrance passed trough her field of vision:

Storms of yesterday

Now, labor in solitude

Joy! Water for all

Leaning back, floating, fingers breaking the surface to feel the first drops of the arriving storm. Her submerged head muffled the joyous cheer that came with the start of a storm – the people of Knoxville celebrating the first days of monsoon season. She arced her body in the water, arms open to the hard spits of rain falling from the sky. Water would fill every creek so quickly, that the TVA workers would be directing it to the bath house cascades where it would mingle with the pools. Most beautiful in the rain, made of rubble and waterfalls, the bath house would wake its sleepy lights and inaugurate the start of a new year - a temporary end to the austerity and subtle stress, to guilty pleasures and token actions, to infrastructural and the resource-driven inequality that permeated their postmodern condition. The winds whipped through market square, washing through the air, roughly cleansing the faces of bathers. Soon they would be freezing, and red faced, shivering and hungry, too worn out to continue celebrating - but until then, the city rejoiced the start of the new year.