Preserving Post-Landscapes: Reconstituting Lost Territory Through Impermanent Architecture

Worldwide environmental and political crises threaten assumed conditions of stability undergirding contemporary legal frameworks of property. As an abstract and static mechanism for ordering the landscapes, property is not suited to the increasingly chaotic state of our environment, nor is the fixed and isolationist architecture it propagates. Accepting these escalating changes as insurmountable, in opposition to individualist and preservationist ideologies governing current responses to climate change, presents the potential for a new architectural paradigm based in adaptability and collective mobilization of resources.

This project doesn’t propose a utopian model for propertyless society. Instead, it employs existing preservation frameworks specific to the Ashley River Historical District in Charleston, SC, the site of this project, as a mechanism for reconstituting a shared historical landscape of enslavement, rice growing, and phosphate extraction. By reading these sites in relation to each other and broader historical movements informing property, an understanding of the extractive nature of property and its consequences is made apparent, compounded by sea-level rise reshaping the area.

Architecture as a static medium cannot be perpetually maintained. This project suggests a model for preservation that reconciles architecture, landscape, and time. It is composed of three parts; a series of structures embedded in their site, a migratory structure which moves between sites, and a connective path network. The embedded buildings extend the landscape, marking environmental change and facilitating movement of the mobile architecture. This structure adapts to each new site, producing a record of migration and its initial site, reconstructing the lost landscape.