“America’s Fourth Coast: Industrialization Along the Mississippi River.” Benjamin Menschel Fellows Exhibition. The Cooper Union, New York, NY. 2015.

Completed with Arta Perezic

The world’s great rivers encourage wonder and awe. They cleanse the body, nourish appetites, sooth our senses, yield fertile ground, float our stuffs and persons, and have done so seemingly forever. In the United States our great river is the Mississippi and its feeder streams and main currents act to define the physical and social landscape of America’s Heartland.

The Mississippi of the present century is one that flows with a boiling rage, its waters blackened by the pollutants of industrial malpractice. Cities and towns along its banks, once critical hubs of trade, travel, and culture, are now in stages of decline and struggling with the terms of recovery.

For our Benjamin Menschel Fellowship we proposed traveling the length of the Mississippi River. We began our journey at the headwaters, outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, accompanied by the strident sounds of St. Anthony Falls.  Traveling south we encountered industrial cities of varying historical significance: Red Wing, Wisconsin; Quad Cities, Iowa; Saint Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee; and Helena, Arkansas, among others.  Our journey ended in the fabled city of New Orleans.

We consider architecture as agency to the built environment. Through intimate exploration of the structures that account for the use, control, and misuse of the river’s mighty gifts, we hope to open up a dialogue with the unseen social and political policies that direct these structure’s purposes. We came to see a river continuously buttressed by railroads, highways, cornfields under industrial management, petroleum processing plants, flood-prevention infrastructures, and a signature urban development which reads as a kind of bloodline from which America is aggressively, if not desperately, feeding. In this part of the country, the river rules.

This work is an exploration. We have revisited our journey via journals, maps, sketchbooks, photographs, and various acquisitions. We are motivated by the river’s great impact, but also by the call to study the contrasting elements of river-use–urban and farm landscapes, human and non-human scales of production, states of marginalized decay and concentrated growth, projects of environmental assault and environmental restoration. We are seeking a way for architectural means of representation to act as clarifying tools of understanding. We challenged ourselves to engage these indexed moments of divergence as they occur within a landscape of strong geophysical commonality.

A river draws people to it, to travel down it, to grasp its energy and power. We were drawn down this river’s banks, seeking a dialogue with the river’s disparate and dissimilar moments in industrial practice. Our exhibition is dedicated to the architect as interlocutor with the social and the landscape in one of this country’s most defining events: The Mississippi River.