Project on Southern Appalachian Architecture

There was an anecdote that made the rounds in IIT’s Crown Hall that when Mies was working on the Edith Farnsworth house he sent Myron Goldsmith out to record the high water mark on the nearby 1884 bridge over the Fox River. Mies then set the floor datum for the house two feet higher. Given subsequent ruinous floodings the narrowness of Mies dataset is striking.

I remember my father talking about the folly of building in Western North Carolina floodplains when I was just a boy. “Flood plains are flat because they have flooded, time and again. Before any of us lived around here. If it’s flat in these mountains you know it’s going to get wet”. The reappearance of natural forces that have shaped this land deep in the past should not come as a complete surprise. Even if the level of destruction of the built environment that results is beyond imagining - as we are seeing right now. The land itself speaks a language much older than our arrival in the region.

The Project on Southern Appalachian Architecture is aimed at understanding the built environment of the region, and its scope rightly reaches past how we build into larger questions about where we build. This post was uploaded from Genoa Italy, not far from Vernazza, a Ligurian town which suffered an extraordinary flood in 2011 when the mountainous terrain saw over 12 inches of rain in six hours. And I was driving through the Pigeon River Gorge the day after the intense storm in 2021 that saw around 14 inches of rain dumped on Haywood County. Six people died in that flooding. I have been thinking about the impacts of radical weather events on the mountains for some time.

Once the region affected by Helene counts its casualties, and eventually manages to get power, water, and services reestablished, the plans for rebuilding communities has to account for the high likelihood of similar storms in the future, if not even more extreme weather. Houston saw 50 inches of rain during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, so what would 30 inches falling in Southern Appalachia look like?

It’s neither desirable or feasible to avoid building in flood plains in the Southern Appalachians. The steep slopes and rugged terrain in the region mean buildable sites are going to be low and flat. But we can develop a workable strategy for what we build in flood plains. Certainly not housing. And we have to consider more robust and carefully sited infrastructure projects that provide redundancy and refuge. We have to think about hardening critical structures like health care facilities and schools.

The people of the region have known how to build with an eye on nature’s vagaries and potentials for violence and destruction. The people making decisions about how and where we rebuild need to consider the knowledge that informed earlier patterns of development and then figure in a new reality of impacts that we’ve not seen in our more recent past. Mies based his decision about flood risk in Plano on a benchmark that was only about 60 years old. In spite of the clear evidence of the flood plain’s extents one could see by simply looking at the landscape.

We need to relearn how to read the landscape of Southern Appalachia.

POST-HELENE