Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Micah Rutenberg
The material conditions of geographic space and infrastructure has tended to dominate architectural discourse at the expense of a nuanced understanding of the important role immaterial systems also have to play. Increasingly, however, the immaterial conditions of objects and institutions are being integrated into contemporary discourse on the dynamics of geographic space and infrastructure. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a New Deal agency, initiated a vast infrastructure of power generating hydroelectric dams along the Tennessee River and its tributaries. The TVA fundamentally transformed the rituals and practices of life in the Tennessee Valley by integrating all aspects of the everyday within a system of power, infrastructure, environment, politics, and consumer capitalism. This essay examines the geographic territory constructed by the TVA, which emerged through the overlap of power in the form of physical infrastructure, and soft power in the form of consumerism. To illustrate this point, I will describe the spatial consequences of two artifacts critical to the TVA’s development: the electrical appliance and the power system map. After exploring the nuanced conditions of each invention, I will make the argument that they inhabit a system of objects that renders intriguing, less-understood geographic epistemologies and conceptual adjacencies, which reveal novel trajectories for a discourse on geographic and infrastructural space.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.73
Volume Editors
ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5
