Reorienting the Rural: The Great Plains Shelterbelt in an Expanded Subjective Field

‘Reorienting the Rural’ is a research project that uses the climatic and economic disruptions sweeping the Great Plains as both site and pretext to re-examine how architecture conceives of order, form, and the agency of more-than-human subjects. The project appropriates and redeploys the spatial, territorial, and microclimatic logics of the original Great Plains Shelterbelt of the 1930s—reinvigorating it just as its current form reaches the limits of its ability to mediate soil moisture by lifting the wind off their fields. It centers on a speculative narrative of farmers “tightening their belts”—their Shelterbelts, that is—in response to the looming threat of a second Dust Bowl. Aggregating along an emerging Aridity Line beyond which crops lack the soil moisture to consistently grow, the new belts thicken the line into a newly-sheltered territory—while at the same time thickening the idea of what the Shelterbelt can be and do.

Volume Editors
Amir Ameri & Rebecca O'Neal Dagg

ISBN
978-1-944214-14-2