in explorations and realizations of architecture in a less conventionally anticipated means.
Agrarian Ruins (Drawing)
is an ongoing body of work that investigates the spatial and cultural afterlives of agricultural structures across the Great Plains. Through hybrid drawings, photography, and paintings, the series studies how rural buildings persist, decay, and are reinterpreted through representation.
Vernacular Monsters
Building on the foundations established in the initial thesis work, the current phase of Agrarian Ruins expands the investigation to the vernacular ruins of the Northern Great Plains, particularly within Nebraska. This phase of the project contributes to a poster proposal for the 2026 Great Plains Conference, hosted by the Center for Great Plains Studies.
Many of these sites exist today in a transitional condition. Abandoned rural buildings stand within landscapes gradually overtaking them, becoming overgrown and increasingly indistinguishable from the environments that surround them.
These ruins occupy a moment of transformation, simultaneously standing and falling. The project asks whether meaning persists within these vernacular structures as they continue to deteriorate, and what their study might contribute to contemporary architectural thinking.
What architectural qualities remain within these structures today? What lessons might their forms, materials, and relationships to the landscape offer to the built environment of the present? As largely unexamined architectural devices, these ruins may reveal alternative understandings of form, construction, and contextual response.
Documentation of these sites has primarily been conducted through digital photography during field visits. However, the seemingly most effective means of exploring and communicating these observations has been through drawing. Through drawing, the rural landscape is reimagined and the latent architectural qualities of these ruins are examined more closely.
This work also situates agrarian ruins within a broader lineage of rural construction. As newer agricultural structures, such as Quonset huts and pre-engineered metal sheds, begin to age and deteriorate, understanding their stick-framed predecessors becomes increasingly important. Studying these earlier buildings provides valuable context for continuing discussions surrounding vernacular architecture across the Midwest and Northern Great Plains.
Agrarian Ruins (Photo)
is an ongoing body of work that investigates the spatial and cultural afterlives of agricultural structures across the Great Plains. Through hybrid drawings, photography, and paintings, the series studies how rural buildings persist, decay, and are reinterpreted through representation.