Agrarian Ruins

Origins of the Agrarian Ruins

Agrarian Ruins is an ongoing investigation into the abandoned rural architecture of the American Midwest. Originating from a thesis project developed during the 2016–2017 academic year under the advisement of Associate Professor Jason Griffiths, the work examines the architectural afterlife of agrarian settlement across the Great Plains through drawing and visual speculation.

The Midwest is often imagined as a counterpoint to the congestion of post-industrial cities: a vast and open landscape stretching toward the Great Plains. Yet this landscape is now shaped by another form of industrialization, as the distributive pattern of small farms and homesteads that once defined the region has increasingly given way to large-scale commercial agriculture.

These agrarian ruins, farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings often remain standing within fields of commercial corn. Too damaged to remain useful yet still physically present, they occupy a suspended condition between persistence and disappearance, their awkward forms monumentalizing the ambitions and excesses of settlement across the American frontier while casting a cautionary eye toward the hubris embedded in the Jeffersonian vision of land distribution.

Within the drawings of Agrarian Ruins, these remnants of settlement appear gathered together as a bricolage of abandoned forms. Hand-drawn elevations of buildings located primarily in Gosper County, Nebraska form the foundation of the work and are subtly combined with digital collage and overlay, where the computational aspect remains visually suppressed yet essential to the final representation.

Through this process, the collective act of collaging drawings together becomes a cipher for the collective resistance implied in the project, a resistance embedded within the architecture of the agrarian ruin.

Present Investigation: Agrarian Ruins of the Northern Great Plains

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.