12 Miles a Year

My winning entry for the Archon Studio of 2018, with the supervision of Olsen-Kundig Studio and professor Carl Lewis, drew inspiration from the post-industrial landscapes of the Midwest, particularly those of early nuclear research and energy production. Dresden Generating Station—the first privately financed nuclear power plant in the U.S. and a keystone of postwar energy optimism—sits within a landscape where rail lines, river corridors, and prairie converge. This terrain carries the layered histories of industry, energy, and abandonment. By re-inhabiting its disused rail lines, the project reclaims infrastructure not for transit or commerce but for reflection and habitation, transforming the residues of industry into a framework for living.

Rather than treating movement as speed or efficiency, the project reframes locomotion as a slow inhabitation of landscape. Its propulsion system borrows from the mechanics of a grandfather clock, scaled up into a pendulum, counterweights, and a 1.5-meter winding wheel. Each day, residents wind the mechanism to power the ultra-slow drive, where a heavy steel “foot” presses against the ground to move the house forward.

Built on the reclaimed steel frame of boxcars, the house unfolds as a linear sequence—private quarters, dining, power, and communal spaces—that extend dwelling into a year-long passage across prairie, rivers, marshland, and ruins. In place of the forward thrust of rail or the concentrated energy of nuclear power, the project proposes a cyclical, patient mode of inhabiting the Anthropocene landscape. The house becomes an instrument for reading its environment slowly and deliberately, reframing abandoned infrastructure as a stage for observation, ritual, and renewed attachment to place.