12 Miles a Year

Archon Studio Prize (2nd Place), 2018

An architectural proposal that reclaims industrial infrastructure for habitation, this was my winning entry for the Archon Studio of 2018. Developed with the supervision of Olsen-Kundig Studio and professor Carl Lewis, the project 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.