Thomas-Mark Peterson: Themes on a Fallow House

Graduate Thesis - Thomas-Mark Peterson, Virginia Tech School of Architecture, 2023

Since the late 1800’s, generations of Thomas-Mark Peterson’s family have lived on a farm on the edge of the lugubriously named Great Dismal Swamp in Virgina. Knowing that soon ‘The Farm’, as the 40-acre property is known to the family, will have to be sold and will pass out of his family’s hands, aspiring architect Thomas-Mark set about capturing something of the meaning of the place via his architectural studies at Virginia Tech School of Architecture in 2023.

The resulting thesis combines elements of historical research, speculative design work and, essentially, something like a psycho-geographic investigation, as an attempt to both understand and preserve this family legacy before it is sold on to land developers.

The thesis includes written recollections of life in the house by family members as well as models and drawings that analysis the building’s formal qualities. These drawings and modelling techniques are developed in order to reinterpret the building, becoming a means with which the building, as a repository of memory, can be simultaneously preserved and also destroyed.

What is presented below is just an extract, to explore the whole thesis it is available here as a PDF.

Chapter VI - Fragmentation and Re-Assembly - How to Bury a House

The Farm is a funny name for a place that does not grow crops or care for livestock. Its soil currently lies fallow yet full of potential. While I have always known it to be a place of labor, it only carries traces of its past agricultural use. This setting has created a rich backdrop for domestic life. Yet, it will be lost if The Farm is to become a grid-layed suburban development. The once beautiful landscape will be plagued by retention ponds and vinyl siding. The agricultural backdrop of this land will fragment and fade.

The land we live on is in a constant state of change. Things become buried while others become unearthed, giving us clues to what came before. In Archaeology, there is a practice of digging into the earth in order to find artifacts which might lead us to unanswered questions about the past. They might come across a site that was an old home. When they are finished extrapolating data from the site, if there is not a public or private entity who aims to take over the site for educationally exhibiting the area, it is simply buried once more in an act called spoliation. Spoliation marks an endpoint, the termination of a building’s original form and purpose. It refers to intentional or negligent destruction, or alteration. What does spoliation have to do with the impending loss of The Farm? In an effort to understand more about The Farm as both object and setting, I undertook this act of spoliation by creating fragments.

Many artists have previously explored the operation of cutting in their work. While artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark may have cut buildings in half as social commentary, others such as Sarah Oppenheimer create voids with a surgical precision as an exploration of space. The architect Catie Newell of Alibi Studio cuts into a barn as a site specific installation that allows us to look at common objects in the landscape in a new way (Newell). Re-assembly has also been explored as a method from the found objects of Marcel Duchamp to the desert sculptures of Noah Purifoy.

The 2D fragments are in essence, facade studies. Facade studies were conducted on the front of the farm house as well as the barn. Slices of various thickness and number were used to manipulate photographs in search of new forms. The slices were moved in order to progressively distort the images. In a way, they mimic the act of collectively remembering an event or place around a dinner table. Some things become distorted as everyone remembers the event differently. The facade studies act as an amalgamation of memories, misplaced and translated.

The 3D fragments occurred as 20 low resolution models made from 5 mm plywood and painted white. 5 depict the original farmhouse, 5 depict the 1920’s addition, 5 depict the 1950’s addition, and 5 depict the 1960’s addition (the current house). 4 methodologies of cutting/fragmenting were performed on each group by a bandsaw and the parts re-assembled through a process of forming intuitive relationships.

1. A Cut to Understand - A cartesian cut from a particular origin.

2. A Cut to Consume - Divided into understandable pieces.

3. A Cut to Core - A small invasion as needed for extraction.

4. A Cut to Destroy - No pattern is discernible.

While most view the act of cutting an object primarily as an act of destruction, I am interested in the act of cutting as an autopsy. In this way the farm is acting as a cadaver. With the use of domesticity out of sight and life removed, we can begin to understand the building as an object. It has turned from a setting to an object, just like livestock becomes meat. The Reassembly of the fragments display a search and exploration for new forms, processions, spatial qualities, and understandings from the original house. The well worn floorboards of the domestic structure create new pathways and develop new narratives of what could have happened within its walls.

The Farm will no longer be a home. It will have passed onto an object as if we are laying it to rest. Like placing a body in a casket, its likeness lies in it, although its spirit resides elsewhere. It will live on as a ghost from the memories and fragments pulled from its material. The act of cutting and re-assembling fragments of our own material culture allows us a look beneath the floorboards of our lives to discover a way forward, amidst the destruction of important cultural artifacts of our past.