Mississippi Basin Model DESIGN CHARRETTE:

Monday/Thursday March 20/23, 2000 The City of Jackson, the present owner of the Basin Model, is at a loss of what it should do with this icon of River Hydraulics. Restoring it to its original working condition is presently not an option for the City while destroying all traces of it seems just as unlikely. The model, in its abandonment, presents a design opportunity. How may we strategize its transformation? How may we engage this model and make this site accessible to the city? Using plans, diagrams, photographs, and any other mode of representation as ‘sites’ of transformation, present your proposal on a single 24” X 24” frame. Your proposal should be clearly articulated graphically, and with minimum text. Consider that you will be presenting your proposal to the City of Jackson. The emphasis is on the operations, processes of construction, and material transformations that may give rise to new situations and orders, while amplifying or subverting latent ones.

Fenced with wire and surrounding a watchtower on the brink of collapse is a vast and weathered concrete field. Much of it is covered with vegetation and an accordion-like wire mesh about five inches high resembling vegetation. Running across the surface in river-like fashion are deep channels edged by steep embankments. These channels vary in depth from an inch to a couple of feet. Criss-crossing this sinuous landscape orthogonally are the white chalky joints between the individual units of the molded concrete, rusting pipes that run a few inches above the surface, and drains that end in open manholes. Occasionally, where the joints have eroded, one gets a glimpse of the ground upon which the concrete units rest on supports. It is empowering to know that a step in this ruinous landscape takes you a mile across the Mississippi Basin and the channels, when they are a foot deep, take you 100 feet down into the Mississippi.