Thesis: Benjamin Oliver

Quiet Extensions

This thesis investigates how historically rooted timber construction and thatch cladding systems can be adapted through contemporary fabrication and assembly methods to support low-carbon, materially efficient architecture. By analyzing and redesigning architectural details, the project foregrounds the embedded histories, cultural logics, and labor practices that shape construction. It proposes that these elements are not merely inherited but can be deliberately redesigned to engage with the evolving urgencies and complexities of the present.

Benjamin Oliver

Benjamin Oliver
Set in the former Hobet mountaintop removal mining site in West Virginia, the project uses the damaged Appalachian landscape as both a physical site and a critical lens. Here, environmental degradation and labor displacement caused by extractive industry become central to understanding how architectural systems might intervene. In response, the thesis focuses on designing a timber structural system derived from the logic of the hammer beam truss, and a prefabricated thatch cladding assembly. Both systems are conceived to reduce material waste, limit on-site disruption, and rely on craft-based methods that recall and revise regional construction traditions.

Timber joinery is digitally fabricated for ease of transport, intuitive assembly, and spatial flexibility, allowing buildings to adapt to difficult terrain while supporting cooperative construction practices rooted in Appalachian histories. The prefabricated thatch panels draw on the material’s ecological performance and construction logic, while reframing its perception through contemporary detailing that departs from nostalgic representation.
Benjamin Oliver

Benjamin Oliver
Benjamin Oliver
The architectural component of the project brings these systems together into a civic building sited between altered and unaltered land. The structure houses an office for Appalachian Voices and a community center, providing educational and gathering spaces while physically and symbolically reoccupying a devastated mining site. Its spatial organization leverages passive environmental strategies and introduces a layered porosity that reflects the tectonic interplay of the building systems.
Benjamin Oliver
Rather than positioning vernacular systems as static representations of regional identity, the thesis advances a process-oriented view of regional design—one that treats historical techniques as adaptable tools. In doing so, it offers an architectural approach grounded in detail, labor, and ecological awareness, positioned as a deliberate counterpoint to the histories of erasure that define the mountaintop removal landscape.
Benjamin Oliver
Benjamin Oliver

Benjamin Oliver
Benjamin Oliver

Benjamin Oliver
Benjamin Oliver

Benjamin Oliver

Thesis: Benjamin Oliver

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