SERIES NARRATIVE

The Driftless Waystation, an unrealized collaboration between the architectural collaborative Dream the Combine and Sam Gould was a distributed architectural project that established a space of transit for the many varying and interconnected subjectivities throughout the Kickapoo Valley region within what is known as the Driftless Region; the Ho-Chunk peoples who have called the land home for millennia, settler farmers of European origin, Black farmers who established farms in the region following the Civil War, and most recently, the drop-out Hippie diaspora and its generational legacy.

The Kickapoo Valley is the ancestral home of the Ho Chunk nation, as well, one of many spots of transit for the Kickapoo nation. The designation, Driftless, is so-named in relation to its being the only unglaciated area within the region, forming a unique 24,000 sq. mile topography of river and stream, as well as flora and fauna more common to New England than the upper Midwest.

A distributed architectural provocation, the Waystation acts as a framing device within a (social) landscape that has experienced the effects of centuries of colonization and extraction. Moving forward with these realities at the forefront, the Waystation acts as a terminus. A site, as well as a frame, to move through as a method of orientation on shifting and contested land.

Working with environmental activists, scientists, indigenous scholars and educators, farmers, back-to-the-landers and other locals and passers-through, the Driftless Waystation asks itself and those who encounter it what a decolonized architecture might be within the age of the anthropocene.

A central transit node for the Waystation will assemble books, maps, images, seeds, and other materials contextualizing the region, as well as a recording room, (solar) low-power FM radio transmitter, and screen printing capabilities in keeping with the appropriate media for the immediate region.

COMMENTARY

DOCUMENTS

COLOPHON

Editors: Sam Gould, and Jennifer Newsom & Tom Carrauthers (Dream the Combine)