Carson Michaelis
E131 → Surveying West Texas
Spring 2024Elective Course - ‘Avatars, Surveys of the Ordinary’
University of Texas at Austin
Professor Kyriakos Kyriakou
This survey was undertaken for a course which attempted to “cultivate a powerful architectural gaze towards those otherwise elusive and invisible places .” Each student was tasked to find an underrepresented part of the countryside, and docment conditions of physical decay among the rural life, seeking overlooked and conspicuous urban fragments which existed within these small towns. Through the docmentation we found narritaves of form, function, time, and more elements that write the stories of these buildings, and repretented them through a set of clean rendered drawings.
I identified a set of buildings with an open-air main floor, rare in these parts. These were each active spaces once, but now sit vacant. Below is a sample of photographs taken from my own survey, going as far as McCamey, Texas, 300 miles West of Austin. Some of these images fit my small narritave, and some not, but each contains crucial elements to these small towns. Below the photos are three rendered axonometric drawings which I believe represent something interesting about the open-air main floors.
One route traved shown above in red, surveyed cities circled.
622 4th St, Sterling City, TX 76951
701 Main St, Sheffield, TX 79781
11 Harrison Ave, Roma, TX 78584