ARC3015YF (L0102) 
Instructor: Shane Williamson

Savannah Georgia is an extraordinary living laboratory. The Oglethorpe Plan is a unique 18th-century Enlightenment urban design that expanded systematically via a grid of repeating "wards" anchored by 22 preserved and walkable public squares. Situated on a high bluff overlooking the Savannah River, the city's relationship to the coast demonstrates how a highly disciplined, non-hierarchical urban framework can create an intimate human scale while fostering a rich, multi-century timeline of diverse building typologies.

The cobblestones on River Street in Savannah are not from Georgia, though. They are ballast consisting of rocks loaded into the holds of empty ships that crossed the Atlantic. When those ships reached Savannah and filled their holds with rice, cotton, and indigo, the stones were dumped on the riverbank. On other legs of the same voyages, those same holds carried enslaved Africans, who were the very ones to lay the cobblestones in the streets.

The rice that made Savannah a financial stronghold of the antebellum South was cultivated using agricultural knowledge stolen from West Africa's Rice Coast. Europeans did not possess the expertise in tidal irrigation and wetland management. The Gullah Geechee descendants of the people who carried that knowledge are still in the city and environs, still practicing it, and still largely uncredited.

As time passed, ships that once held ballast began to carry ballast water, and with it a tide of uninvited organisms including Asian green mussels and charrua mussels. On land, kudzu, Chinese tallow, and dozens of other introduced species have rewritten the region's ecology. A recent study found that one-third of all plant species growing at the port terminal in Savannah are non-native.

This studio will visit Savannah and ask you to design a building that holds all of this at once.

The Ballast Garden and Material Library is a hybrid institution prominently located on Savannah's waterfront. It is part geological archive, part controlled garden, part memorial, and part living space for Gullah Geechee agricultural knowledge that predates the city itself. It is a building organized not by program alone but by vector with emphasis upon how things arrived, who carried them, and what was lost in the crossing.

The site sits between the Oglethorpe grid and the Savannah River, residing between Enlightenment order and tidal disorder. It is also between the tourist surface and the deep history beneath it. Your project will work in the section of the bluff, the warehouses, the water's edge and explore the potential of architecture to contain what cannot be reconciled, display what should not be aestheticized, and memorialize what must not be forgotten.