Our theory, The American Industrial Agricultural Phenomenon, and what has become to be our project, titled Porkopolis, asks why certain agricultural architecture emerges, and what those buildings describe about our relationship to nature. What values do CAFOs reflect? What about a pasture?
The first section, (AIAP), provides the conceptual foundation for a proposed intervention described in the second and third parts (titled Fictional Landscapes and Harvest). It is through this work that we suggest new buildings, but position ourselves as architects who, through analyzing the status of agriculture, propose a speculative circumstance that may have otherwise not been considered.
Our proposed solution is twofold: reconsider animal welfare, and “partner” with an animal protagonist—the pig—to rethink onion farming’s reliance on chemical fertilizers. The intertwined dance between pig and onion, labor and industry, and interspecies dependence allows the Black Dirt Region to continue to flourish, a rebirth of an age-old natural system.
