"Settle in the bare desert and cause it to bloom."

This is an imaginary for the town of Allensworth, an unincorporated community of about 600 inhabitants in the Central Valley of California, located 50 miles from both the city of Visalia in the north and the city of Bakersfield in the south. Based on a series of historic oral and written interviews and through informal conversations with inhabitants, the narrative is told by multiple voices across time to recover the past, understand the present, and project to a future environment in which the township will continue to develop. Proposed within the shaping of this "future" environment is the Saltbush Collectives, a series of experimental hubs run by the community to promote the cultivation of the saltbush plant. Each center is composed of a crop field of saltbushes and a unique water tower dedicated to one of the various usages provided by the shrub: a test kitchen, a medicinal lab, a dye works, a sauna, and a seed bank. The architecture defining the town's imagined future is dominated by images of the agricultural icons in California since the late 19th century. In a slow transformation of the local landscape by the ongoing expansion of the saltbush shrub, large billboards of a cornstalk, an almond tree, stalks of wheat, an alfalfa plant, and an orange tree present monuments as questions of the relationships between human sociology, economy, and ecology. Visitors near and far travel to Allensworth to learn of the estranged saltbush and the community which supports it. There, they experience a landscape of symbolic contradictions that begs one to ask "why??" Yet, the extent to which the author will answer this question straightforwardly, dear reader, sums up as this: the Saltbush Collectives is a gathering.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Nguyễn, MỹDung T. (MỹDung Thi)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark Jarzombek.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115618

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/115618