Date of Submission
Spring 5-13-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation/Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Architecture
Department
Architecture
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Ehsan Sheikholharam
Abstract
As anthropologists have shown, rivers are foundational to the creation of human settlement, and many cities design their urban fabric to interact with their respective rivers. Despite the scale of the Chattahoochee River, however, a typical visitor of Atlanta might not see the river as it is covered with highways and other infrastructures. Since the inception of colonial Atlanta as a railroad town in the nineteenth century, the urban design deviated from having the rivers be central to the city’s evolution as scholarship shows. Despite this structural arrangement, there was still an existing relationship with its rivers when waterways, most notably the Chattahoochee River, played essential roles in the economy as power sources for industrial mills. Once the economic use of mills fell out of fashion, the relationship with rivers also fizzled out, and now there are almost no day-to-day interactions with the water. This broken ecological relationship can be seen through the rise and fall of mills as a once-important part of Atlantean landscape. One such mill was Marietta Paper Mill on the Chattahoochee River that was once a booming economic source that lays abandoned to this day.
These ruins symbolize the current relationship that the people of Atlanta have with rivers. This research design project brings into light the fraught relationship between Atlanta and its rivers, and how these waterways have suffered from high levels of pollution due to a lack of care of them. How can architectural interventions transform Sope Creek Pulp Mill ruins to reconnect the broken ecological relationship between the Chattahoochee River and people into the urban fabric of Atlanta? This design research explores adaptive reuse of the Sope Creek Pulp Mill as a technique to revive the connection between people and the Chattahoochee River in hopes to increase environmentalist attitudes towards our waterways. Duke University’s West Campus Union building was originally built in the 1930s and has been restored and re-imagined into a multi-program student hub that has become the centerpiece of the campus. By reprogramming the Sope Creek Paper Mill and restoring the space, people who are not just hikers would interact with the space and establish their connection to the Chattahoochee River.