Reintegrating the River: Sope Creek Mill as the Site for Reviving the Connection to Chattahoochee
Disciplines
Historic Preservation and Conservation
Abstract (300 words maximum)
What environmental feature does San Antonio, Chicago, and Atlanta have in common? Despite their radically different urban cultures, these cities are all built around rivers! 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, a 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. There was still an existing relationship with its rivers when waterways played essential roles in the economy as power sources for industrial mills. Once the economic use of mills declined, the relationship with rivers also fizzled out. 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 today. 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. How can architectural interventions transform Sope Creek Paper 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 Paper Mill as a technique to revive the connection between people and the Chattahoochee River. 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.
Use of AI Disclaimer
no
Academic department under which the project should be listed
CACM – Architecture
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Ehsan Sheikholharam
Reintegrating the River: Sope Creek Mill as the Site for Reviving the Connection to Chattahoochee
What environmental feature does San Antonio, Chicago, and Atlanta have in common? Despite their radically different urban cultures, these cities are all built around rivers! 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, a 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. There was still an existing relationship with its rivers when waterways played essential roles in the economy as power sources for industrial mills. Once the economic use of mills declined, the relationship with rivers also fizzled out. 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 today. 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. How can architectural interventions transform Sope Creek Paper 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 Paper Mill as a technique to revive the connection between people and the Chattahoochee River. 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.