Threads of Kinship.
Arch 3120-06 Options Studio
Spring 2026 WashU Undergraduate Approach Nomination
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Context
In partnership with the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Community Trust, I was tasked with advancing cultural continuity, collective care, and ecological resilience through spatial design. The Gullah Geechee people are descendants of enslaved Africans from the Rice Coast who later established communities along the southern coast of the United States. Much of their land today faces unprecedented development pressure, speculative land acquisition, and aggressive displacement, threatening the survival of Black cultural life, unmarked burial grounds, and ancestral territories.
Through this speculative collage, I sought to understand the importance of kinship within Gullah Geechee communities. As I came to realize it, kinship is a web of collective experiences that extends beyond biological ties and is maintained through cultural practices, intergenerational knowledge, spirituality, land stewardship, and gathering. These layered relationships became the foundation for imagining design as an act of protection, continuity, and resistance.
Through the series of place-based collages above, I explored my assigned site not as a fixed parcel of land, but as a living archive shaped by memory, ritual, and development pressures. Each collage tested how space might hold ceremony, facilitate intergenerational exchange, and support everyday acts of care. Rather than imposing a singular architectural object, this series proposes a spatial network, one that emerges from the rhythms of the landscape and reinforces the social and cultural infrastructures already present. Breaking down kinship into its four nodes or threads (cultural knowledge, spirituality, gathering, and cultural practice) is where I began to iterate.
Site: McCloud/McNair
The McCloud/McNair parcel is a rare convergence of ecological richness and ancestral memory within one of Nassau County’s oldest Gullah Geechee communities. Neighbored by Harper Chapel Baptist Church and containing an unmarked burial ground, the site operates as sacred landscape, ecological corridor, and cultural archive. As commercial and civic development presses in from the north, the parcel stands at the frontline of land retention and cultural survival.
This site invites low-impact, reverent design strategies that work with wetlands, hydrology, and memory rather than against them. The proposed access points indicated by the stars anchor Harper Chapel, the neighboring descendant community, and the busy road that stretches along the perimeter of the parcel. Each path intentionally corresponds to one of four kinship "threads" as outlined above.
Cultural Practice:
The Makerspace
Addressing the first node of cultural practice prompted me to consider which traditions are most vulnerable to erasure. Through research into Gullah Geechee basket weaving, indigo dyeing, and textile production, I realized that these crafts are not only artistic expressions but dualy act as vessels of memory, labor, and land-based knowledge. This inquiry led me to propose a makerspace: a space for apprenticeship, material experimentation, and intergenerational exchange. The overall form of the structure is derived from the braiding imagery present in my first collage. I began to question how the architecture itself could merge with the weaving paths that thread through the wetland landscape. The structure is additionally placed at an intersection, where its curved walls guide exterior circulation. It is an extension of the braid itself.
Spirituality:
The Praise House
The Praise House serves as the spiritual anchor of Threads of Kinship, grounding the project in the sacred traditions that have long sustained Gullah Geechee communities. Its form honors the architectural language of early praise houses while reinterpreting it through a spatial gesture of continuity. The primary gathering space is organized in a circular plan, directly responding to the counterclockwise movement of the ring shout — a ritual of song, prayer, and embodied memory. This circularity reinforces the collective nature of worship, dissolving hierarchies and centering the community within the space. The enclosing walls hold the rhythm of movement, allowing footsteps, clapping, and call-and-response to reverberate as shared experience. Above, the gable remains as a familiar silhouette, signaling tradition and shelter. Together, the circle and the gable weave past and present, making the Praise House both a vessel of spiritual resistance and a space where kinship is continually renewed through motion, sound, and gathering.
Materiality in the Praise House is drawn directly from the surrounding wetland landscape. Wood forms the primary structure and enclosure, grounding the space in a material that is both locally resonant and culturally familiar. Its warmth, grain, and tactile quality reinforce the intimacy of worship. Raised slightly above the wetland, as are the other proposed structures, the Praise House acknowledges the environmental conditions of the site and remains visibly tied to the land.
Above, a tin roof caps the gabled form, a material historically common across coastal Southern vernacular buildings. Its lightness contrasts with the solidity of the wood, and its acoustic quality amplifies the sensory experience of gathering: rain striking the metal becomes part of the spiritual atmosphere, folding the sounds of the environment into moments of prayer and song. Together, wood and tin situate the Praise House within both ecological context and cultural memory, allowing material to become another thread in the continuity of kinship.
Cultural Knowledge:
The Cultivation Classrooms
The Rice Cultivation Classrooms are conceived not as spaces of production, but as spaces of transmission, directly tying to the kinship node of cultural knowledge. They honor rice not simply as a crop, but as ancestral intelligence, a system of environmental understanding, labor, ritual, and care that was carried across the Atlantic and embedded into the wetlands of the Lowcountry. Positioned in close relationship to the site’s marsh terrain, the classrooms frame views of the water and tidal landscape, situating learning within the ecology that makes cultivation possible.
These spaces prioritize demonstration, storytelling, and intergenerational exchange. Flexible worktables, wash areas, and storage for tools support hands-on teaching, while open thresholds allow movement between interior instruction and outdoor observation plots.
The architecture of these structures remains permeable and grounded, emphasizing airflow, shade, and proximity to water as reminders that rice cultivation is inseparable from wetland systems. By centering teaching over yield, the classrooms reinforce that cultural continuity depends on the passing down of knowledge. Here, techniques of tidal irrigation, seasonal rhythms, seed selection, and communal labor practices are shared collectively, ensuring that rice cultivation endures as living heritage sustained through kinship and rooted in place.
Gathering:
The Community Kitchen
Considering the proximity of the descendant community to this site, the Community Kitchen extends the idea of the front porch into the landscape. In Gullah Geechee tradition, the porch is a threshold of exchange, a place for storytelling, food preparation, and everyday gathering. By enlarging this gesture, the project creates intentional space for connection, where kinship can be practiced openly and collectively. Food becomes the medium through which memory and culture are sustained. Rooted in ancestral knowledge and local harvest, cooking is not only nourishment but preservation and care. The kitchen opens outward, allowing preparation and shared meals to spill into communal space, reinforcing that food is both sustenance and ceremony. As a node within Threads of Kinship, the Community Kitchen strengthens bonds across generations, transforming gathering and nourishment into acts of cultural continuity.
The triple-tiered layout of the Community Kitchen is organized to prioritize circulation, visibility, and connection. A central tier acts as a porous threshold between exterior and interior, allowing movement to flow seamlessly in both directions. Positioned along this transitional zone, the servery becomes a point of convergence where one receives food and chooses how to inhabit the space: continue along the path, gather outdoors, or settle inside.
The outer tier extends toward the landscape, lined with outdoor seating that overlooks the wetlands. Here, dining unfolds in dialogue with the environment, softening the boundary between nature and nourishment and reinforcing the connection between land and table.
The final tier anchors the composition with the kitchen and indoor dining area. Located prominently at the main entrance, these spaces welcome visitors with warmth and activity, placing the act of cooking and sharing food at the forefront. Together, the three tiers choreograph movement and gathering, turning circulation into an extension of kinship.
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