INSTITUTIONS
2G1/3G4 - ARCH 552 - FALL 2025

Mending Relationships: Rethinking Exchange Between Community, Ecology, and Textiles
STUDENT

Ann Nguyen


PROFESSOR

Dawn Gilpin


Reinforcing Potawatomi Indigenous values of interconnectedness, this project explores “mending” as a spatial and conceptual driver for a speculative textile market in a floodplain and former coal-gasification site. Practices rooted in reciprocity shape the market’s structural and social fabric, staging moments that:    

1. Highlight communal labor, nurturing   collective identity and belonging, through flexible gathering spaces    

2. Strengthen relationships between craft, crafter, and recipient by revealing processes of textile production

3. Celebrate water by embracing inevitable flooding, allowing water to enter and recede through the intervention    

4. Attune to seasonal, solar, and lunar cycles by capturing views through “peeling” walls and a sloped roof