In our current moment, when our political differences stand out so vividly, Iâd like to suggest a way of thinking about wholeness in the built environment, as something that might lead us more readily to embrace our collective enterprise. Itâs going to take a little longer than most of my posts, but there will be a lot of nice pictures.Â
Iâll start with a couple by a photographer named Micah Cash, whoâs published a book of photographs of the buildings and landscapes of the Tennessee Valley Authority called Dangerous Waters. (Heâs more recently produced an equally beautiful study of roadside dining, Waffle House Vistas.)
Micah takes the title of his book from this sign. Itâs at Fort Loudoun Dam, on the Tennessee River about 25 miles southwest of Knoxville, halfway between there and Rockwood, the town where I grew up. There are signs like it at most, if not all, of the twenty-some-odd TVA dams, intended as a warning to folks out fishing in small boats, who ease up to where the turbine outflow roils the surface, churning oxygen into the water, which the fish like.Â
Hereâs another one, at Pickwick Landing Dam. It offers a lot to think about. Sober harmonies of hue and tone and texture. Rust cracking the enamel of modernity. A sign ruled for an absent message. A frame within a frame, a view blocked, a working landscape classicized. You neednât have been to Tennessee to enjoy it. But, as I mentioned, I grew up there. I learned to swim in Watts Bar Lake, and Iâve spent a lot of time on the TVA reservations, so I can tell you something else about this image: I can tell you why the back of a sign is something to take a picture of.
You may know Wallace Stevensâs poem about the jar:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill . . .Â
Architects are drawn to this poem because of the license it seems to confer, to insert an isolated object into a landscape and expect it to change everything, to bring a new order to the place. But thatâs not how order is brought to most landscapes. Or, anyway, itâs not how it was brought to the landscape of the Tennessee Valley. Order came to that landscape through the pen of a liberal, bow-tie-wearing Republican senator from Nebraska, George W. Norris, who wouldnât abide Henry Ford buying â for pennies on the dollar â a dam that had been built with taxpayer money to power armament production for World War I.
The tussle over the fate of that earlier dam â Wilson, near Florence, Alabama â sparked the idea of the TVA, but the idea was much bigger. At that point it was the vastest and most coherent physical idea the federal government had ever imagined. Second to the Interstate Highway System, it remains so to this day. More remarkably, it is the only project of its size in the U.S. comprising a natural, rather than a political, territory: the watershed of the Tennessee River, which includes parts of seven states.
The Tennessee Valley Authority  was conceived by Norris in 1926 and chartered by Congress in 1933 with lofty goals:
To improve the navigability and to provide for the flood control of the Tennessee River; to provide for reforestation and the proper use of marginal lands in the Tennessee Valley; to provide for the agricultural and industrial development of said valley; to provide for the national defense. . . , and for other purposes.
The âother purposesâ included eradicating malaria, which affected thirty percent of people in the region in 1933. Providing for the national defense included the production of much of the weaponry of World War II, including the atomic bomb. Today, the TVA provides not-for-profit electricity â and plenty of good fishing â to more than nine million people.
A lot of benefit, but at great cost: entire towns (and 20,000 graves) relocated, thousands of acres of rich bottomland farms erased.
The families who owned those farms â my grandfatherâs, shown above, among them â suffered loss, but it was a necessary loss if cities like Chattanooga were to be spared the floods that periodically tore them apart.
This is Chattanooga in 1917. The city was particularly vulnerable, because it is at a choke point on the Tennessee, where the river had, ages earlier, broken through Walden Ridge, severing Lookout Mountain to the south from Signal Mountain to the north.Â
To prevent such devastating floods, the TVA made controlled floods: the chain of lakes pushed out from the Tennessee by the nine main-river dams â Fort Loudoun, Watts Bar, Chickamauga, Nickajack, Guntersville, Wheeler, Wilson, Pickwick Landing, and Kentucky.
It was a gargantuan project, and it confronted the TVA with a challenge: to court popular sentiment, first to promote its own agenda and then to support the burgeoning war effort. Toward that end, it enlisted the design professions in a unified program of persuasion â propaganda, if you will â remarkable for its scope and coherence.Â
Its vision is almost seamless, and so are its landscapes. The typical reservation surrounding one of the dams unfolds gradually for the visitor, the verges becoming progressively tidier, the roadway riding the topography more gracefully than the workaday roads of the wider world.
Every moment is considered, every detail, down to the rungs of a ladder.
There are no loose ends. If there were, there might be room to doubt the rightness of it all. Contingency has been submerged in a landscape that is as inevitable as nature itself. Unlike the rest of the built environment, with its groomed fronts and ratty backs, the TVA has no backs.
Which is why the back of a sign is something to take a picture of.
Itâs also a big part of why the TVA has been accepted into the everyday lives of the people who live there, who enjoy it and take pride in it, even those whose families lost places that were dear to them.
Itâs an awkward moment to be recommending large-scale, federal infrastructure projects, when the only one on offer is a wall that is anything but uniting. But itâs something to think about: how architecture might contribute to the cohesion of a fractious society.
We live in an entropic universe. Fractiousness is the natural mode. Wholeness is elusive. Cohesion takes work. I would rather architecture contributed to that work.
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The final two photos are by the amazing photographer Richard Barnes, who took them for The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, which explores the range of art and design disciplines that contributed to the TVA project. The black and white photos, except those of the Culvahouse farm and of Chattanooga in flood, are by another extraordinary photographer, Charles Krutch, who took some 3,000 images recording the development of the TVA.Â
An earlier version of this essay appears in Places, as an accompaniment to a portfolio of Micah Cashâs photos.Â