The relationship between farmers and the land is a conflict of ecological conduct. Current agro-industrial landscapes have distorted the contextual relationship between artificial and natural landscape signifiers. As a result, contemporary agricultural models have become ethically deficient, producing unified monocultural cultivations in place of once diverse networks of polycultural ecologies. The stability of agricultural communities can no longer be seen as an isolated rural problem. At the cultural expense of damaged environments, depopulating communities, decomposing buildings, and faded traditions, agro-industries have extracted vast amounts of wealth from rural areas. As Wendell Berry wisely said, „Eating is an agricultural act.„ A simple but illuminating message; we are all a part of the rural communities that grow our food; we need to become accountable for the effects our purchasing and eating has on the agricultural environment.
More than any other input, technology has overwhelming reshaped how and what farms produce. New technologies delivered to farms need to be inherently architectural; derived not from physical objects such as devices, implements, and buildings but from the social patterns that objects generate, along with the displacement of activities that such patterns produce.
This thesis establishes architectural strategies for restoring social and ecological resilience within agricultural communities. It defines alternative ways of thinking about farm ecologies as a methodology for architectural alterations to the existing rural landscape. These ideas are applied to the [re]design of a once productive family farm in Northern Minnesota, generating a catalog of potential architectural alterations intended to restore sustainable production, ethical determinism, and cultural significance to the working farm- landscape.