Advanced Option Studio (AOS): River Reframed — The Space Between Change
This studio explores how small post-industrial cities built around rivers can build capacity for agile adaptation in the face of economic, environmental, and social change.
Waterway in the Lewiston Textile Mills and Waterpower System Historic District of Lewiston, Maine.
This studio explores how small post-industrial cities built around rivers can build capacity for agile adaptation in the face of economic, environmental, and social change. Drawing on ecological theory by Carl Folke and others, the studio positions resilience as the capacity to adapt and transform, and design as a tool for revealing opportunities, testing alternatives, and guiding change across scales.
The studio focuses on the Androscoggin River as a space between cities and between conditions. Spatially, the river lies between Lewiston and Auburn, Maine, two communities with distinct identities and governing systems that function as an interconnected urban region. Temporally, the river lies between an industrial past and an emerging future shaped by ecological recovery, aging infrastructure, economic transition, and changing communities. This condition of betweenness creates a productive space where established systems and emerging possibilities meet.
The Androscoggin itself embodies these transitions. Indigenous relationships connected use of the river with reciprocity and stewardship. Industrialization harnessed its energy and concentrated production along its banks, helping give rise to Lewiston-Auburn. As production shifted to fossil fuels, that relationship changed. Today, the river generates energy valued by global markets and power-hungry industries like AI, while some community members advocate for dam removal to restore ecological flows and connectivity. The studio uses these tensions among restoration and production, extraction and stewardship, and local and global systems to ask how design can create new relationships among ecology, culture, infrastructure, and public life.
Students investigate these conditions at the regional, district, and site scales, examining how durable systems and flexible zones of transformation operate together. Regional investigations consider watershed systems, hydrology, and long-term ecological conditions. District investigations examine how infrastructure, public space, policy, and neighborhoods shape access, identity, and collective life along the river corridor. Site-scale proposals test how adaptive reuse and public interventions can catalyze broader change.