Wings Over Ruins

Year: 2024 Design & Honor Awards | Category: Unbuilt Project

Join us in reshaping the built environment to harmonize with nature. Wing Over Ruins project tackles the ecological crisis caused by urbanization and agricultural expansion, focusing on the endangered Blackland Prairie in Texas. Through meticulous studies and innovative design, the project offers to revitalize ghost towns like The Grove into vibrant habitats for migratory birds such as the scissor-tailed flycatcher. By reintroducing native vegetation and repurposing abandoned infrastructure, the project aims to create eco-tourism destinations that promote habitat restoration. With cities encroaching on delicate ecosystems, the project mission is urgent: forge a vernacular design that preserves and restores the ecosystem, ensuring a sustainable future for both humans and nature.

Design Challenge

The evolution of our built environment, driven by technological advancements and a departure from contextual responsiveness, has positioned it as an invasive force on the planet’s ecosystems. This departure from vernacular design has severed the innate connection between humanity and nature, leading to a growing ecological illiteracy within society. The challenge lies in redefining guiding principles to bridge the widening gap, ensuring that the built environment becomes a mutually supportive component of the natural world.

Zooming in from this broad topic, the loss of grassland habitat due to rapid urbanization and agricultural expansion has led to a 3 billion drop in bird populations in the US since the 1970s. Nevertheless, located at the intersection of two migration pathways, Texas presents a remarkable opportunity to reverse the damage by revitalizing over 500 abandoned ghost towns dispersed throughout the state and transforming them into an interconnected network of ecotourism destinations that promote habitat restoration.

In the selected ghost town, The Grove, TX, the focus is on the plight of the scissor-tailed flycatcher as a design paradigm. The transformation includes meticulous studies of the species, prioritizing the reintroduction of native grasses and vegetation to recreate a suitable habitat, and repurposing the ghost town’s infrastructure to accommodate bird trails, observation points, and educational centers for the birdwatching communities. Through these transformations, not only will the migratory birds find a thriving breeding ground, but the ghost towns will also be given a second lease on life as an eco-tourism destination.

Firm
HKS, Inc.

Project Location
The Grove, Texas

Completion Date
3/31/2023

Architects and Designers
Karalina Shastavets
Dandi Zhang

Renderings
Karalina Shastavets, Dandi Zhang