A Conversation With A Smokies Architect

Billie Faircloth is an architect, but not of the standard blueprint-and-build variety.

She’s spent her career asking why people build the way that they do, and how those decisions affect the ecosystems where materials are harvested and buildings constructed. Now a partner at the Knoxville-based architecture, planning and research firm KierenTimberlake, Faircloth recently found herself exploring those questions in even greater detail when she was selected as University of Tennessee Knoxville’s 2018 BarberMcMurry Professor, leading design students into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a deeper understanding of the relationship between architecture, ecosystems and anthropology. 

Your work has taken your all over the country and the world. What do you consider to be the highlights of your career thus far? 

The central highlight of my career has been finding a way to work with people who have other backgrounds, who look at the world through the lens of anthropology and ecology. That has absolutely shaped the way I view design, view architecture, and view the future of my career. 

Few people think of architecture and ecology in the same sentence. In your view, why is it important to consider them in tandem? 

They’re related in a really simple way. All of the materials we use to build come from the earth, and when we extract materials, we disturb ecosystems. On one hand it’s incredibly simple. On the other hand there are really profound opportunities to rethink the relationship between architecture and ecology and to design through what would be referred to as a socioecological framework. It’s social and ecological. We can’t subtract ourselves from the picture. 

Your students spent a lot of time in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Cherokee National Forest, working to deliver a design for a fictional Center for Ecological Interpretation and Land Use History located on a newly acquired tract of public land near Maryville, Tennessee. What did their research consist of? 

This area that we’re working with is in an area along the Little Tennessee River that was historically home to a number of the Overhill Cherokee villages, and it also is an area that is marked by industry and the history of Alcoa, so we really are looking at the way a deep understanding of ecology and a deep understanding of our actions on the land informed current and future design action on the land. We’ve set up this scenario where the materials that they are using to design and build the center come directly from the forest. What that means is one has to sort of slow down and think through what’s there. What they’ve been doing is taking inventory, but really many of them are proposing ways of allowing the extraction of those materials to ultimately have a beneficial outcome over time. So after extraction what happens next? Some are proposing new land uses for the forest, maybe turning the extraction into an opportunity to create a new trail network or to create a destination or to create an extension of the park. 

Given that the research focuses on what is ultimately a fictional project, how will your students’ work benefit the park? 

These areas of the forest and the park are new to both the Citico Creek Area (of the Cherokee National Forest) and to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They’re not well known. They haven’t been inventoried or well documented, and that was one of the first things that we asked them as we began talking with the national park and the national forest. What do you want to know about this site? What do you hope to do with this new acquisition? We’re excited to actually propose back to them a use scenario for this site, one that’s rooted in an ecological framework and a land use framework. This is often how projects start.

Faircloth wishes to thank other professionals who were essential to the project, including landscape architecture professor Scottie McDaniel, KieranTimberlake principle Stephanie Carlisle, and Stephanie Bland and Mark Healy, both of the Cherokee National Forest.