Smout Allen

Smout Allen - Super-Mega-Ruralistic: Spectral Agriculture and Inhabited Infrastructures
Presented with the Architecture and Urbanism Group and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU)
Part of the MIT Spring 2025 Architecture Lecture Series. 

This lecture examines ‘Super-Mega-Ruralistic’, a speculative design project that rethinks industrialized landscapes as adaptive, interdependent systems. Building on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s legacy of engineered landscapes, the project proposes raised platform farms that mitigate flooding while enabling new forms of habitation and ecological restoration. Elevated structures create a dynamic interface between high-tech agriculture and riparian regeneration, addressing climate resilience at multiple scales. The project draws from TVA’s experimental farms to propose new modes of living, farming, and coexisting with landscape dynamics.

At the project's core is luxoir, a concept paralleling terroir in winemaking. Through precision UV modulations linked to localized renewable energy fluctuations, luxoir shapes crop characteristics while redefining agriculture as a spectral, energy-responsive system. 

This project responds to ‘Regional Globalism in the Tennessee Valley’ a project run by the U of T, College of Architecture and Design that address the region’s history of large-scale public works on the theme of regenerative regional futures for the Tennessee Valley and beyond.

In the corresponding exhibition, materials include territorial and architectural drawings alongside models illustrating fluctuating greenhouse lightscapes and a community of farm buildings elevated above flood-prone terrain."

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.