Architecture students focus on impact-oriented designs for "Appalachian Futures Lab"

We're helping real people, we're working with good people, we're wanting to do good things for them. They're counting on us to propose something, to think of an idea to help well reimagine what this town could be for Pocahontas. We're bringing in our own perspective to the town and the people who live here have their perspective of the town and what it used to be, what they want it to be. We can give them some new ideas and they can tell us what they miss, what they want, and we can try to provide that as best we can for them, or give them at least ideas for how that might be possible. It's a new program that we're just starting this semester, called the "Appalachian Futures Lab." It's imagined as an opportunity for students to get embedded and do experiential learning and community based work, but with travel. We're here in the town of Pocahontas, this semester, going to be working with the community all semester long. We're going to be coming down three or four times, presenting, talking to folks. We stayed a few nights, we'll come back for a few nights, share design work. Get feedback, try to help the town on some of their initiatives. The idea is sort of a different community, maybe each semester, and that you build a body of work focused on the region and trying to improve some of the conditions. The town of Pocahontas is an extremely small municipality in the state of Virginia. We're probably close to 300 residents so, when we have outside help like Virginia Tech, that's amazing. Pocahontas has, you know, a a hot spot list of areas that...it's a little bit more than we can handle that we need outside help for, and expertise like Virginia Tech offers that can benefit the town. We knew that some of these spots have set for a while and we've just been stuck. Even just where we are now versus Blacksburg, which is not that far away, the difference in the towns is pretty drastic. There is a number of like really great architecture, a lot of it is falling into disrepair or completely falling down, which loses a little bit of history. So I think one of the things that's really cool that we might be able to do is help preserve some of the great architecture that is here in Appalachia. It's, I think, a heartwarming feeling, right ? It's just like, it's nice that people are like, it's like, oh, they care because this is the future of their town. They're giving us the trust and the willingness to help us out. To really like give the information that we need to where we can now go back, think, use all these past four years of us being in school. I think what, you know, the students from Virginia Tech are going to learn from this is, you know, what we currently have. They're going to go back and, you know, brainstorm and see, well, we might not be able to do something major, but there may be some smaller things that can change a lot. I want them to learn to be great architects. And I'm interested in sort of the citizen architect that we, whatever we're doing, we should be giving back and sort of making positive impacts in the world. So, this class is real focused in on that.