Appalshop Film Center

Graduate Studio - University of Virginia, 2017

Deep within the New River Gorge of West Virginia sits the ghost town of Nuttallburg. Once a prosperous mining town with direct investment from the Ford Motor Company, the town vanished upon the mine’s closing in 1958. Various ruins populate the heavily forested site, including a massive tipple to carry coal from midway up the canyon rim down to the railroad alongside the New River.

Of the ruins on-site, the foundation of the former town general store and clubhouse would come to serve as the new base for young and developing filmmakers in Appalachia. Conceived as a timber tower within the original footprint of the general store, the film center would split several programmatic elements over a series of floors. The first level of the tower traces out the former mass of the general store, with the timber structure exposed via a transparent curtain wall facade. The upper floors of the tower are wrapped in an envelope of wood fins, darkened via sho-sugi-ban as a form of preservation, and reflective of the coal that powered the town’s former life.