Building a Pavilion

Abstract

THE FIRST TIME our team—Nathan Orrison, Anthony Tindill, Mary Beth Maness, and I—explored our thesis site, we crept out onto a flooding landscape caused by a change in course by the winding Cahaba River. This was the old Perry Lakes Park, which was created in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration and closed in the 1970s. Left behind was a place that had been untouched by the people of Perry County for over thirty years. The lake had deeply rooted cypress trees and water tupelos twisting and turning out of its murky water, while Spanish moss hung from the branches and nests made by blue herons towered over us. The land was densely overgrown and later revealed itself to us as remarkably mysterious.