A fifth generation Mississippian, Andrew Liles is invariably intrigued by place and its influence. Liles owns his own architectural practice in New Orleans and is faculty at the Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment. Liles’ focus practice is in the southeast, infusing each project with regional relevance and a high degree of creativity. Both design and technical expertise have afforded the opportunity to teach consistently at TUSABE for over fifteen years, in design studio at all years of core instruction, and courses in building technologies, sustainability and in drawing and observation. He is a practicing plein air artist, though eschewing the pastoral and slipping into the infrastructure of the urban fabric.

A habitual sketcher, he mines content from his context, codifying the language of place, be it through a meeting house or a mirliton, and largely in the thick of graphite, ink and watercolor. Trained as an architect, he is charged to infuse each work with a subtle scaffolding and a specific spatial composition, embracing negative space as a building embraces its siting. These clean gleanings of place dwell on the infrastructure of the everyday: overpasses, water towers, cemeteries, drawbridges- sublime necessities and often iconic in the landscape.

“Our vitality resides in what we ride past every day.”

Similarly, this research manifests as visual reportage (graphite and watercolor) and will be a now-record of the best mitigative efforts to quell the Mississippi River through impositions of surge barriers, pumping stations, floodgates and outfall canals. The research will only surge in relevance as changes in climate challenge the levee and its means to their engineered extents. The goal is to record an instance in time through visual reportage when our counter-measures were largely enough to match tenacities with climate change, to provide an artifactual catalog of what was in-situ prior to perhaps when we are bested, and do so in a way that renders the industrial sublime.

Photo credit: Ray Fontaine