More than a century ago, the Piney Woods School was founded to offer students and education that others sought to deny them. With this proposed expansion, the school champions a further mission: counteracting Mississippi’s extractive mono-crop industry by fostering new generations of leaders in the fields of agricultural science and food systems.

Interviews with current Piney Woods students revealed an ag school split into distinct halves – an academic campus where the students spend most of their time, and a farm that is rarely (and reluctantly) visited.

Our proposal addresses this agricultural apathy, and suggests dispersed programs of reverence, craft, and play to encourage novel interactions with the farmland, while a new dormitory neighborhood with student-managed plots spurs agency in the school’s mission. These new programs are integrated with the formerly disparate elements of the school by a formal promenade – a social condenser containing farm infrastructure and sports activities that additionally provides convenient pedestrian access to both ends of the mile-long campus.