This paper presents the role of visible and invisible people, work, and resources within a scientifically managed construction process fast-tracked by New Deal politics, addressing how archival research excavates and reveals hidden traces of process, politics, and people within constructed artifacts and the ephemera of construction management, and the influence of these visible and invisible participants on the daily praxis of process and production. The case example for this discussion is a life-cycle study of in-situ ‘standing timber to formwork’ production at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Norris Dam Project. This case discusses visible dignitaries, design personnel, politicians, and public-relations staff; and invisible skilled and unskilled workers who labored in crews that actually did the work. Key to success was the emotional investment, passion, ingenuity, and collaborative problem solving of visible and invisible participants in service of the ultimate social and political goals to increase employment, support families, and close the gates at Norris Dam before the 1936 election. Obstacles to success included variable quality of materials, poor transportation routes in the Upper Tennessee River watershed, and the need to train thousands of newly hired laborers who worked in offices and shops rather than construction prior to the American Great Depression. Archived management reports, photographs, charts, memorandums personnel at the Norris Dam Construction Plant field office used to communicate with personnel at TVA’s central office in Knoxville, Congress and other political constituencies across the United States is used to illustrate and support the case study.

This paper interrogates the invisible realities of labor and craft which underwrite mythologies of ingenuity and self-reliance in early Appalachian culture, specifically focusing on brick making as a cottage industry in antebellum Tennessee and Kentucky (Peres, 2008). At the center of this localized means of production is the ‘brick clamp’ - a kiln assembled from unfired bricks in situ - triangulating intimate relationships between clay sources and building sites within a given landscape.
Clamps were typically single-use and clamp sites left to erode back into the landscape obscuring opportunity for study. Evidence of participants and knowledge holders in this process are similarly obscured in records of land ownership and occupation which do not account for enslaved and indentured contributions of labor and craft (Guymon, 1986).
Maintenance and preservation of surviving brick architecture in the region has revealed the literal impressions and other traces of the hands of enslaved and indentured craftspeople responsible for acts of craft previously accredited to landowners and founders of prominent Appalachian cities (Dennis, 2020) (Wilson, 2022).
Renewed study and maintenance of regional kiln sites and brick architecture reveals a process aspirational for contemporary agendas of sustainability via material circularity, environmental sensitivity, and site specificity. These intimate acts of craft have been obscured by the brutality of labor relations which remain latent in the consolidation of contemporary industrial production and construction. Drawing, 3d scanning, and other means ‘salvaging’ meaning from historical brick structures will construct arguments for practices of circularity, care, and celebration of invisible labor.

This paper explores how the artist’s perspective center forms of labor – visible and invisible – in the telling of how engineered landscapes come to be and how they are lived.
The mountainous geography, dense population, and dynamic environment (earthquakes, fires, and volcanic activity) have led to particularly astonishing and seductively engineered large-scale works of civil engineering and landscapes in Japan. Japan’s civil engineering projects are particularly known for their vivid technical beauty, but such beauty is not planned. It arises from pragmatic technical solutions necessary to accommodate modern life on uncertain terrain. Unlike works of art, the authors of such engineered artifacts are rarely individuals from creative or artistic fields. They are teams of technical experts within public agencies and private firms, as well as the skilled and unskilled laborers whose work is often unacknowledged in the public record.
Through artist representations, the engineered landscape is brought into focus and provides an interpretive lens through which to gain an essential understanding of the volatile environment civil engineering is intended to mediate, the visible and invisible labor that goes into their production, and the people whose lives are afforded or disrupted by them. This paper will describe a set of land-artifacts that contemporary Japanese artists such as photographer Toshio Shibata, installation artist Yukihisa Isobe, and others working in a range of media have taken as their subjects, and the art based upon these artifacts to generate a discussion on the subjects brought forth in this paper.