Devin Jernigan

Devin Jernigan studies architecture that the discipline has rarely counted, starting from the American traveling circus. For about a century the circus put up its tents on a new lot almost every day of the season and took them down the same night. His dissertation at Yale, Spectacular Nomadism, asks how those tents were made, how the lot was laid out, and how a season’s route was decided. The work draws on a tentmaker’s journals and the circuses’ route books and ledgers, measured drawings for the Historic American Buildings Survey, maps of the routes, and a 1920 concessions tent rebuilt by hand to learn what the journals leave out.

He teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn, after more than a decade in architecture and landscape architecture practice. The tent behind this text comes from a live model of the circus’s round tops and round oblongs, built on the rules a tentmaker kept in his journals; clicktap it to explore.