Revised Domain

The act of construction, unavoidably, alters the landscape. The typical process of laying a foundation best reveals our attitude towards place, history and landscape: the land is razed and reconfigured to suit our needs. The replacement for what was lost is rarely satisfying in the American landscape; land becomes real estate and architecture style, with the relationship between the two wholly discreet. To ameliorate what has already been lost, building should be seen as a synergistic action—one that offers new potentials where landscape, architecture and place are indistinct.

This relationship is best examined on the fringes, between the undeveloped and the developed, the virgin and the spoiled. These are the places that attract both mining and tourism—California being the paragon example. The most sublime public landscapes of the Sierra Nevadas, marked by theatrical geysers and waterfalls, can still be purchased for five dollars an acre according to an 1872 Mining Law still in effect today. Reflecting how little our attitude towards the natural landscape has changed over the past century, this is not an isolated condition. The infamous search for gold that has left such a devastating ecological legacy for California, from mercury spills to the massacre of native people, is still a nascent condition in pristine environments, such as the Amazon in Brazil.

This thesis investigates a new relationship between landscape and architecture, synthetically intertwining the act of tourism and mining with land remediation. A new form of ecotourism, the site is no longer a pristine wilderness, but the tailings of a gold mine. Instead of conceiving of sustainability simply as improved mechanical systems, architecture actively engages itself in a process of remediation. For example, phytomining is combined with phytoremediation, simultaneously ridding the soil of both it’s contaminates and the gold, which may be used to pay for the process. Pioneered in 1998 by New Zealand Earth Scientist Christopher Anderson and confirmed in experiments, the soil of mining sites can be treated with naturally occurring chemicals to allow plants, whose leaves turn purple from the process (gold is purple rather than yellow in its nano particulate form), to remediate the land while yielding up to 14 ounces of gold (approximately $8,400) per acre. Architecture, too, is embedded in the process of remediation by both exposing the scars of the past as well as creating specific innovations. This constitutes a new attitude towards the American landscape; one where building is not an object within a site, but inextricably tied to the landscape, embedded within the processes of reconciliation. The result is a new way of experiencing our [un]natural landscape.