TERRITORY AND TRANSGRESSION: Alternative models of resilience in post-exploitation zones
Type | Urban design, architectural design, Speculative project
Year | 2020
Project site | Degtyarsk [Дегтя́рск], Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia
Selected for Archiprix BK/TUDelft selection - Shortlisted Archiprix Netherlands 2020
Link at the full publication.
As we head towards scenarios of radical resource depletion and more frequent cataclysms linked to climate change, waste products accumulate drastically. Territory and trans-gression designs architecture after the catastrophe and works on alternative methodologies for sustainable resilience. This translates into the embracement of counter-aesthetics and the prospect of failure and perpetual crisis as valuable design elements. In doing that, the project explores the paradox of designing imperfection, breaking free from the premise of power and control that designing through technical methods has. It breaks free from architecture's positivist and heroic grounds as a solution-oriented operation. Territory and trans-gression propose a humble approach to unraveling civilization as preparation for collateral damage. It imagines the role of design as an infrastructure for rehabilitation and caretaking. A step-back and re-orientation of technical efforts towards the dysfunctional and the provisional.
The project site is Degtjarsk, a small town in Siberia's industrial core where mineral exploitation processes have heavily deteriorated the territory. The project reads this condition as a pilot example for the global prospect of a post-human territory caused by anthropic activities. In this scenario, territory and trans-gression provides catalytic spatial solutions aimed at social and environmental rehabilitation. Low-functional improvised structures built with waste materials develop into more complex configurations, providing infrastructural support for the local community to build with debris. The result is a clinical intervention that proceeds in phases and leads to the production of an urban workshop for Degtjarsk.
Cross section through the former ore sorting building (left) and the cleaning, sorting and storing of leftovers (right). The intervention is depicted in the moments before its completion, in the making, when the process of improvisation and collective care-taking is taking place alongside social activities.
View from South-East overlooking the chemical and mechanical analysis of waste material facility.
Overview of the intervention. Bird’s eye view from East.
West elevation. temporary scaffoldings help reclaim the materials from the building whilst providing access to the intermediate floors and new functions within.
Mapping of the traces of the former mining activity in Degtyarsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. Copper polluted water bodies are marked in red.
Remains of the former ore sorting building in the Kapitalnaya nr.2 mining site in Degtyarsk.
Fragment detail of the overhang of the co-working units in the ore sorting buildings.
Ground floor plan
1:1 prototype for an improvised formal analysis of scrap material platform. Overlay of the spatial gesture.