Wallenberg Studio Book 2026

LAND

B.S. ARCH 2026 WALLENBERG STUDIO

Published to commemorate the 2026

B.S.Arch Wallenberg Reviews held at Taubman College April 23rd and 24th, 2026.

A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard

Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 USA

taubmancollege.umich.edu

@umich.bs.arch.taubman @umich.taubmancollege #taubmancollege

Copyright © 2026

The Regents of the University of Michigan

Designed by Zain AbuSeir & Malak Atwi

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the University of Michigan Taubman College.

A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

Bachelor of Science in Architecture Class of 2026

WALLENBERG STUDIO

The final undergraduate design studio honors the legacy of Taubman College Alumnus Raoul Wallenberg, who graduated with a degree in architecture in 1935 and named “the greatest humanitarian of the 20th Century” by the United Nations for his humanitarian efforts in Hungary during World War II.

Raoul Wallenberg utilized tactical interventions to carefully manipulate the spatial logic of political borders, property, and sovereignty. He designed and issued protective passports (Schutz-Passe) to grant diplomatic immunity, delayed deportations, and reclassified ordinary buildings as Swedishprotected diplomatic residences, hospitals and libraries(Safe Houses). At the ethical core of his actions, Wallenberg risked everything by making himself and his actions highly visible - leveraging the visual authority of the Swedish state through diplomatic insignia like uniforms, paperwork and flags creating moments of hesitation. Wallenberg’s actions utilized the performative power of diplomacy to transform ordinary objects and spaces into instruments of care and protection.

The Wallenberg Studio Competition benefits from the generous support of the Benard L. Maas Foundation, which aims to enhance understanding of architecture through travel

experiences. The funds from this endowment are allocated such that half are designated for travel during the semester, and the other half is for studio prizes. These prizes are awarded after a competitive external review at the semester's end. It is anticipated that Wallenberg Award winners will engage in the culture of the country they visit and explore the experiential qualities of architecture as affected by the way people shape places. Above all, it is hoped that students will return with a broadened understanding of the world and an appreciation and feeling for the people they encounter, sharing this knowledge to the college through a report, lecture, and/or exhibition.

Each annual Wallenberg Studio focuses on broad humanitarian concerns explored through the interests and expertise of the studio section faculty. This year’s Wallenberg Studio theme is:”Land”.

FOREWORD

Land as a Practice of Care

As the inaugural volume showcasing the tremendous accomplishments of students in their final year of Taubman College’s Bachelor of Science in Architecture program, this book gathers the work of six parallel sections of the Wallenberg Studio. The studio draws inspiration from the humanitarian legacy of Raoul Wallenberg, whose nonviolent courage during World War II demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to act in the face of injustice. Through ingenuity and resolve, Wallenberg drew on his training as an architect to transform ordinary objects, documents, and spaces into instruments of care and protection. His actions remind us that the built environment is never neutral; it can be mobilized in the service of humanity.

Eight decades later, the question of how we might leverage our disciplinary skills toward human and environmental well-being remains urgent. Amid intersecting global crises of climate change, resurgent nationalism, and displacement, how might architects apply the lessons of Wallenberg’s courage today? What does it mean to act with purpose and responsibility in a world where the stakes of design extend far beyond the boundaries of any single site?

This year’s Wallenberg Studios center “Land” as a shared framework through which to explore these

Antje Steinmuller Chair of Architecture, Professor

questions. Land is understood both as ground and territory: material and symbolic, lived, and contested. Architecture is deeply implicated in how land is claimed, commodified, bounded, and exploited, and carries an ethical responsibility to those whose identities, histories, and livelihoods are entangled with it. Across six distinct sections, the studio probes how architects might become agents of protection and repair. The projects engage strategies that make land visible and care possible; they challenge extractive practices by proposing non-extractive material processes; and they question regimes of private ownership in favor of collective stewardship. Working across diverse contexts—urban land appropriation, Arctic exploitation, submerged histories embedded in the ground, the fluid ecologies of swamps, the desert as a site of cultural experimentation, and land as an archive of environmental vulnerability —students cultivate awareness, empathy, and responsiveness to shifting conditions.

The resulting student work reflects a commitment to architecture as a practice of care. In confronting complexity, students demonstrate courage: not only in what they design, but in how they position their discipline as a tool for restoration, accountability, and the collective good.

LAND

Wallenberg Studio 2026

Land requires that we pause and reflect on what is often taken for granted, inviting shared yet divergent inquiry into architecture’s relationships and responsibilities to ground, territory, and planetary extents. Land is never neutral. Land is relational and socially produced–shaped by intersecting histories, social, political and economic interrelations. Land is claimed, bordered, extracted, and contested, shaping histories of misuse, ownership, and dispossession. At the same time, land is cultivated, inhabited, remembered, and repaired, carrying narratives of labor and identities alongside the futures we imagine.

Across contemporary contexts, environmental contamination, territorial conflict, economic turmoil, and social inequities are inscribed into and on to land, registering the characteristics of the moment in the ways we see and apprehend land. From agricultural monocultures and urban redevelopment zones to landscapes of waste, land bears the marks of ecological breakdown, extractive economies, cultural vulnerabilities and ongoing political struggles. Spatial disciplines give form to these complex entanglements by following capital flows –rendering exclusion, enclosure, and extraction into spatial realities.

How might architecture engage in an understanding of the consequences of these inherited systems, policies, and practices written on the land?

One pathway for inquiry approaches land through instruments of environmental assessment, surveying, and zoning, to make land more legible and actionable. Material and environmental systems offer an alternative line of inquiry. Lydia Kallipoliti reveals that architectural production is dependent on extraction, energy flows, labor and larger systems rendering land inseparable from industrial capitalism and long-term environmental impacts. How can material ecologies and infrastructural systems resist singular solutionist approaches and be reimagined to address social and environmental urgencies? Can architecture be positioned to operate as a negotiator to offer more sustainable energy flows and infrastructural systems? Land is where political theory and systems of ownership and access become spatially explicit- Achille Mbembe foregrounds how these systems determine whose claims are secured and whose lives and labor are rendered precarious. What is architecture’s agency within these larger systems of uneven distributions of access, protection and risk?

Land is governed through overlapping frameworks of public and private ownership, formal regulation and informal use, individual rights and collective claims. For Elinor Ostrom, collective stewardship, the commons and shared governance challenge assumptions of enclosure and privatization, proposing alternative models for land and its infrastructures. With this consideration, what ethical obligation does architecture hold to interrogate and propose spatial and institutional arrangements for alternate realities of collective stewardship?

To engage land is to recognize that every boundary established, resource extracted, and line drawn carry consequences and potentials to impact livelihoods and futures. Rather than a singular agenda, Land calls for architectural participation to operate across scales and temporalities from the intimate to the planetary attending to what can be shaped and negotiated–to propose new realities that participate in future potentials situated in knowledge generation and shared responsibilities. A call to awaken social and ecological consciousness —foregrounding ways of living with the land and cultivating the resilience needed to sustain vulnerable relations for a future not so far.

Studio Faculty:

Zain AbuSeir (coordinator)

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies

Tess Clancy

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition

Nitzan Farfel

THE AMBLER ROAD— Cosmopolitics of Arctic Territory

Dawn Gilpin & Gina Reichert

Celestial Artifice + Subterranean Clouds

Neal Robinson Swamp Logics

Geoffrey Thün Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa

WALLENBERG STUDIO EVENTS

WALLENBERG WORKSHOP

02/04/2026

WALLENBERG LECTURE

02/04/2026

Smout Allen : ‘Models, drawings and everything in-between. A look at the work of Unit 11’.

Winter 2026 Binda Lecture Series: Smout Allen – Laura Allen & Mark Smout

REVIEWS & EXHIBITION

The culminating work of the 2026 graduating class of Taubman College’s B.S of Architecture program will be on display during Final Reviews, held at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning on April 23 and April 24. This two-day event marks the official presentation of projects that represent the culmination of intensive research, design exploration, and critical discourse developed over the final year of undergraduate study.

In addition to the Final Reviews, the work will be displayed at the annual Wallenberg Studio Exhibition and Awards Symposium on May 1. The work will remain up throughout the weekend for viewing.

VISITING CRITICS

Clare Lyster

Lola Sheppard

DK Osseo-Asare

Mark Stanley

University of Illinois at Chicago

University of Waterloo

Penn State University

University of Tennessee

SUPER JURY

Rania Ghosn

Jerome Haferd

José Ibarra

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

City College of New York

Penn State University

ARCHITECTURE FACULTY

Ellie Abrons

Zain AbuSeir

Robert Adams

Mania Aghaei Meibodi

Sean Ahlquist

María Arquero de Alarcón

Tony Bedogne

Craig Borum

Bryan Boyer

James Chaffers

Angela Cho

Tess Clancy

McLain Clutter

Jacob Comerci

Gabriel Cuéllar

Nitzan Farfel

Robert Fishman

Adam Fure

Collin Garnett

Dawn Gilpin

Lars Gräbner

Linda N. Groat

Sharon Haar

Peter Halquist

Christina Hansen

Melissa Harris

Rachael Henry

Andrew Herscher

Irene Hwang

Andrew Ibrahim

El Hadi Jazairy

Lars Junghans

Michael Kennedy

Jong-Jin Kim

Joy Knoblauch

Perry Kulper

Emily Kutil

Yojairo Lomeli

Ann Lui

Kuukuwa Manful

Steven Mankouche

Robert Marans

John Marshall

Jonathan Massey

Francesca Mavaracchio

Kit McCullough

Malcolm McCullough

Wesley McGee

John McMorrough

Julia McMorrough

Mark Meier

Meredith Miller

Keith Mitnick

Thomas Moran

Ana Morcillo Pallarés

Athar Mufreh

Upali Nanda

Mojtaba Navvab

Catie Newell

Tsz Yan Ng

Charlie O’Geen

Cynthia Pachikara

Cyrus Peñarroyo

Gina Reichert

Neal Robinson

Mireille Roddier

Jonathan Rule

Lisa Sauvé

Ishan Pal Singh

Anya Sirota

Elliot Smithberger

Łukasz Stanek

Antje Steinmuller

Jono Sturt

Geoffrey Thün

Anca Trandafirescu

Christian Unverzagt

Mohsen Vatandoost

Kathy Velikov

Peter von Bülow

Claudia Wigger

Glenn Wilcox

Craig Wilkins

B.S.ARCH 2026

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies

Zain AbuSeir

Yingyu Bi

Constanza Capriles

Mia Chen

Molly Conlin

Elliot Lavigne

Luke Lynch

Kai Martin

Alexandra Mercier

Noorhan Moustafa

Sophie Panfel-Levitsky

Olivia Wilcox

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition

Tess Clancy

Fatema Almoamen

Eduardo Cardenas-Denova

Lilijana Gregov

Manar Khan

Jinhyuk Kim

Anthony Miller

Alaina Moseley

Naomi Peterson

Sarah Shaw-Nichols

Hazel Yufei Hu

THE AMBLER ROAD— Cosmopolitics

Nitzan Farfel

Emma High

Miranda Lloyd

Paige Osterkamp

Olivia Ott

Halle Paternoster

Maddie Pelto

Matthew Sept

Zeyu Shi

Carly Smith

Madeline Tay

Dawn Gilpin & Gina Reichert

Misk Aldulaimy

Audrey Bellak

Rachel Chen

Ethan Coletta

Abigail Dziedzic

Alina Mankowski

Emma Oestmann

Dana O’Connor

William Peterson-Kirkland

Elaina Schuesler

Neal Robinson

Anelisa Anderson

Adelaide Fackler

Demetrius Ford

Sayna Gholami

Julia Lindahl

Jessica Pasma

Mariam Reyes-Toidze

Misbah Shahid

Celine Shaji

John Watha

Eliott Young

Geoffrey Thün

Watson Baek

Zoe Blackburn

Evita Christou

Anna DeYoung

Jake Erlich

Brittney Harwin

Taylor Horsfall

Axel Mar Pulido

Gulshat Rozali

Evan Wendorf

Emily Xu

The Truth Signal

Yingyu Bi

Tierra de Gracia: Thresholds Constanza Capriles

No/New Land - The Archival Marsh

Mia Chen

Evaporating White Gold

Molly Conlin

Chasing The Sun

Elliot Lavigne

Evaporating White Gold

Luke Lynch

Slow Fashion

Kai Martin

Land for Pandanus

Alexandra Mercier

For the Willow Fields

Noorhan Moustafa

Glitchy Streams: Reclamation of a Lake No More

Sophie Panfel-Levitsky

Overflowing an Aqueduct

Olivia Wilcox

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies

Zain AbuSeir

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies

Zain AbuSeir

Wallenberg travel destination: LA, Owens Lake & Lone Pine

As we take stock of our current planetary state, it is evident that social and ecological conditions are actively reconfiguring land and its relations, reshaping planetary systems across time and space. Climate-driven environmental shifts, ecologies of waste and contamination, and extractive processes are reconfiguring the way humans and more-than-humans inhabit the land. These processes reveal both glimpses of fragility and latent possibilities, positioning land as an archive and an active witness to conflict, planetary crises, and environmental and cultural vulnerability.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies Studio engages the patch as a spatial condition and methodological lens. A patch is defined as a material used to mend, a small plot of land for growing plants, a temporary connection or exchange, or an unsettled period of time. In landscape ecology, a patch is also defined as a spatially discrete area marked with variations of matter, environmental conditions, and ecosystems, shaped by climate disruptions, anthropogenic processes and ecological responses. Patchy ecologies -like contaminated atmospheres, forests facing biodiversity, shifting coastlines, post-extractive sites, to drying lakebeds with toxic clouds, and unstable wetlands- are land environments characterized with uneven assemblages and interruptions of adaptations, potentials, repair and recovery. In this studio, imaginaries take form in architectural propositions that engage methods of research, representation, and speculation to explore potentials of designing for and with land’s patchy ecologies embracing impermanence, reciprocity and the makeshift.

Students are invited to explore how architectural imaginaries can recalibrate connections and stewardship of the land through intentional observations, analytical readings, spatial translations, knowledge production and transfer, and assemblages of repair. Within these patchy ecologies, we will imagine alternate realities, ways of seeing and being with the land embedded in ethics, resilience and interspecies relations where nothing exists in isolation. Here, speculative architectural propositions are mediators existing within the sympoietic, emerging through uncertainties, fragilities, entanglements and the yet unseenwhere fact meets myth and the material and imaginative co-produce worlds.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

The Truth Signal

Yingyu Bi

Nuclear contamination is often rendered invisible. This project asks what it means to make contamination visible—to measure, to witness, and to resist the erasure of its consequences. Here, architecture operates as a mediator: a framework that supports the uncovering of truths, the circulation of knowledge, and the formation of collective responsibility.

The work proposes a distributed system composed of detectors and broadcast stations, unfolding across both urban and remote landscapes marked by environmental uncertainty. Detectors are situated within affected territories, continuously measuring the level of contamination through overhead monitoring systems. They register what cannot be directly sensed, transmitting real-time data as a form of environmental testimony.

Broadcast stations emerge as sites of translation and gathering. Here, data is processed, visualized, and projected—transforming abstract measurements into shared, public encounters. These sites function not as isolated objects, but as moments of convergence where filmmakers, journalists, architects, artists, scientists, and activists come together to interpret, narrate, and disseminate.

Together, these elements form a living network—one that operates through collaboration rather than control. Measurement becomes a collective act; awareness, an ongoing process; truth, something continuously negotiated and revealed. The system is sustained through partnerships that evolve over time, adapting to shifting conditions while maintaining its core intention.

Through acts of measuring, broadcasting, and engaging, the project holds space for what is often unseen, insisting on visibility, accountability, and the shared responsibility to respond.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Tierra de Gracia: Thresholds

Constanza Capriles

Venezuela was once called Tierra de Gracia, Land of Grace. Columbus called it “earthly paradise.” Then we took everything. Oil, forests, futures, people. Eight million Venezuelans left. The ones who stayed lived under a criminal regime.

Thresholds documents four wounded ecologies. The Diaspora. Dining rooms with plates on the table. Photos on walls because there wasn’t room in the bag. Houses holding impossible choices. The Cacao Farms. Farmers gone. Jungle reclaiming everything. Cacao trees strangled by vines, sheds collapsing, channels choked with weeds. The Logged Forests. Armed groups running illegal logging, mining, trafficking of drugs, people, and animals. People trapped with no way out. Centuries-old forests gone in months. The Orinoco Delta. The Warao lived with this river for millennia. Oil, mining pollution, urban waste poisoned where they fish, live, pray. Self-sufficient people now dependent on external medicine and food. Same root: a government that treated land and people as resources to extract and sell.

This project imagines extraction becoming illegal after the regime falls and land is reclaimed. Venezuela begins protecting land instead of selling it. A future shaped by Indigenous knowledge, that sees land as family, not property. Organized around watersheds, not oil fields. This isn’t about everyone returning. It’s about diaspora staying connected, some coming back, others rotating through, all contributing. Where return becomes choice, not dream.

The archive is a nomadic table. Two chairs. One for a Venezuelan, one for anyone willing to listen and share. It collects stories and the global network forming around Venezuelan memory. As it travels, it archives materials, objects, stories, traces. It grows. It returns to Venezuela transformed, using its acquired knowledge to imagine a future. The table proves diaspora isn’t loss. It’s expansion. An ongoing narrative that continues to move and grow. A threshold into what we carry forward.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

No/New Land - The Archival Marsh

Mia Chen

From the 1930s to now, the Southeastern coast of Louisiana has lost land nearly equivalent to the size of Delaware. The land loss — in large part the consequence of canals carved through the marsh for oil extraction, leading to land subsidence — continues to threaten local biodiversity and indigenous cultural practices. The fragmentation, along with natural disasters, lack of sediment deposit, and rising sea levels, causes the coastlines to continue receding. While freshwater marshes have experienced the greatest decrease, intermediate, brackish, and salt marshes are equally threatened with loss, posing a threat to numerous human and more-than-human ecologies.

The Pointe-au-Chien tribe of Louisiana have long lived in the region fishing the marshes, cultivating crops and medicinal herbs, and protecting local cultural sites. The rising water levels and loss of marsh land endanger their homes, cultural material, and livelihoods. This proposal seeks to empower stewardship and memory of the land when living on it is no longer viable. This work imagines a system of water-adapted infrastructures, each addressing the specific ecological and residential concerns of each marsh type for the human and more-than-human: freshwater fishing pools create microhabitats for various mussel, fish, and shellfish species, fostering the daily fishing ritual for the Pointau-Chien. Mats of marsh cordgrass and black needlerush form nesting grounds for migratory birds. Among the ecosystems, floating and stilted residencies allow the Pointe-au-Chien to continue stewarding the land in the areas they have for centuries. Additionally, floating schools facilitate the education of future generations on local biodiversity, as well as significant cultural sites. The project seeks not to replace, but to support the passing-on and preservation of cultural knowledge and ritual, both the physical and immaterial.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Evaporating White Gold

Assembling Alliances

Molly Conlin & Luke Lynch

Evaporating White Gold is situated within the Lithium Triangle, a tri-border region spanning Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile that contains some of the world’s largest lithium reserves. As demand for lithium accelerates with the rise of advanced technologies and renewable energy systems, extraction in this region has intensified. These processes rely on vast amounts of groundwater in the most arid environment on Earth, placing severe strain on fragile desert ecosystems and the Indigenous communities that have inhabited the region for millennia. What forms of extraction are rendered invisible within the rhetoric of “green” energy, and who bears their environmental and social costs?

This work explores alternate realities for the extracted land through a series of speculative architectural propositions, the work engages with the region through the lens of mitigating existing infrastructure, interrupting labor and global systems, and alliance building that shift regional power dynamics. Operating across multiple scales—from plant ecologies and territorial patterns to global economic networks—Evaporating White Gold imagines a construction of a phased resistance of land extractive processes. How might architecture operate not only as a spatial practice but as a tool for economic intervention, activism, and environmental stewardship? What new alliances might emerge when infrastructure is not erased, but retooled to become a platform of empowerment and resistance foregrounding culturally and ecologically centered imaginaries?

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Chasing The Sun

Elliot Lavigne

We live now on a vast, exposed seabed, a flat and fractured expanse of saltcrusted earth that was once the Aral Sea, a vast inland freshwater basin fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. It held ports and communities, where water, reed beds, and fisheries produced intertwined ecologies. Then the rivers were stolen, redirected outward to irrigate distant cotton fields. Year by year the shoreline pulled away, exposing strata of salt, dust, and agricultural toxins, forming what is now the Aralkum Desert.

The sea was systematically destroyed and forgotten. Boats, nets, and structures that once sustained livelihoods now sit scattered across the barren desert, displaced from the water that once gave them purpose. And still, we persist here, carrying a situated knowledge of living with land, wind, and water, held as embodied memory and guiding new forms of transition.

We learned to live with the land the sea left behind. Using the same structures that once served the fishing economy, we began forming small patches of life across the salt flats. Brine pools gather and separate salt and toxins, the air is measured and filtered as dust moves across the desert, and fragments of water slowly expand, enough for plants and animals to return. These patches grow through repair and reuse, guided by the knowledge carried from the sea. What began as scattered attempts has become a shared way of living in the Aralkum Desert.

Our story is no longer one of loss. It has become a living and changing process of evolution. Each new patch expands the conditions for life, suggesting how human and ecological systems must be reorganized in the wake of systemic and ecological collapse, guided by reciprocity, where what is taken is measured against what can be given back.

Field Record

Aralkum Desert Patch Zone 3.2 May 9, 2049, 17:40

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Evaporating White Gold

Spatial Activism

Luke Lynch & Molly Conlin

Evaporating White Gold imagines a readaptation of extractive infrastructure as a form of spatial activism, emerging as these systems fall out of economic viability. Rather than abandoning this infrastructure, the work envisions its reclamation through Indigenous knowledge systems and practices of care of environmental activists. The work explores how architecture can participate in imagining the spatial possibilities when infrastructures of extraction are reclaimed as sites of care and relation.

The evaporation pools become sites for wetlands, flamingo habitats, and experimental agriculture local to the area, while the industrial structures are repurposed for vertical farming, water harvesting, and a broadcasting station. These propositions operate as forms of spatial activism, where the reconfiguration of the infrastructure is an act of resistance. Rather than opposing extraction solely through protest, the project intervenes directly in the material and spatial logics that sustain it—redirecting flows of water, labor, and energy toward collective and regenerative ends. These spatial strategies assert alternative forms of governance rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems and forms of activism and ecological care, where land is not a resource to be depleted but a relation to be maintained. In this way, activism is not only oppositional but generative—producing new spatial conditions that enable repair, resilience, and autonomy.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Slow Fashion

Kai Martin

What if fast fashion wasn’t fast? In a world where every action is optimized for peak performance, the art of slowing down and being present has disappeared.

Around the world, textile fibres are mass farmed, contributing to severe land degradation, labor exploitation, and loss of cultural style and identity. Too quickly, clothing articles are disposed of, ending up in landfills, where around 100 tons of waste are discarded per day. Through examining the fast fashion industry’s relationship with ethical land use, labor and culture, and ecological stewardship and consciousness, Slow Fashion seeks to foster conscious clothing consumption by redefining the form and social relations of the domestic space.

Home to one of the United State’s largest apparel manufacturing centers, Los Angeles is a hub for clothing trends and a leader in sustainable fashion practices. This proposal is located in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood affected by the 2025 fires. Due to the lack of insurance compensation and aid, natural disasters like these offer a blank slate for residents and designers to explore how new infrastructure creates new forms of community resilience.

Slow Fashion reimagines burned front yards as fields for raw fibre like flax and cotton and abandoned parcels as active community spaces. What was once a private, fenced-off lot, is now a place for the public. Inside the house, kitchens reconfigure into raw fibre treatment areas and storage, and home offices become collaborative clothing making and mending workshops. As time progresses, the lots left behind in the Pacific Palisades transform into collective spaces within the fabric of the land, redefining what it means to be a part of a community. Imaginaries

Land for Pandanus

Alexandra Mercier

The United States, China, South Korea, and Japan export close to 90% of the Republic of the Marshall Islands’ foodstuffs, creating a dependency that links the islands to industrialized food systems. These systems create food deserts, overproduction, contamination, pesticides, food waste, slaughterhouses, meat packing plants, and monocrop farming, prioritizing shelf life, scale, and exportability over nutrition. This results in a reliance on highly processed foods and often expired fresh foods. This work explores new relationships between the people of the Marshall Islands and their land that propose different ways of empowerment to release dependency.

The islands are at the front of the global climate crises and extremely susceptible to sea level rise. Their fishing industry is threatened by warming oceans and coral bleaching, while increasing El Niño events create uncertainty in available freshwater resources. Residual radiation from nuclear bomb testing and leaking radioactive tomb continues to contaminate the soil and water, and the cultural history is threatened by western influence.

In an imagined future not so far, the Marshallese actively disengage from externally imposed systems and decrease dependency on imported food. Partnering with a local, a climate journalist and a gardener, the project proposes alternate realities that do not seek to restore a prior state, but generate new adaptive conditions for inhabitation. Through propositions that collect, distribute and record knowledge, traditions and practices deeply rooted to the identity of the Marshallese people, the work imagines a spatial manual of repair and spatial archives of tools and ways of living with the land. Grounded in local knowledge systems, technologies and ecological practices, they reconfigure their relationship with the land to repair it and imagine new ways of farming within fragile environmental conditions, making spatial forms of resistance to reclaim their independence through localized cultivation and care of the land.

For the Willow Fields

Noorhan Moustafa

What happens to a people when their land faces ecological and cultural fracture? In British Columbia, Canada, one of the world’s largest gold mines is under construction. While the land there is treated as an untapped resource, the territories downstream in Southeast Alaska are disregarded, and the international border becomes a blind spot. Acid mine drainage and ore processing release heavy metals into soils, watersheds, and salmon habitats, producing effects that are spatially and temporally nearly irreparable. These toxins move beyond the land, entering bodies, disrupting subsistence practices, and threatening entire ways of life for Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian communities.

These communities maintain deeply reciprocal relationships with the land and water. Forests, rivers, salmon, cedar, and berries are not passive resources, but active participants in cultural practice. Knowledge is not stored, it is practiced through harvesting, fishing, making, and gathering. As the land is damaged, so too are the conditions that allow this knowledge to be passed on.

Memories of Repair positions a series of architectural propositions as acts of resistance and repair. The project unfolds as a distributed network of markers that operate as spaces of repairing land and passing on knowledge. The markers are responsive, they establish conditions for gathering, learning, and practice. Through interaction, they become classrooms themselves, sometimes a structure, sometimes a tool, sometimes a modification of the ground.

Within these spaces, the roles of the people become fluid. People move between being builders, harvesters, listeners, and teachers, as knowledge is shared through doing. Both cultural and temporal, these markers support soil remediation, salmon habitat restoration, and subsistence practices while simultaneously acting as spatial archives.

Rather than preserving knowledge as static memory, the project sustains it as a living and practiced relationship between people and land.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Glitchy Streams: Reclamation of a Lake No More

Sophie Panfel-Levitsky

Nestled between the Sierra Nevada and Inyo Mountains, the dry lakebed of Owens Lake (Patsiata) marks the remains of a terminal lake, forcibly drained by the Department of Water and Power to supply the distant metropolis of Los Angeles. For the Owens Valley Paiute (Nüümü), Patsiata and the broader Owens Valley (Payahuunadü) are not resources, but kin. Today, the valley is overlaid with rigid boundary lines that divide and regulate what was never discrete.

“Glitchy Streams” asks what it means to reclaim land shaped by extraction, and to reimagine it as relational rather than territorial. It challenges the authority of drawn boundaries, negating that polygons can replace how land exists, moves, or is known. The project situates architecture as a collaborator, working alongside Indigenous and long-time stewards of the land to restore ways of seeing, knowing, and caring for Payahuunadü beyond imposed limits.

The project imagines a distributed network of broadcasting booths that capture the unseen truths across Payahuunadü. Maintained by those with deep, placebased knowledge, each booth records the slowness of its immediate landscape–the grasses of a drying riverbed, the migrating avocets, the sodium crust of Patsiata–in a live stream, translating lived knowledge into a shared, global archive.

Accessing the booths requires movement that cuts across, blurs, or ignores imposed lines. Travel becomes an act of refusal, privileging continuity of land over its segmentation. At each site, the live stream mirrors the user’s perspective. Movement as subtle as wind can trigger a glitch, revealing layered, speculative narratives where the past informs possible futures to the user and broadcast viewers alike. Each booth makes visible what a single frame cannot: overlapped histories and stories still unfolding.

Rather than a static archive, the project frames storytelling as active and collective; reclaiming not only land, but the right to move through and narrate it beyond the limits drawn upon it.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Overflowing an Aqueduct

Returning Water to Land

Olivia Wilcox

Extractive infrastructures support Los Angeles’ growing population but harm social, cultural, and ecological systems. Water which sustains Los Angeles is sourced from hundreds of miles away in Owen’s Valley, the Colorado river, and Northern California. The extraction of water from Owen’s valley in 1913 created the largest dust bowl in the country, and completely changed the livelihoods of farmers and native Paiute and Shoshone tribes who inhabited the once fertile valley.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles river has been channelized, encased in concrete. Water in the river channel is moved through the city as quickly as possible, essentially behaving as a giant storm-drain. This channelization of the river, while preventing catastrophic flooding, has also removed key riparian habitats for fish, birds, and other wildlife. Concrete covers the soil as development contaminates it. Soil within the watershed is also being deprived of nutrients that the overflow of the river provides, making the area more susceptible to wildfire and less hospitable to native flora and fauna.

In this proposed future, communities work to strategically dismantle portions of the extractive Los Angeles aqueduct. Remnants of the aqueduct are then redistributed to support an overflow of ecological remediation throughout developed LA in the form of greenhouse, seedbank, and classroom. These interventions promote a radical restoration of the wetlands in Los Angeles through the removal of concrete from the LA river, the reintroduction of native flora and fauna, and the teaching of heritage practices which relate to the river and its stewardship. In this future, human interventions repair and restore relationships with altered ecosystems through architectures which acknowledge that we are intimately connected to the land we live on and live with. Ultimately, these interventions assert that land is not inert, that water and land are inseparable systems, and that human inhabitation is dependent on reciprocal relationships with the earth’s other-than-human inhabitants.

Imaginaries for Patchy Ecologies // Zain AbuSeir

Reframed: A Series of Active Assemblies

Fatema Almoamen

We are still here

Eduardo Cardenas-Denova

Inverted Block: The alley as a positive Lilijana Gregov

Collective Stories of History

Manar Khan

Warmth in Motion

Jinhyuk Kim Healing Ecologies

Anthony Miller

Social Sanctuary: Texture Captured In Music

Alaina Moseley

Movement and Memory in Detroit: Access to Transit

Naomi Peterson

I Felt The Earth Move

Sarah Shaw-Nichols

The Common Door

Hazel Yufei Hu

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition

Tess Clancy

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition

Tess Clancy

Wallenberg travel destination: Montgomery & Newbern (Alabama)

The demolition of vast swaths of a city often results in historical erasure or even a condition of post-history, where the past is no longer remembered. What is remembered is often decided by those in power, and serves to perpetuate a particular narrative, while marginalizing others.

Though narratives that emerged in the early 21st century cast Detroit as “empty, wasted, and underutilized (The City After Property, 6),” Detroit was not abandoned. Since 1920, it has remained the most populous city in the state of Michigan. It is also true that, as a result of entrenched racial capitalism, Detroit experienced unfathomable loss–of people, of neighborhoods and neighborhood culture, and physical structures of all kinds.

Students in this studio were asked to respond to the above simultaneous truths by designing a living monument/memorial for the city of Detroit, that questions the city’s reliance on demolition and acknowledges the material and cultural loss that has occurred as a result. We address the theme of “Land” at multiple scales, from the life cycle of a single salvaged brick to concepts of ownership at an urban scale–land grabs, land banks, and land back initiatives.

Student designs explore ways that architecture can reveal alternative historical narratives. How can one embrace methods of experimental preservation in order to draw attention to certain aspects of the city’s past? How can designs oppose nostalgia, and instead serve as a critical marker or index of the city’s history and its relation to the present and future? Monuments and memorials speak to an already existing history of a place. A site with a monument cannot be sold as a “new frontier” (136-137). If a chosen site or history has a painful past, how can this be revealed to prevent its repetition?

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition // Tess Clancy

“Shannon Goodman Is Helping Make Material Reuse the Norm.” Metropolis, n.d. Accessed January 25, 2026. https://metropolismag.com/ profiles/shannon-goodman-life-cycle-building-center/. “Hangars, Greenhouses and Barns Opalis.” Accessed January 25, 2026. https://opalis.eu/en/materials/hangars-greenhouses-and-barns. “Home.” Accessed January 25, 2026. https://aswdetroit.org/. Maynard, Nigel F. “Rheaply Brings Ingenuity to Recycling Building Materials.” Metropolis, n.d. Accessed January 25, 2026. https:// metropolismag.com/profiles/salvage-superstar-rheaply/.

“ASWD’s Community Uplift Program.” Architectural Salvage Warehouse of Detroit, aswdetroit.org/. Accessed 25 Jan. 2026. “Salvage Superstar: Doors Unhinged - Metropolis.” Accessed January 25, 2026. https://metropolismag.com/profiles/salvage-superstar-doorsunhinged/.

“Woodward Throwbacks Transforms Landfill-Bound Goods into Modern Furniture Metropolis.” Accessed January 25, 2026. https:// metropolismag.com/profiles/woodward-throwbacks-salvage-superstar/.

Reframed: A Series of Active Assemblies

Fatema Almoamen

From widespread vacancies to demolition, land in Detroit forms a patchy urban fabric. With only a few houses remaining on some blocks and empty lots in between, neighborhoods continue to experience fragmentation at varying architectural and social scales. The absence of houses becomes present and the block remains incomplete. As density loosens, the neighborhood becomes inactive.

To bridge the gaps of neighborhood fragmentation, this project explores the adaptability of a framed assembly as a reactivating patch. Through subtle formal characteristics, each assembly acknowledges the house that stood before it, inviting back the activity, connection, and support of a higher density neighborhood block.

Each assembly may adapt its programming to respond to the particular preferences of the neighborhood and its residents. A neighborhood near a public school may utilize the frame as a small library, one close to the river may prefer a kayak shed, and proximity to Detroit’s art scene may call for an art studio. Whether a greenhouse, a bike garage or a stage, the frame represents possibility and encourages choice. With slight alterations, the frame can be adaptable to better fit the needs of the neighborhood it’s serving.

By working from a simple grid and salvaging materials from nearby residential demolition sites, constructing and assembling these frames is motivated by neighborhood autonomy. Leaning into Detroit’s Do-It-Yourself ethos, these assemblies are designed to be for the neighbors, by the neighbors. The neighbors assemble it, the neighbors disassemble it. They put it together by hand, and then take it apart by hand. They dictate what happens in their neighborhood.

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition // Tess Clancy

We are still here

Eduardo Cardenas-Denova

This project proposes a Monumental Passageway for the Mexican and Central American Diaspora in the U.S, and specifically in Southwest Detroit. A public space of resistance, pride, and collective memory that directly confronts the immigration policies, enforcement systems, and political conditions that have displaced, criminalized, and erased Hispanic communities in the United States.

Where I-75 was carved through Mexicantown in the 1960s, entire blocks of homes, businesses, and streets were demolished, erasing the physical fabric of a community that had built its life there for decades. This studio’s research into Detroit’s history of demolition and redlining reveals immigration enforcement as a parallel system of forced erasure, one that operates not through demolition but through documents, raids, and borders. Detroit’s Latino community has faced this system repeatedly: the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, Operation Wetback in 1954, and the ongoing ICE enforcement of today. Each wave attempted to erase a community that had built its life here. Each time, the community remained. The highway’s gap is like a wound that divided one neighborhood into two becoming the site of this project.

The design proposes an experiential passage that puts visitors in the shoes of an immigrant traveling to the United States, from the warmth of home, through the darkness and danger of crossing, to the confrontation with the systems designed to keep them out. Visitors are asked to sit inside the weight of these realities before arriving at a living, active public space built from salvaged Detroit brick, fragments of the city’s own demolished homes reassembled into something new, acknowledging the past and hoping for a better future.

This is not a memorial to what was lost. It is a declaration that we are still here.

Inverted Block: The alley as a positive

Lilijana Gregov

When the buildings that construct an alleyway’s boundaries disappear, the alley erodes as the architectures vanish. Once acting as hosts of utility and activity (trash pick-up, delivery, playing, and walking), the slow erasure of Detroit’s dense residential landscape changed the space of the alley and how the land was occupied. Without the surrounding homes and residents, alleys became empty or overgrown, sites of a different kind of activity. This project re-institutes the alley and the tight perimeters which once perpetuated autonomy for residents, and propagated grass-root, local-scale development.

This project rebuilds the alley, activating the community land it once provided. Hosting, in different configurations, wood shops, greenhouses, daycares, studios, art spaces, and performance areas. The alley here becomes a long shed, simple in its architecture and easy to construct, multiply, and adapt. This shed is built of timber members salvaged from homes in Detroit’s demolition pipeline. Helping to activate the reuse economy in Detroit, the structure pulls materials from houses before they are demolished, preserving material memory and their availability to residents. This project perpetuates the once easily entered, yet enclosed experience of the alley with walls and apertures shifting throughout the seasons. The simplicity of the shed allows the programming of the structure to be its strengths. Storage for salvaged construction materials is built into the walls, solar panels are easily installed onto roofs, and rainwater collection is embedded into the gutters. The alleyway can again become a neighborhood space for learning, play, and outdoor enclosure. Salvaging: Material and Memory

Collective Stories of History

Manar Khan

Demolition in Detroit doesn’t just remove buildings, it erases the stories tied to them. This project proposes an architectural intervention that captures and carries those stories before and after demolition, turning vacant land into a living archive of community memory. It is sited at Schuester’s Playground in the Davison neighborhood, a vacant space shaped by nearby demolitions through Proposal N. The project responds to that absence while creating new ways for people to gather and engage.

The design centers on the Story Wall, made from salvaged doors, windows, and fragments from demolished or deconstructed homes. Instead of rebuilding entire structures, it focuses on thresholds, elements that once marked the boundary between private and public life. Some of these doors open into small recording booths where residents can share personal and neighborhood stories, building an ongoing oral archive.

Alongside this, reclaimed brick is used to create mural walls that act as another layer of storytelling. Detroiters are storytellers (Dr. Bebe), and these brick murals give residents a way to express their experiences visually. The murals are framed through the openings in the Story Wall, connecting past domestic spaces to present-day voices.

The project prioritizes narratives created by residents rather than imposed redevelopment. It becomes a space for expression, gathering, and exchange across generations. By reusing materials from demolished homes as both structure and canvas, the Story Wall keeps these stories present and visible within the changing landscape.

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition // Tess Clancy

Warmth in Motion

Jinhyuk Kim

Detroit is a city that has lost countless houses through repeated cycles of fire, vacancy, and demolition. Yet what does not disappear with the house is the residential lot beneath it. Fire destroys structures, but in doing so it exposes a spatial order that persists. This project begins from this condition, rethinking fire not only as a force of destruction but as a medium through which memory can be made visible.

Rather than reconstructing what has been lost, the project seeks to evoke domestic life, warmth, and memory once embedded within Detroit’s neighborhoods. It proposes a mobile hearth system that moves through vacant lots across the city. Arriving on a flat-bed trailer, the structure is assembled on site using reclaimed bricks sourced from multiple demolished houses. These bricks carry traces of different homes and are continually recombined from site to site, forming an everchanging material archive of the city. Joined without mortar, they allow the installation to remain temporary, reversible, and capable of being disassembled and reconfigured elsewhere. At its center, a flame is lit, reintroducing the hearth as both a spatial anchor and a communal ritual.

The memorial operates through shifting rhythms of use. During the day, it supports food, exchange, and collective construction; at night, it becomes a setting for storytelling, gatherings, and small performances organized around firelight and warmth. The project is not a fixed monument, but a moving system that travels, settles, gathers, and disperses, allowing memory to emerge, circulate, and fade back into the city.

Healing Ecologies

Soil Remediation as a Framework for Reclaiming Detroit Land

Anthony Miller

Land in Detroit is a tool used to discriminate and control marginalized communities. Major city-led demolition programs have been used to displace, relocate, and segregate communities based on their race and socioeconomic status. Programs such as Urban Renewal and Slum Clearance efforts acted as precursors to contemporary demolition efforts, resulting in Detroit having approximately one-third of its remaining housing stock since the 1950s.

Mass Demolition introduces harsh heavy metals to the land in Detroit. Lead, Cadmium, zinc, copper, and other compounds, such as arsenic, plague hundreds of properties throughout the city. Either from demolished building materials or irresponsible and negligent backfill sourcing, these metals can cross property lines and spread through soil and groundwater.

This design proposal reframes contaminated Detroit lands by introducing infrastructure that facilitates phytoremediation and mitigates the spread of soil contaminants. Phytoremediation utilizes specialized plants that can either stabilize (phytostabilization), extract (Phytoaccumulation), or metabolize (phytodegradation) heavy metals in the soil.

The proposal explores the implementation of phytoremediation through provisional land uses where plantings trace the footprints of previously demolished homes. Transforming these sites into living memorials that honor the histories embedded in the land. These interim landscapes persist until the City of Detroit initiates formal cleanup of contaminated backfill. The process is supported by mobile seed carts that distribute native Michigan plant species, extending the reach of community-led remediation efforts. Together, these elements create a citywide network of community-driven soil remediation, transforming vacant lots into active sites of ecological repair, historical memory, and neighborhood stewardship.

Social Sanctuary: Texture Captured In Music

Alaina Moseley

While remaining resilient through textured and disparate socioeconomic conditions, African-Americans preserve their own textured expressions as avenues of hope, education, and aesthetic. One can audibly encounter this sort of cultural expression in the black church, an epicenter of spirituality, political refuge, and interpersonal identity for many Black Americans.

As a way to capture pain and perseverance, as well as excitement and style, Black churchgoers favor the rough, almost growling approach to music-making, allowing riveting belts, riffs, and runs to sound from the pulpit. This fashion of performance has bled into secular music for large waves of Black musical artists, as well, and can be heard and felt in blues, rock and roll, and R&B, genres pioneered by African-Americans.

When focusing on this branch of history in the African-American community, cities like Detroit, particularly the Black Bottom Neighborhood, stand out as geographical apparatuses for such a story of musical redepemtion and spiritual safety to be told for Black people. Urban renewal in Detroit has wiped away much of this powerful legacy from its architectural landscape, making Black Bottom, razed in 1950s and 60s, almost like a figment of the past in the context of eastern Detroit’s day-to-day culture. This project proposes the erection of an outdoor amphitheater that integrates into its form various smaller creative spaces that harness the creative and therapeutic impact of music. This structure would serve as a community-facing outdoor concert hall where aural and visual art can be appreciated in addition to providing space for multi-denominational church services to be held.

Movement and Memory in Detroit: Access to Transit

Naomi Peterson

Detroit’s decline in housing and public transit systems can be traced to interconnected factors, including capitalism, the automotive industry’s influence on transit policy, and redlining and racist housing practices. Redlining not only enforced segregation but also promoted relatively inexpensive singlefamily housing in suburbia, contributing to the exodus of the white middle class from the city. This outward movement, paired with a lack of funding and rising costs for basic necessities, weakened inner-city neighborhoods and left behind populations—primarily people of color and the elderly—facing higher housing prices, limited job access, and increasing economic instability.

At the same time, highways and bus lines replaced Detroit’s streetcar system despite community resistance, reflecting a broader methodology of expanding the city outward rather than reinforcing its core. As described in The Derailment of Detroit, “Transit maintained connectivity to the urban center, which was weighed down by the burden of history. While cars traveled on a linear path away from this center, mass transit moved in a cyclical pattern, always returning to the location of its past.” This shift from cyclical connectivity to linear escape made public transit incompatible with suburban expansion, reinforcing car dependency and reshaping the city’s spatial logic.

As infrastructure shifted, Detroit’s built environment followed, producing patterns of vacancy, demolition, and fragmented land use. In response, the design of a bus shelter constructed from salvaged materials is sited at the crossroads of former streetcar stops, directly engaging the spatial memory of transit within the city. The shelter operates not only as a protective space, but as a memorial to the streetcar system and the circular connectivity it once provided. By reusing materials from demolition cycles, the intervention reclaims fragments of the city’s past while addressing the present conditions of exposure and disconnection. The bus stop becomes both a site of memory and a tool for reestablishing connection within a system long defined by separation.

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition // Tess Clancy

I Felt The Earth Move

Sarah Shaw-Nichols

In the United States millions of African Americans left the agrarian south during The Great Migration. Migrants were in pursuit of individual freedom, economic and political citizenship, paid employment and entrepreneurial opportunities not afforded to black residents in the south. Of the millions who moved, 500,000 found a home in Detroit, Michigan. Along with their families and belongings they also brought the remains of a homeland that cannot be shaken. Each migrant represents another deposit of soil that fused with the iron-rich earth of an industrial city. Though we accrue dirt on our soles and skin daily, it’s an often overlooked connection to our individual and collective histories. While we may wash away the soil, and along with it the memories of the day it represents, an inherent tie to the land remains. Our footsteps have made permanent paths, fingerprints remain in the bricks we’ve created, and our hands dig through the earth to harvest plants. Even as populations leave agrarian communities, this connection remains, waning but forever present.

Sited partially in Detroit, and partially in small towns across the south. This project contends that Detroit is a northern embassy to the southern United States. Enriched by decades of shared earth, the city provides a metaphorical grounding for migrants. This work seeks to highlight how both sides adapt to and reflect on this century-long relationship.

Salvaging: Material and Memory After Demolition // Tess Clancy

The Common Door

Hazel Yufei Hu

The Common Door is a living monument proposed for Sanctuary Farms in Detroit’s Riverbend neighborhood. The project begins with the door — not simply as an object, but as a threshold between inside and outside, shelter and exposure, belonging and exclusion. In a city shaped by demolition, the loss of a house is also the loss of its threshold: the point where domestic life begins, where memory is held, and where access is either granted or denied.

Set within Sanctuary Farms, the project is rooted in a landscape already defined by recovery. Land that was once vacant, disinvested, and abandoned has been transformed into a site of cultivation, gathering, and care. Rather than placing a memorial onto this land, the proposal grows from the farm’s existing life, imagining a shared structure that can hold remembrance while remaining open to use.

The project is informed by a catalog of doors salvaged from houses in Detroit, along with observed thresholds from the immediate Riverbend context. Each door carries traces of another life: paint, wear, hardware, scale, ornament, and proportion. Together, they form an archive of domestic thresholds and a record of homes that are no longer there.

These doors are held within a steel framework that allows them to shift in state and meaning. They can stand upright as screens and markers, open as passages, fold into tables, or disappear through reuse. In this way, The Common Door does not freeze loss into monumentality. It keeps memory in motion, transforming the closed door into a shared threshold for gathering, labor, and collective life. Salvaging: Material and Memory

Ambler Medevac + Trauma Clinic

Emma High

Ambler Ambassade Corporare

Miranda Lloyd

The Subsistence Hub

Paige Osterkamp

Watershed Oversight Along the Ambler Road

Olivia Ott

Ambler Archive

Halle Paternoster

Mobilizing the Park Ranger

Maddie Pelto

Last Rest Stop of the Last Frontier

Matthew Sept

Where Infrastructure Meets the River

Zeyu Shi

Subsistence Stability Network

Carly Smith

A-10: Materials, Machines, Workers, and Wildlife

Madeline Tay

THE AMBLER ROAD — Cosmopolitics

of Arctic Territory

Nitzan Farfel

THE AMBLER ROAD

Cosmopolitics of Arctic Territory

Nitzan Farfel

Wallenberg travel destination: Iceland

A road is never just a road. It reorganizes territory before it is built, enacted through permits, surveyed alignments, and projected logistics. The proposed Ambler Road—a 211-mile industrial corridor across northwest Alaska—does not yet exist as infrastructure but already operates as one, shaping land, ecology, and governance through environmental impact statements and logistical planning. The corridor crosses lands structured through overlapping jurisdictions: federal agencies, state claims, Native corporations, and Indigenous territories, including Iñupiat and Athabascan communities whose relationships to land exceed the frameworks that seek to contain them. The ground is not neutral. It is already inhabited, negotiated, and contested—before any construction begins.

The studio is organized through comparison. Iceland’s Ring Road is a built counterpart: a continuous, publicly accessible infrastructure where extraction, tourism, and environmental management are spatially legible and collectively experienced. The Ambler Road, by contrast, is a privately driven industrial corridor—unbuilt, remote, and largely inaccessible—reconstructed through satellite imagery, GIS datasets, and government records. The method follows: document the built to project the unbuilt.

Across the corridor’s 19 proposed segments—parsed from the ADL 421741 Ambler Road Right-of-Way maps—the work is structured through three linked instruments: the line, the crossing, and the point. The line constructs the road as a territorial field, assembled through mapping and datasets. The crossing isolates moments of friction, where road, water, animal migration, and jurisdiction collide and force negotiation between incompatible systems. The point is the architectural project: a site-specific enclosure positioned before, during, or after the road, where infrastructure becomes inhabitable, operational, and politically legible.

Architecture here does not stand outside extraction. It operates within its systems, where consequences accumulate and take form. These projects do not resolve the corridor; they render its effects legible—what infrastructure produces, displaces, and makes irrecoverable.

Ambler Medevac + Trauma Clinic

Emma High

The [BLM / AIDEA] Ambler Road documentation defines 67° 2’30.92”N 152°18’44.35”W to 67° 5’11.59”N 152°36’36.03”W as Proposed Segment 7 of 19. Within these boundaries, high industrial activity will be introduced into a remote, permafrost landscape hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, producing a territory where injury is inevitable and care is absent.

Operating on state-regulated land, Segment 7 follows an established industrial mining formula, including worker housing, an airstrip, a fiber optic repeater, a material site, a maintenance station, and state mining claims. This proposed node of infrastructure precedes South32’s large-scale mining operation and intersects with interwoven ecological systems that support and are inseparable from Indigenous communities’ ways of life.

Continuous extraction, equipment staging, and worker presence produce a proto-settlement condition defined by repeated occupation without permanent infrastructure or access to care. The site is 53 miles from the Dalton Highway (1 hour 20 minutes), 130 miles from Segment 19, and 283 road miles (7 hours) or a 1 hour 45 minute flight from Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. Within this context, a trauma and medevac facility becomes necessary as the first point of care in a territory otherwise inaccessible to emergency response.

Beyond its functional role, the medical facility operates as an infrastructural counterpoint to the opacity of extractive systems. It becomes a site where injury, exposure, and environmental impact are no longer concealed within extraction but made visible and measurable. The project concentrates the human and environmental cost required to sustain the corridor into a single, unavoidable site of care and exposure.

Ambler Ambassade Corporare

Miranda Lloyd

Situated along the proposed Ambler Road corridor in northwest Alaska, this project establishes a spatial and institutional framework that confronts the immediate and enduring consequences of extraction-based infrastructure. Positioned at the moment when land shifts from consultation to active impact, the building operates as a site where decision-making is no longer abstracted from the territory it transforms.

The project takes form as an elevated, centralized assembly anchored within a fragile permafrost landscape, integrating structural permanence with environmental sensitivity. A domed gathering space serves as the core of deliberation, while distributed programmatic elements extend outward, accommodating stakeholders whose interests are often geographically and politically dispersed. By embedding systems of transparency, communication, and convening directly within the site, the architecture collapses the distance between action and consequence.

Rather than treating land as a passive surface for development, the proposal acknowledges it as a contested and dynamic field shaped by overlapping claims, resource flows, and ecological vulnerabilities. The building acts as a mediator among these forces, making the relationship between industrial activity, environmental change, and community impact visible and unavoidable. It reframes infrastructure not as a neutral conduit, but as an active participant in shaping territorial futures.

In this context, architecture assumes an operative role, structuring accountability, facilitating negotiation, and situating governance within the very landscape it affects. The project aligns with broader inquiries into how spatial practice can engage complex systems of ownership, risk, and responsibility, proposing a model where consequence is immediate, shared, and inescapably present.

The Subsistence Hub

Paige Osterkamp

The Proposed Ambler Road - Segment 17/19, lies within 67° 1’4.32”N 156°37’46.54”W --> 67° 2’47.36”N 156°12’20.17”W of Northwest Alaska, where native villages, including Kobuk and Shungnak, sit along the Kobuk River. These communities rely on engaging with land and access to clean waterways for both subsistence and cultural practices. Survival is based on seasonal subsistence practices. Continuous permafrost, short growing periods, and frigid temperatures leave the people in these remote areas relying on hunting and gathering practices for thousands of years. Construction along these regions, including the Ambler Road Proposal, a 211 mile industrial road, will cut through native lands and waterways directly along and downstream, including Kobuk and Shungnak. This proximity will pose risk to food availability as migration paths are cut off and pollution in waterways poses a great threat to the preservation of these practices. With changing temperatures and infrastructure development, traditional subsistence storage ice cellars and caches are becoming increasingly unreliable to protect food security. In response to growing food insecurity, a place where subsistence can be easily prepared and preserved is vital to the survival of the inuit communities along Kobuk. A subsistence hub, providing an adaptable space where food security is more guaranteed with stable freezer conditions, storage units, as well as a community kitchen space. The goal of this facility is not to replace these traditions but rather secure them within an unstable future. The form and placement of this structure aims to blend into the landscape of Kobuk, including through ecological storage alongside human ones in order to manage the changing needs and conditions of the environment for both humans and animals.

Watershed Oversight Along the Ambler Road

Olivia Ott

Contamination does not remain at the site of extraction, but moves through the watershed, linking distant territories into a shared condition of risk. Ambler Road Section 14/19 crosses Beaver Creek, which flows into the Kobuk River. Indigenous communities rely on the Kobuk River for subsistence fishing and drinking water. Copper, lead, and zinc extraction and processing planned adjacent to Beaver Creek will produce toxic byproducts. There is a high risk that contaminants will enter Beaver Creek and flow downstream into the Kobuk River, detrimentally affecting the conditions that indigenous communities rely on for survival.

This project proposes a watershed research and monitoring station that acts as a monitoring instrument, governing presence, and a system of accountability. Constructed before the Ambler Road, the building is not reacting to damage. It is positioned in advance, making the impacts of the road measurable, visible, and contestable as they occur. Programmatically, it integrates water testing laboratories, cryogenic hydrology laboratories, and a real-time monitoring tower system. Connected to the fiber optic network planned along the Ambler Road, the project enables the immediate transmission of environmental data, transforming localized knowledge into distributed awareness. This ensures that information about contamination is not isolated but shared with other research entities and affected communities. The building will operate on a co-managed system, where scientific monitoring and Indigenous knowledge function together to combine measurement with lived understanding of the land and water. Ultimately, the project positions architecture as an instrument of environmental accountability, making change visible, measurable, and actionable.

Ambler Archive

Halle Paternoster

Knowledge is not fixed. It is produced through lived experience, carried through oral histories, observation, and daily practice. In northern Alaska, the lower Alatna Valley was shaped by three major episodes of glaciation, leaving a landscape of outwash gravel across a poorly drained lowland between mountainous terrain in what is now classified as Segment 9 of the Ambler Road. This is a place where ways of living depend on close, evolving relationships to land and water.

What is at risk is not only memory, but the continuity of knowledge as conditions begin to shift. The proposed Ambler Road introduces an infrastructure that moves resources outward, accelerating extraction while increasing pressure on ecological and cultural systems. As the land changes, knowledge tied to it risks becoming misaligned, dispersed, or lost.

In response, this project proposes a community-centered archive and gathering space along the Alatna River corridor. Grounded in the spatial and cultural precedent of the qargi, the building operates as a site of collection, authorship, and exchange. Recording spaces, communal rooms, and areas for observation support the ongoing production of knowledge as it is lived and shared. The archive is not object-based, but practice-based, embedded in daily use and collective activity. Elevated on a light footprint it overlooks the landscape it records, and acknowledges the presence of the road and extraction. Over time, the project becomes an infrastructure of knowledge along the Ambler Road. The building is not only a repository, but an active participant in the life of the land.

Mobilizing the Park Ranger

Maddie Pelto

At the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve (GAAR), National Park Service (NPS) rangers steward one of the largest infrastructure free landscapes in the United States. Rangers patrol and protect land that exceeds the capacity of fixed infrastructure, while still confined to the limits of what their bodies can hike, climb, and carry. With the introduction of the Ambler Road, the increase in access poses new threats that require a response of immediate and continuous monitoring across the park. Existing modes of movement and stewardship are no longer sufficient to effectively oversee the entirety of the park.

This project proposes a network of mobile field units that allow for NPS rangers to steward and patrol GAAR as the Ambler Road is introduced. The units aren’t just a form of shelter, but an extension of NPS rangers in GAAR. They increase the range, duration, and capacity of the work all while taking on the responsibilities and traditional programming of a park ranger station. By mobilizing these rangers, the park becomes continuously monitored, allowing for a changes to be documented as the occur, thus producing a higher level of observation and accuracy.

Centered around a hybrid type of backcountry rangers, labor is structured into three areas: movement, response, and observation. These units allow for all three areas to be supported through extending mobility, immediate emergency response, and continuous environmental monitoring. Through these devices and practices, rangers can report back to the Arctic Network of the NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program, ensuring that the park remains protected during and after mining operations are established. As access to the region increases, so does the need for responsive systems. By integrating movement, communication, and reporting, a network emerges and is able to thrive with the rangers in GAAR.

Last Rest Stop of the Last Frontier

Matthew Sept

The Ambler Road runs west, starting at 67.0791046˚N, -150.3499580˚W, roughly at milepost 160 of the 414-mile Dalton highway, which runs from Fairbanks to Deadhorse. The road is much more than just a line drawn by the US government. It cuts a deep scar into the remote interior, threatening the natural resources, while promising opportunity for industry. The road highlights the dichotomy between wild and developed. The existing ecologies may be resource rich, but the lack of human resources and support infrastructure reveal the location is ill-equipped to support operations.

Coldfoot lies 15 miles north, representing 1 of the 2 service stops along the highway, responsible for providing fuel, food, and a place to rest to hundreds of trucks passing daily, as well as tourists. Besides Coldfoot and nearby Yukon River Camp, the closest gas station or food stop is hundreds of miles.

The support infrastructure desperately needs to expand, in order to meet higher demand at each stop. The intersection of the Ambler Road and the Dalton Highway provides the perfect site for a new rest stop, maximizing opportunities to service tourists along the Dalton Highway, as well as truckers involved in any industry.

Especially for workers traveling the Ambler Road, this project represents the last opportunity to buy food, fuel and gear before embarking on the 211-mile journey west. Connected to the public highway, the rest stop is also the only public-facing infrastructure along the otherwise private corridor. Besides the amenities provided, the public can also visit exhibitions about the Ambler Road, local communities, and energy extraction, turning the rest stop into a node of education, alongside needed services.

Where Infrastructure Meets the River

Zeyu Shi

The Mauneluk River is not a neutral obstacle along the planned Ambler Road corridor; it is the point where labor, logistics, and ecology come into direct conflict. This project treats the river crossing as the central condition of the site and proposes a service outpost that occupies both banks at the river’s narrowest point. Rather than allowing infrastructure to pass over the river as if it were empty ground, the project makes the crossing itself the place where construction support, ecological restraint, and cultural awareness are forced into relation.

The proposal is organized as a three-part system: two elevated structures anchored lightly into the unstable ground by friction piles, and a circular cablestayed pedestrian bridge spanning between them. Positioned before the completion of the main Ambler Road bridge, this temporary crossing provides a direct link between workers approaching from the mining and road-construction zones on either side. Its looped form absorbs the twelve-foot difference in elevation between the banks through a continuous four-percent slope, while its extremely light structure avoids placing supports in the water.

By refusing to treat the river as expendable infrastructure space, the project holds open another reading of the site. The Mauneluk River remains part of a living food system that supports sheefish and, with them, nearby Indigenous communities. Fishing, gathering, and food processing are therefore not added amenities, but spatial reminders that this crossing is already occupied by other forms of life, use, and dependence. The project argues that at the moment infrastructure enters a fragile landscape, architecture must do more than support work: it must make visible what that work puts at risk.

Subsistence Stability Network

Carly Smith

Proposed Segment 4/19 – 67° 1’4.61”N, 151° 3’46.59”W -- 67° 2’17.08”N, 151°33’30.54”W – as defined in the BLM Environmental Impact Statement for the Ambler Road lies within the Koyukuk River Region, where the ground operates as a dynamic hydrological system rather than solid ground. Constantly shifting wetlands, floodplains, and thawing permafrost produce ground conditions where water movement, soil stability and subsistence routes are all interconnected across native, federal, and state land. As the ground becomes more porous than solid in consequence of existing infrastructure and climatic changes, ground bearing capacity decreases, communities lose access to fishing sites and subsistence routes, and fish populations decline.

A Subsistence Stability Network will operate along the Koyukuk River system prior to any Ambler Road construction, and continue functioning throughout and after its development. Acting in anticipation of the effects Ambler Road will have on local food systems, it consists of distributed fishing huts for locals that simultaneously track water quality and are in constant communication with the central fish hatchery and data testing & analysis center. Co-managed by The Alaska Department of Fish & Game and Doyon, this network provides staterequired initial and periodic evidence of fish habitat status to hold the AIDEA during construction, while ultimately serving the nearby communities who depend on this river system for daily subsistence practices. The Subsistence Stability Network does not stabilize the land it sits on, but adapts to it in order to stabilize local access to the necessary food systems by tracking change in the Koyukuk over time, restoring fish populations, and connecting communities along the Koyukuk River Region.

A-10: Materials, Machines, Workers, and Wildlife

Madeline Tay

The Ambler Road proposes approximately 2.4 times the density of material sites per mile than the Dalton Highway—a figure that cannot be explained by construction demand alone. At this frequency, material sites exceed their role as sources of sand and gravel and instead operate as distributed logistical nodes: sites of storage, staging, and accumulation positioned between extraction, processing, and transport.

What gathers at these sites extends far beyond aggregate. Overburden, waste rock, substandard material, fuel, decommissioned machinery, water, and industrial byproducts accumulate alongside usable resources. These landscapes are defined as much by excess and residue as by extraction, producing zones where material is sorted, stockpiled, deferred, or abandoned.

During the day, these sites operate as active zones of machines, material, and workers; at night, they become active zones for wildlife. Caribou are drawn to gravel surfaces for relief from insects, suggesting that material sites function as unintended attractors within the landscape. These overlapping uses produce a condition in which industrial activity and animal movement are not separated, but occur within the same spatial field.

Despite their increasing significance, material sites remain classified as temporary and auxiliary to the road, existing outside sustained architectural and regulatory attention. Their distributed presence and provisional status allow them to function as unregulated zones of secondary output, where the byproducts of infrastructure development are stored without long-term spatial or environmental oversight. Within this condition, architecture does not resolve these contradictions but makes them legible, situating material sites as spaces where materials, machines, workers, and wildlife converge—where extraction produces both resource and risk across a shared terrain.

Land as Memory

Misk Aldulaimy

The Care of Fragmented Landscapes

Audrey Bellak

Making the Invisible Visible

Rachel Chen

Dissolving the Thresholds of the Metropolis

Ethan Coletta

Settling Sands

Abigail Dziedzic

What Remains

Alina Mankowski

Turn and Sow

Dana O’Connor

Contaminated Diversity for Collaborative Remediation

Emma Oestmann

The Inhabited Witness

William Peterson-Kirkland

Unstable Entanglements

Elaina Schuesler

Celestial Artifice + Subterranean Clouds

Dawn Gilpin Gina Reichert

Celestial Artifice + Subterranean Clouds

Land, Atmosphere, and Politics of the Invisible

Dawn Gilpin

This studio operates within the all-studios topic: Land, which calls for a critical re-examination of architecture’s relationship to ground, territory, and planetary systems. Land is understood not as a passive surface, but as relational, contested, and socially produced—shaped by histories of extraction, ownership, labor, dispossession, and repair. Across contemporary contexts, land registers environmental contamination, territorial conflict, economic instability, and social inequity. These conditions are inscribed through zoning, infrastructure, resource extraction, and capital flows, rendering political and economic systems spatially explicit. Architecture, as a spatial discipline, is implicated in these processes and must confront its agency within them.

Rather than proposing a singular solution, the all-studios brief asks architecture to operate across scales and temporalities, engaging land as a site of inherited consequences and future responsibility.Within this shared inquiry, Celestial Artifice + Subterranean Clouds advances a focused and speculative investigation into land as a vertical and atmospheric construct—extending from the subterranean to the celestial. The studio reframes land not only as ground or property, but as a thick zone of material, energy, labor, and governance, where what is visible above is inseparable from what is hidden below.

Celestial Artifice refers to the constructed systems that operate above and beyond land: energy infrastructures, climate technologies, atmospheric regulation, optical and data networks. These systems often appear detached from land, yet are fundamentally dependent on extraction, labor, and territorial control.

Subterranean Clouds foreground the unseen conditions beneath land: contaminated soils, buried infra-structures, moisture, thermal gradients, geological time, and displaced ecologies. These hidden atmospheres reveal the long-term environmental and social consequences of industrial capitalism and extractive economies. This studio considers architecture as a mediator of land’s visible and invisible conditions, capable of revealing, negotiating, and reconfiguring relationships between ground, infrastructure, and atmosphere.

Land as Memory

Misk Aldulaimy

Land is a concept because it constantly evolves and changes, and peoples’ memories allow previous versions of land to exist. Thus, people become time capsules that hold these earlier versions. For example, my parents are immigrants who raised us with the values and beliefs of a specific place in a specific time period. However, the people on that land continued to evolve as culture and language changed. Since my parents were physically detached from the land, they became time capsules of how people acted there at that specific time.

In the case of Detroit, some residents have become time capsules, holding onto what the city once was. Rather than simple nostalgia, this reflects a response to histories of displacement and policy-driven change that reshaped the land without their consent. These imposed changes created a sense of distance from the land and a loss of control over its future. In this context, memory becomes a form of preservation, allowing people to maintain a connection to what has been erased. Rebuilding is not simply a matter of will, but is limited by access to resources and financing. As a result, it becomes easier to reminisce than to rebuild, making it more difficult to reconnect with the community that remains.

Therefore, how can memory, experience, and storytelling be used to reclaim the land? These interventions would be informal, almost parasitic, since the land is now legally owned by corporations. Rather than imposing something new, the approach draws from how people historically lived within restriction on the same site, working within imposed limits of segregation while still building community and thriving. That same resilience becomes the strategy, allowing the intervention to remain flexible and adapt to ongoing socio-political conditions.

The Care of Fragmented Landscapes

Audrey Bellak

Most land is divided into categories—public and private, maintained and abandoned, valuable and worthless. These divisions are imposed to organize human activity, determining who can occupy, use, and control land. While these boundaries are legible to people, they are not so strictly understood by ecological systems. Water, soil, vegetation, and other forms of life move continuously across the divisions we construct. Yet the ways in which land is divided and managed have lasting effects on these systems, which in turn shape the conditions of human life.

As infrastructure is built and landscapes are altered to accommodate development, land is often forced to conform to specific uses. When disinvestment happens, or people leave, or policy shifts occur, these spaces are left behind: buildings are abandoned or demolished, and ecological processes return. Grass grows, water collects, and nonhuman life returns. These sites become labeled as “abandoned,” signaled by a lack of care. This perception invites further neglect, reinforcing cycles of dumping, disuse, and social fragmentation of land within the larger community.

This project investigates how architecture can respond to land that has become fragmented and unattended through processes of infrastructure, demolition, and disinvestment. Rather than relying on large-scale redevelopment, it proposes maintenance and care as a form of architectural practice. Through incremental acts that signal attention and responsibility, architecture is capable of reconnecting fragmented land, supporting existing communities, and cultivating long-term stewardship of the environments people inhabit.

Making the Invisible Visible

Rachel Chen

What does architecture mean in the digital age?

How does land policy impact the digital infrastructure, both locally & globally?

How do local materials influence global exchanges?

Will it become the endless expansion of campus-scale data centers that dominate the landscape and obstruct our views? All built so we can continue to prompt AI, store data, and generate investments? Architecture has always been about experience: light, movement, material, and human presence. But today, rows upon rows of server racks, sealed and inaccessible, are becoming a new kind of architecture. These spaces don’t invite us in; instead, they render our experiences through our screens.

Pause for a moment and ask yourself—what space does your information inhabit?

Where is your bank account, your cloud photos, your research, even the posts you liked just minutes ago? Like natural resources, your data is extracted, transported, and stored globally. It moves through a vast network of facilities, governed by contracts and controlled by dominant tech corporations. You may not see it, but it exists physically, somewhere, occupying land, consuming energy, and influencing environments.

So even if you don’t know exactly where your data resides, are you willing to accept the consequences of its storage?

Are you willing for new facilities to be built into your landscape?

For your community to bear the strain of increased energy demand?

For your backyard to face a windowless concrete structure with no visible human life?

How much land are we willing to allocate to sustain the “invisible” machine?

Dissolving the Thresholds of the Metropolis

Ethan Coletta

Cities have lost their individuality. They have grown into centers of dense populations - nodes within a larger metropolis governed by multinational corporations. This global capitalistic market gives little regard to the inhabitants who make up the city, instead focusing on maximizing profit through increasing levels of resource consumption. As a result, the city has lost its connection to the land on which it exists and the culture that defines it.

The “city” that society has produced is dictated by a generic set of rules replicated from place to place without consideration for the needs of the ecosystem that it inhabits. Grids of symmetrical 100-meter blocks, along with glass-and-steel skyscrapers, have come to define the contemporary image of the city. As resources become more expensive and scarce, this preconceived notion of what a city should look like needs to evolve drastically.

By starting with the land - breaking the grid and studying how ecosystems invite inhabitation, cities can begin to recover their individuality and sustainability. This requires breaking through the concrete and the glass thresholds that separate human-conditioned environments from the non-human ecosystems pushed to the margins. Architectural practices developed by both humans and non-humans over thousands of years - practices that sustain life without reliance on hyper-conditioning or extensive energy and resource consumption can be adapted and integrated into the facades and infrastructure of the city.

As the concept of the city is reimagined, the inhabitants, both human and nonhuman, can begin to reclaim agency over their environment and restore the individuality necessary to break the cycle of consumption that has become the societal norm.

Settling Sands

Abigail Dziedzic

Coastal barriers protect inland areas from the damaging effects of waves, wind, and rising water levels. Most artificial barriers rely on hard infrastructure that acts as walls or wave breaks; however, these solutions are often expensive and prone to failure. Natural systems like those of mangroves and corals dissipate tides more efficiently than human-made structures, while also promoting biodiversity and supporting healthy ecosystems. Coastal sand dunes function in a similar way, and are particularly effective at reducing the impact of strong winds and storms. These conditions are of constant threat to the state of Michigan, and why Lake Michigan Dunes are vital to the state’s safety. Coastal dunes create conditions that allow grasses to take root, promoting the growth of forests. Together, sand mounds and forests buffer storms for inlands, while also hosting a wide variety of plants and animals.

Unfortunately, these dunes are at risk, primarily due to human activities. Recreation such as hiking, dune rides, along with coastal development, disrupts the soft, loose sands, making them more vulnerable to wind erosion. The constant disturbance of the surface sands prevents vegetation from taking hold, leaving these coastal areas vulnerable and increasingly unstable.

Closing dunes entirely to the public is not a complete solution, as it does not address the existing damage. Instead, symbiotic architectural interventions could be integrated into coastal dunes, helping to support regeneration of sand and vegetation, while allowing for responsible human occupation. These structures would gradually become obsolete once the vegetation is able to reestablish themselves.

What Remains

Alina Mankowski

Architecture provides a view into the past, offering insight into what was valued throughout time. The result of what is built is a thread of information and importance for those who inhabited the land. This project investigates the memory of land not just through the built environment, but who has been victim to violence or erasure.

The investigation is driven by an understanding of history that extends beyond the recent past to include the formation of land, materials, and the species that came to inhabit the area. It explores the idea of land as architecture and as something worth persevering and rehabilitating to the same - or higher - degree as site current being preserved. The aim is to compare methods of extractions in a pre-capitalist context, and to educate the public about what has been lost and what continues to occur at these sites. The types of contamination under investigation include visible forms, such as extreme land extraction, the dumping of pollutants, and the burning of toxic chemicals for capitalist gain. Other forms of contamination include the erasure of history, the forced removal of Indigenous peoples, and the loss of native species of the area.

The research brings together histories across time in which verbal, physical,and spiritual aspects are intertwined within different communities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It examines how various occupants of the land interact with and inhabit it, with the goal of bringing education and on-site research to sites of extreme extraction.

The work allows observers to become immersed in past conditions that were once inaccessible or obscured. It does so by examining the political dimensions of extraction while also telling the story of the landscape and its recovery over time. Land holds memory; although attempts may be made to erase it, the marks left by its inhabitants remain.

Turn and Sow

Dana O’Connor

Extractivism scars land—leaving wounds that fester long after.

Land post-extraction bears marks and seams—reverberations of depletion and accumulation.

Life strives to remain, recover, and persist—pleading to breathe, see, and move.

To turn is to uncover—make visible, rework, and renew.

Subsurface becomes surface and site.

To sow is to foster—to generate life, connections, and value.

Vacancy transforms into occupation and community.

Architecture no longer imposes on land but lives with it.

Architecture is of land and earth—an extension of landscape, a site of movement, growth, and community.

Life must no longer claim to live, implore to move, or plead to breathe.

Contaminated Diversity for Collaborative Remediation

Emma Oestmann

The historic misuse of land has contaminated and harmed present-day ecosystems, leaving current and future generations to develop mindful and intentional reparations for the damage done.

Extractive processes have rendered landscapes vulnerable and left behind harmful contaminants. This contamination influences how we interact with these sites of extraction, and raises concerns about the health and well-being of both humans and non-humans who depend on the land. Remediation of these sites is essential to protect and heal ecosystems for future generations.

Anthropologist Anna Tsing describes “contaminated diversity” as the cultural and biological ways in which organisms have lived and interacted with one another since the beginning of human influence. The human species has irreversibly altered and damaged the landscape, and the only way to live through these precarious conditions is to participate in interspecies collaboration, coexist in troubled landscapes, and form symbiotic relationships with one another and the land.

Historical remediation efforts are flawed in that they often overlook existing ecosystems and fail to employ the most suitable strategies for specific landscapes. Remediation is not scalable and cannot be solved through a “onesize-fits-all” approach. Phytoremediation, however, has the potential to meet ecosystems where they are – carefully, intentionally, and gradually aiding the landscape through biodiversity and helping restore it to a healthy state. Intentional spatial design on this site can also foster these situations and help bear witness to the past.

Contaminated diversity can deliberately, mindfully, and collaboratively remediate damaged landscapes, allowing ecosystems to prosper despite their histories of harm.

The Inhabited Witness

A Tool for Environmental Prosecution

William Peterson-Kirkland

Operated by EES Coke Battery LLC. a subsidiary of DTE Energy, in partnership with United States Steel, Zug Island exists as an industrial enclave defined by sulfur oxide air and heavy metal ground contamination. For a century, the city has watched this ecological degradation and the parties responsible have been shielded from criminal liability by the corporate veil. This legal abstraction diffuses the responsibility of ownership across complex structures. This thesis uses architecture to pierce the corporate veil, and restore the divergence of authority and responsibility that takes place on the sites of some of the most polluted places in the country.

By leveraging the physical sovereignty of the site, architecture can dissolve these legal shields, treating industrial landholders with the same direct criminal liability as individual homeowners. In this framework, the built environment ceases to be a passive container for industry and becomes a forensic instrument that enforces accountability on the owner for the land it occupies. We can radically shift the diffusion of authority that comes with these complex structures, and finally hold parties criminally responsible for the effects that the operations of these toxic structures have on the neighborhoods around them.

Unstable Entanglements

Elaina Schuesler

Land is a vertical archive that records time within its layers and living systems. It is continuously reshaped by forces such as erosion, settlement, construction, extraction, and avoidance. Human and nonhuman actors alike transform it, negotiating relationships between body, spirit, and sensory experience. Borders emerge from these negotiations, especially in threshold environments where identities and patterns meet. Natural boundaries arise from climate, geology, and ecology, offering cues for survival without rigid limits. In contrast, human-made borders are explicit and enforced through policy, zoning, and infrastructure, reflecting systems of ownership, profit, and control. These edges become sites of exchange, conflict, and ongoing negotiation.

Wetlands exemplify interconnected systems sustained through geological and hydrological exchange. Their overlapping paths and sensory signals reveal unstable terrain shaped by adaptation. They act as thresholds that protect and bear witness to both sacred and damaged land. Many wetlands have been degraded, and restoration efforts often obscure past harm while introducing unintended consequences. This erasure allows historical damage to fade, even as its effects persist. Disregarding Indigenous knowledge and the land’s inherent logics contributes to the loss of cultural identity and long-developed sensory systems.

As flooding, water demand, climate shifts, and development intensify, these edge conditions become more critical, threatening infrastructure and inhabited spaces. Architecture can mediate between land, body, and environmental forces. Rather than erasing complexity, it can engage wetlands as entangled systems, reframing revitalization as a practice rooted in memory, coexistence, and shared occupation.

FILL IN THE BLANK

Anelisa Anderson

You Belong

Adelaide Fackler

Promised Lands Casino

Demetrius Ford

IYKYK

Sayna Gholami

Contingency Cushions

Julia Lindahl

Honeycrisp®

Jessica Pasma

Land of the Free?

Mariam Reyes-Toidze

Interwoven

Misbah Shahid

Warp & Weft

Celine Shaji

Beyond Babel

John Watha

Thank You for Your Service

Eliott Young

Swamp Logics

Neal Robinson

Swamp Logics

Neal Robinson

Wallenberg travel destination: Barrier Islands of Coastal Georgia

“I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is.” - Raoul Wallenberg

A culture’s aspirations and fears are embedded in its stories. Examining what those stories say and how they are told, both visually and verbally, provides insight into contemporary dispositions. SWAMP LOGICS studio will lean into a series of reasoned stories of origination and land-making through drawing, modeling, and geo-chronic concerns in order to “situate” the architect’s role as a cultural producer. We’ll seek a loaded albeit speculative condition in which the agency of the hermetic story has been replaced by the conditional act of telling it. While there are loose ends to tend, contextual footnotes have ceased to illuminate tactical points. Instead, for those in the know, their referential specificity drives the storyline. In this sense, and something Raoul Wallenberg knew well, “situation” (LAND) is the root architectural site, and both “program” and “form” are left to fend for themselves.

SWAMP LOGICS sinks into this uncertain, semi-liquid territorial negotiation to ply new takes at differentiating firmament from philosophy. Our site is both real and imagined. It’s murky...on a Wednesday...a little after noon on the third day of Genesis...seriously. At this moment, “land” is threatening to differentiate from “not land” (water), and things have yet to be resolved and settle into a state of “good.” Perfect. Opportunity beckons, and both evidence and implication will be asked to sit uncomfortably close to our aspirations and ideological pragmatism. While not quite science fiction, the agency and false equities of the near now will be used as resistance to ground, to land(v.), projective casts, plausible futures, and “might-be” architectures. Digital drownings, crash landings, and synaptic shorings are expected. Psst. Watch out for snakes.

To supplement our (dis)position, we’ll travel to the coastal edge of the southeastern United States where Land is not certain. There are 10 Golden Isles in our path. We’ll hit a random seven. (Golden Isle, Queen Isle, Sea Island, Gnat Island, Resort Island, Bird Island, Secret Island, Lost Island, Eco-Island, and History Island)

FILL IN THE BLANK

Anelisa Anderson

“In moving we confront the choice of reality and location.” bell hooks

The history of the United States can be understood as an ongoing effort to bridge the gap between its founding ideas and the realities of systemic exclusion. It is a narrative shaped by the pursuit of a more equitable society through a series of legal, social, and cultural shifts.

In January 2025, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. This action rolled back decades of affirmative action initiatives policies, stunting commitments of addressing structural inequality. The project reflects this history, acting as a critical inquiry in an attempt to spatialize the physical setback through a public pavilion.

Operationally, the project is an open structure where rigidity is pushed to the perimeter, creating visceral tension between the two densities. The project begins to pull itself apart, yielding to the pressure at its edges. The physical displacement mirrors the structural exclusion of merit-based rhetoric, forcing navigation of its boundary.

The resulting space serves as a gathering point where its transparency highlights the expanding surrounding environment, offering a testament to the setbacks of the present.

You Belong

Embassies to the Stateless

Adelaide Fackler

The Ghost Citizen, a citizen of nowhere: feared, wayward, and sometimes living in a place they consider home without any documentation proving birth or belonging there. Upwards of 10 million people are currently considered stateless, meaning they are not recognized as a national by any country under its laws. Without official citizenship, millions live without basic documentation, leaving them unable to fully access education, employment, healthcare, or legal protections. Children make up 33-44% of this stateless population, which brings forward a core ethical question, how do we care for other humans?

Stateless populations exist across the globe, spanning continents and climates, which suggests that a network of mobile embassies must respond to geography, operating as land, water-based, mountainous, and desert fleets that adapt to the topographies where assistance is needed. This system exists in a condition of partially legal and political operating in the gray area between humanitarian aid and bureaucratic recognition.

The network would be rapidly deployable and include essential civic infrastructure: a passport photo booth, courthouse, power and internet, archive and database, and the issuing of papers to become a Global Citizen. This passport breaks boundaries, physical and emotional, as it would function across the 193 countries that participate in the United Nations. People feeling like they are living in No Man’s Lands may soon feel like they do belong.

Within each mobile embassy would be spaces for education, a free lawyer on standby, questions of citizenship through marriage, genealogy services, a dating service, a courthouse, voting machine, passport booth, vaccination center, and basic lodging (tents or cots) grounded in safety, security, and access. The vehicles themselves would physically transform, folding open like a food truck for public services, while another side houses administrative infrastructure such as power, passport processing, and archival systems.

Promised Lands Casino

Demetrius Ford

Detroit neighborhoods, long thought of to be filled with parcelled husks of vitality, have become hallmark interests for growth and redevelopment in the last decade. And while these hostile narratives have begun to see a revisioning, much of its land remains vacant, static and indeterminate as a result of wavering community investments, ambiguous socio-economic promises and shaky place-making covenants.

Faced with these undecided promised lands, there is a hopeful lineage to be carried onward from proto-territorial events in neighborhoods like North Corktown, which present as spirit imbued urban interventions- situations on the threshold of adaptive negotiation, meeting at the axis of sacred-symbolic and anticipatory domains.

It becomes apparent, upon deeper inspection of these instances, that vacancy is not simply the objectified residue of urban space, but an ongoing relationship with structuring events that space builds around. Spiritual context exists regardless of what political authorities determine its use case, and may be best understood through the psychogeographic engines we use to engage in acts of re-visioning, thus allowing us to come to terms with our doubts about the pertinence of program and quality of our surroundings.

By scaling commonwealth authorities, “Promised Lands Casino” reconvenes characters of spectacle and speculation around an architectural dialogue between province and fellowship in order to establish a faith based ligature: Land is not commodity, land is community and continuity.

IYKYK

Sayna Gholami

What is a border? A line that separates, distinguishes, and assigns identity. It often appears as a precise mark on a map, a geographic definition drawn across land to organize where one territory ends and another begins. Yet land itself is rarely fixed. Rivers shift, landscapes erode, and territories gradually transform over time, revealing the instability of the lines imposed upon them. Despite this fluid reality, borders are often treated as stable and unquestionable, attaching identity to the ground beneath them and classifying individuals according to where they come from, how they speak, or even how they appear.

Raoul Wallenberg offers a powerful example of how political systems shape individuals’ fates. By the end of World War II, the young architect and businessman had saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest. After the war, he planned to meet Soviet military officials with proposals for the city’s reconstruction, but he was captured and detained by Soviet forces. The reasons for his arrest remain uncertain, and no evidence ever proved the accusations that he was a spy.

Wallenberg’s disappearance reflects a condition in which individuals can be detained based on suspicion rather than proof. His story resonates with contemporary situations where immigrants are arrested or detained while their status remains unclear. In both cases, uncertainty and systems of control shape how individuals are treated.

Food, agriculture, and markets emerge from the soil rather than from political boundaries. By framing the grocery marketplace as a shared space of food, gathering, exchange, and shelter, the project acknowledges the experiences of those who arrive in North America in search of promise and stability, yet live with fear and uncertainty. For many, the possibility of being forced to return to the conditions they left behind shapes everyday life with anxiety and vulnerability. In response, the project challenges the rigidity of borders and suggests how connections rooted in land can extend beyond the lines that divide territory.

Swamp Logics // Neal Robinson

Contingency Cushions

Julia Lindahl

Large public buildings are built to hold tens of thousands of people for brief moments of gathering and spectacle. Outside of these events, however, they often remain dormant while cities around them face moments of disruption, displacement, and uncertainty. At times, these same spaces are suddenly asked to serve another role: shelter.

The Caesars Superdome offers a clear example of this shift. During Hurricane Katrina, the stadium became an emergency refuge for thousands of residents seeking protection. While the building provided a place to gather, the experience also revealed the challenges of adapting infrastructure designed for entertainment to support large populations in crisis. In these moments, the stadium becomes a place where people “land,” arriving from instability and searching for safety, rest, and basic resources.

This project examines how a stadium might better accommodate temporary occupation during emergencies. Circulation routes, seating systems, concourses, and suite spaces are reconsidered as environments that could quickly transform to support sleeping, hygiene, storage, medical care, and moments of privacy. Rather than replacing the stadium, the work focuses on the latent capacity already embedded within its structure and how small spatial adjustments across multiple scales can support large populations in moments of need.

Inspired by the actions of Raoul Wallenberg, who strategically used existing systems to create spaces of protection, the project reimagines the stadium as more than a venue for spectacle. Instead, it becomes a civic infrastructure capable of supporting both gathering and refuge, a place where crowds assemble for entertainment, but where people can also safely “land” during moments of collective vulnerability.

Honeycrisp®

Jessica Pasma

The Honeycrisp apple, accounting for nearly 12% of American apple production, is often known for its explosive crunch and remarkable shelf life. However, this “perfect” fruit is less a miracle of nature than a deliberate feat of human design. Developed at the University of Minnesota in 1962, the Honeycrisp is a triumph of laboratory precision that utilizes an enlarged cell structure to push biological limits. This creates a hybrid reality where the source is a tree, but the beginnings are a lab-grown invention, forcing us to rethink the landscape as a high-tech platform where science and soil converge.

This project bridges the gap between the laboratory and the land by applying Raoul Wallenberg’s subversive logic to modern infrastructure. Just as Wallenberg re-engineered bureaucracies to create “Schutz-Passes” and safe houses, this architecture redefines the data center as a resource-rich framework. Instead of a sterile box, the structure functions as a biological sanctuary, utilizing the thermal exhaust of the digital world to sustain the physical requirements of the soil.

Ultimately, the Honeycrisp serves as a case study for land efficiency. By proving that technological intervention can maximize yield on a smaller footprint, this project suggests that the future of sustainability lies not in shrinking our agricultural reach, but in a courageous recalibration of the spaces we occupy.

Land of the Free?

Mariam Reyes-Toidze

In Philadelphia, PA there is an estimated population of 76,000 undocumented immigrants out of a total population of 1.6 million people. We are currently living in a time period where both documented and undocumented immigrants are afraid to leave their homes due to mass military style deportations that are happening in the United States. As a result, these people are unable to acquire the necessities they need in order to provide for themselves and their families.

Newspaper kiosks have a distinct history in the city of Philadelphia, giving them protection from demolition even when unused. Using these kiosks as a vessel, the intention of this project is to give them a dual purpose of safe spaces. These kiosks play with the concept of both public and private land, similarly to how Raul Wallenberg created a safe haven for Jews under the alias of a diplomatic Swedish building which prevented Nazis from interacting with it.

These dual purpose kiosks would have different functions of food/hygiene pantry, Health center, bunker, and more, while some still having the function of a typical newspaper kiosk. While on public sidewalks, these kiosks are protected creating a veil which prevents officials from entering. Using different sites and forms, these kiosks work to not only protect but also work to create a sense of community.

Interwoven

Misbah Shahid

Belonging emerges as a condition shaped by movement across land, where identity is not held in a single origin but formed through transitions. Growing up between Pakistan and the United States introduces a state where presence in one place is always informed by memory of another. This creates a layered understanding of self, where identity is neither replaced nor resolved, but continually negotiated through experience, time, and distance.

Within this framework, clothing operates as an active carrier of these layers. Each garment records traces of use, exchange, and change, allowing identity to be read as something accumulated rather than defined. The act of wearing, altering, or combining garments becomes a quiet process of negotiation between past and present, familiarity and adaptation.

The structure organizes these conditions into spatial sequences that reflect transformation. Materials enter, are examined, categorized through narrative, and then reworked into new forms. These processes reveal how meaning shifts when garments are removed from fixed categories and instead understood through personal and collective memory.

Set within unstable ground, the environment reinforces this reading of identity as something that is never fully settled. Variations in terrain, atmosphere, and movement create conditions where boundaries are softened and overlap becomes visible. Through this, belonging is understood as an ongoing relationship between body, land, and memory, where identity is continuously constructed through layered interactions rather than singular definitions.

Warp & Weft

Celine Shaji

Handwoven and worn by the working class, Madras checks are a plaid cotton textile from Chennai, South India. By the eighteenth century, colonial trade brought it to the United States, where their vegetable dyes, known for bleeding when washed, were rebranded in American fashion as a sign of handcrafted, artisanal authenticity. What began as a laborer’s cloth became a symbol of Ivy League style; the once-unpredictable bleed was controlled and fixed as an emblematic symbol. Today’s “Care Instructions” prioritize preservation, but a more expansive engagement with maintenance, through laundry, threatens these conventions, producing new cultural meanings and status.

Historically, washing occurred along riverbanks, public washhouses, and openair laundromats. Over time, it shifted into private domestic spaces, concealing the labor and environmental systems that sustain our garments. This proposal is situated in Boston between Back Bay and South End. Back Bay, once a tidal marsh and Indigenous fishing ground, was filled in during the nineteenth century to create an affluent neighborhood. The South End became a dense residential district shaped by immigrants, grassroots organizations, and cycles of displacement. Responding to these histories, the project proposes a laundry facility that reconnects garment care to land and collective labor.

The transformation of Boston and Madras fabric reflects systems of control and rebranding. Back Bay’s infill erased tidal ecology for elite urban life, while Madras was detached from its origins and reproduced industrially. By highlighting garment maintenance, the project frames everyday labor as a collective responsibility. Laundry becomes a shared ritual that embraces change and reconnects cultural production to the land where it unfolds.

Beyond Babel

John Watha

This project reimagines the bema not as a fixed liturgical object, but as an evolving architectural condition shaped by rupture, memory, and projection. Historically, the bema functioned as a raised platform of proclamation, a site where divine word, authority, and communal order converged. It embodied hierarchy and glory, anchoring a stable cosmology within the church.

This proposal asks what the bema becomes when that stability dissolves. Across two millennia of displacement, persecution, and diaspora, Chaldean communities have lost fixed centers of authority and space. In response, the bema is abstracted into a dispersed and migratory system; it is no longer singular, but a field of fragments, alignments, and projections extending across territories.

The work exists at a threshold where limits are no longer stable. Gravity is contested. The divine is approached. Monumentality remains unresolved.

Within a mythic and cosmic framework, the project proposes an inversion of Babel. Where Babel fragments and disperses, this work gathers and reorders without erasing difference. Pentecost multiplicity remains, yet is gathered as one.

At the same time, the project engages the idea of eutopia—both the good place and no place. Rather than proposing a fixed, perfected destination, it resists the dangers of concrete utopias. Instead, the bema operates as an orienting construct: a horizon that is continually approached but never fully attained, transforming a history of scattering into an architecture of gathering. Swamp Logics // Neal Robinson

Thank You for Your Service

Eliott Young

“Thank you for your service.”

A phrase often offered to military members both in casual passing and as default formality. Though well-intentioned, it has become a social placeholder. Frequently caught in political postures and ethical inclinations, it performs as something said when unsure of more meaningful support that follows. It also tends to mark the end of a conversation rather than initiating one about what comes next. In particular, for veterans of conflicts who return with altered physicalities and the added “weight” of service traumas, the phrase can seem performative and “not enough” for the circumstances. We can do better.

“This land is your land, this land is my land.”

At its core, military service is fundamentally allied with “land.” Wars may be framed through ideology or politics, but they are always spatial: bases, borders, occupied territories, and the distinction between home-land and foreign ground. Service is performed in defense of land and the spatial habits and habitats performed on, in, and under its name. Those tasked with defending the land often bear its heaviest personal costs; yet, when service members and veterans end their defensive efforts, many return “home” to a land without secure or meaningful access to spaces that support their own recovery or sense of belonging. We can do better.

This proposal utilizes “land”- territorial “earth” - as both material and site to create domestic spaces of refuge, retreat, and recovery for military veterans. Healing environments that support reflection, resilience, and the re-purposing of one’s human mission are core principles of these species of spaces, and their architecture attempts to care for both the corporeal and the augmented body as well as the many psychological selves that inhabit these new home/land(s). Swamp Logics // Neal Robinson

Shared Skies I

Anna DeYoung

Shared Skies II

Watson Baek

The Remediation Fleet I

Jake Erlich

The Remediation Fleet II

Brittney Harwin

Quitobaquito Respite I

Evan Wendorf

Quitobaquito Respite II

Zoe Blackburn

Quitobaquito Respite III

Axel Mar-Pulido

Ghostfields I

Emily Xu

Ghostfields II

Evita Christou

The End of the American Dream I

Gulshat Roziali

The End of the American Dream II

Taylor Horsfall

Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa

Geoffrey Thün

Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa

Geoffrey Thün

Wallenberg travel destination: Sonoran Desert

Within the cannons of western mythologies and societal practices, the landscape construct of the desert has been positioned as a place in which outcasts, heretics, and visionaries have been voluntarily and involuntarily displaced in order to repent, reconcile, and imagine possible worlds. In America, since the time of its settler colonization, the desert has also been a territory of extreme cultural experimentation – genocidal, consumerist, technological, military, utopian, environmental…

At the geological edge where the Sonoran Desert meets the Colorado Plateau, this Wallenberg studio engages three subjects in search of social, conceptual, material, and systemic design propositions:

(i) Mavericks: renegade disciplinary and adjacent figures whose work and ideas have defined trajectories of design possibility within this terrain and shape the spirit of the work.

(ii) the Multitude: cultural groups that assemble and form within the political and socio-economic landscape of actors and agents that shape the southwest.

(iii) the Mesa: constructed landforms and landscape constructs that structure potential engagement with the land and its species / inhabitants.

A series of team-based exercises during the early semester introduced students to a range of design research documentaries, projects and methodologies that have shaped dialog within this Wallenberg Studio and position students to undertake team-based design research propositions catalyzing emerging obsessions, new discoveries and experiences across a range of scales within the territories and situations implicated by the MMM framework.

Shared Skies I

Anna DeYoung & Watson Baek

The Kitt Peak National Observatory is situated atop the Quinlan Mountain range on the lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation, embedding advanced scientific infrastructure within a culturally and spiritually charged landscape. Within the range, Baboquivari Peak is understood as the dwelling place of I’itoi, the spiritual creator, within an O’odham cosmology where landform and sky are inseparable. As the first astronomers, the O’odham people frame observation not as a detached act, but as one embedded in movement and narrative. This pretext of grounded, relational sky observation contrasts with the instrumental viewing and analytical tracking that occurs at the national observatory, yet the ambition of looking to the sky for answers is shared. The site is a layered field condition, where differing spatial practices and ways of knowing coexist, overlap, and reside in ongoing tension.

By 2100, southern Arizona is projected to exceed 100 days above 100°F annually, with intensifying heat already destabilizing monsoon patterns, degrading air quality, and altering desert vegetation. These changes threaten both the observational precision of Kitt Peak National Observatory and the ecological and cultural continuity of the Tohono O’odham Nation. The project explores new modalities of occupation that overlay and braid tribal perspectives with the remaining artifacts of KPNO’s campus and investigates how subterranean excavations may operate as an architectural countermeasure, leveraging the thermal inertia of granite to significantly reduce ambient temperatures while minimizing surface exposure. The work frames the site as a field of negotiated interventions, situated within a shared landscape open to multiple narratives that explore new horizons.

Shared Skies II

Watson Baek & Anna DeYoung

Design interventions position the site not as a destination of singular significance, but as a distributed sequence of paths that recalibrate how the sky is approached, occupied, and understood and are shaped through the consideration of various perspectives as generative of new ritual practices in these lands. The project explores how architectural experience, rather than technological supremacy, might reframe the act of observation offering hybrid perspectives and opportunities. By proposing a series of subterranean excavations within the ridge of Kitt Peak, the mountain is treated not as a surface for construction but as the architectural medium. New interventions are formed by cutting and carving inhabitable voids that use the mass of the earth for shelter, orientation, and thermal relief. These excavated spaces are conceived as both environmental response and spatial framework, offering protection from intensifying desert heat while creating new relationships between body, ground, and sky in cooperation with the existing structures and devices present on the site. New above grade structures and topographic interventions utilize extracted material at varying scales to produce a material resonance with the matter of the ridge.

The resulting spatial composition offers multiple spatial sequences structured by different cosmological perspectives in which compression and release, darkness and light, interior depth and open sky are continuously and variously negotiated and revealed. The mountain becomes both structure and instrument, design framing views upward while maintaining a profound awareness of the ground as a thick, dense and stable presence for those who traverse it.

The Remediation Fleet I

Jake Erlich & Brittney Harwin

This project reimagines “The Boneyard” in Tucson, AZ as a landscape of ecological repair and encounter. Set within the secured boundaries of an active U.S. Air Force base, it transforms a terrain of historic militaristic use into a living system of environmental recovery and public awareness. Long-term aircraft storage has introduced toxic contaminants such as heavy metals, fuels, and chemical residues into the soils. This proposal operationalizes toxicity through phytoremediation as an agent of change using plants to extract, stabilize, and transform pollutants over time. A demonstration site for the USACE in partnership with local organizations undertake phytoremediation across a landscape that has historically indexed ongoing cycles of conflict. A choreography where aircrafts are dismantled while life is cultivated on the lands they leave behind. The site is organized into linear zones that mirror aircraft storage fields, aligning remediation areas with The Boneyard while maintaining spatial legibility and adding ecological functions. Each zone is organized to confront a specific contaminant, creating a system of phases that evolves over time and across environmental cycles. A military farming operation, cycles of planting, maintenance and harvest modify grounds while those of rust and decay transform the fleet. This visibility reframes environmental contamination as an ongoing pressure linking US military sites as a legacy concern, positioning the act of ecological repair within the framework of National Security. Through this approach, The Boneyard shifts from a static field into a living infrastructure where degradation is not hidden, but rendered as a legible and regenerative process. Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa // Geoffrey

The Remediation Fleet II

Brittney Harwin & Jake Erlich

In parallel the project opens the site to limited public engagement, positioning it as both a place of process-based knowledge creation. Opening portions of a historically restricted military landscape to the public challenges the inaccessibility and lack of transparency of such sites. Visitors engage with The Boneyard through four primary pathways: observing aircraft preservation and disassembly processes, exploring the phytoremediation landscape, experiencing Tucson’s dark sky celestialscape and an artist in residence program operated in partnership with the Center for Landscape Interpretation. Circulation is structured through a network of paths and an elevated viewing platform that provide access while carefully protecting active remediation zones. Phytoremediation operates both as an infrastructure and an interpretive medium, allowing visitors to apprehend the work of remediation processes in real time. At night, the site transforms as artificial lighting is minimized to preserve visibility of the night sky, while subtle illumination guides movement and frames views of the aircrafts. Artists document the transformations, encounters and frictions that will inevitably emerge. The Boneyard’s transformation serves as a training ground for the USACE, documents remedial processes, enables encounter with the military-industrial sublime, affords encounter with dark skies, and structures a framework to document the moments that emerge within a landscape in transition.

Quitobaquito Respite I

Evan Wendorf with Zoe Blackburn & Axel Mar-Pulido

This project explores the preservation and remediation of Earth ecosystems that will be left behind in the event of a mass human exodus due to planetary failure: a future anticipated by the Biosphere 2 terraforming project. Biosphere 2 was an experiment to test the potential for building a closed loop ecosystem capable of sustaining human life. The experiment demonstrated the ability to create artificial biomes independent of their surrounding context maintained via adaptive management by its inhabitants. This project anticipates what is left behind–ecosystems faltering in a future of climate change so severe that humans depart the planet and proposes an intervention in the most fragile of these ecosystems: the desert oasis.

Oases are critical sites of biodiversity, provide migratory stopovers, and havens for endemic species. However, animals and humans are migrating away from these oases sites as their harsh climates are becoming inhabitable. Cut funds from federal conservation organizations and national parks force these sites into a greater state of precarity. ASU research indicates that temperatures will rise by 8°F in the next 100 years and precipitation will diminish over the next 100 years, amplifying the extreme arid climate. These statistics anticipate grave impacts on these fragile ecosystems, making urgent the invocation of conservation efforts. This project aims to shape that future by preserving the Quitobaquito oasis–a critical oasis in the Sonoran desert–by negating the loss of water on the site, and by rehabilitating the endemic species that are at risk of extinction while shaping new multispecies futures.

Quitobaquito Respite II

Zoe Blackburn with Evan Wendorf & Axel Mar-Pulido

Quitobaquito Springs is developed over three stages of expansion from operations initiated in 2030 and prior to the human extraterrestrial exodus of 2050. At present, proximity to the US/MX Border Wall has amplified system fragmentation. Many animal populations that use the spring as a migratory stopover are prevented from passage causing populations to dwindle. In the face of imminent total planetary failure, a team of ecologists and members of the Hia C-ed O’odham tribe intervene and commence construction of an ecoinfrastructure to sponsor extant and migrant species propagation.

The first stage of operations involves the establishment of a research station from which to initiate plant propagation, soil remediation efforts, and construction of bio-terreria to stabilize existing degradation and stage the Oasis’ future. Perimeter biotextile umbrellas redirect available waters and generate energy for the Oasis’ systems operations. Foil based conservatories grow seedlings, larvae, and habitat fodder. The application of adaptive management practices begin to shape a future in which the availability of human participation is uncertain. Slowly, in the manner of a silviculture farming operation, the work begins by strategically planting climate resistant plants to help retain additional water entering the system. Ultimately, this work aims to stage (and design) a pantemporal from of earth based terrarium that will welcome both local species and migratory ones to both enhance the biodiversity of the Oasis, and support intercontinental species health, during both the periods where humans remain to adjust the system, and afterwards, when we are gone.

Quitobaquito Respite III

Axel Mar-Pulido with Evan Wendorf & Zoe Blackburn

Central to the work is the remediation of the desert soils through farming strategies that focus on rebuilding and establishing dense organic matter to undertake the gradual transformation of “wasted ground” into a living, selfreinforcing biotic system. Initial biostrategies include a combination of nitrogenfixing pioneer plants such as Sunshine Mimosas, arranged planting rows that slow evaporation and retain soil moisture while producing biomass, which in turn is oxygenated to produce humus in compost windrows. The windrows positioned along the site act as long-term biomass generators, producing organic material that can be cycled back into the ground. As compost settles over time, it enriches the soil with microbial life and increases its capacity to hold water. Techniques such as half-moon farming and zai pits are utilized and are paired with syntropic farming, a system based on layered planting, ecological succession, and constant biomass production. At Quitobaquito, this approach allows planting to function as remediation, which increases the biomass, cools the ground, and improves water retention.

By 2050, the oasis has continued to expand and flourish despite the absence of humans, a total global technological failure, and the collapse of all humanengineered systems. Through the evolution of constructed habitats, water collection systems, and plantings initiated through the project, now mature systems are overcome by environmental forces–as new forms of life emerge. Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa // Geoffrey

Ghostfields I

Emily Xu & Evita Christou

“Ghostfields” engages the haunting remnants of Arizona’s history of extraction characteristic of the distributed urbanism of mining settlements surrounding shuttered mines. Jerome, AZ and the adjacent Verde Valley serve as a site to imagine new circular operations that both work to process legacy residues and catalyse new futures. Once a prosperous mining town in the early 1900’s, Jerome now sits as a tourism-oriented ghost town characterized by art galleries, gastronomy, and combustion engine voyeurism surrounded by abandoned copper mines, slag piles, and tailings. Though largely inactive today, the hazardous byproducts of historic copper extraction and smelting processes plague the landscape and its communities. While global copper demand has paralleled the dominance of open pit processes and new environmental laws, a manufactured landscape overrun by residual tailings and slag, characterized by high concentrations of heavy metals, environ nearby towns. Heavy metals are released into the environment as airborne particulate matter and sub-surficial plumes, contaminating soil, water, and air. While the titans who oversaw the spectacles of extraction are long departed, today’s residents are regular victims of poisoning and chronic health issues amidst the omnipresence of toxins.

In parallel, other hazards lurk below the surface. Underground mines, both modern and legacy shaft spaces from previous eras, are prone to deadly fires. Without proper response, mine fires are lethal to shaft-miners, burning for years in unoccupied “stopes” while releasing gaseous pollutants into the atmosphere. Ghostfields attends to the active risks and the environmental repercussions of extraction, producing a learning landscape of countermeasure operations.

Ghostfields II

Evita Christou & Emily Xu

Jerome is cast as an experimental site, reimagining the relationships between industrial legacy, environmental restoration and circular material systems. The remnants of mining operations have left the soil burdened with high concentrations of heavy metals. The project is initiated using phytoremediation, a process that enlists the power of plants with their extensive root systems to draw toxins from the soil, moving beyond traditional “dig and dump / cast and cap” methods, opting instead for a biological solution that slowly transforms the landscape in place. Rather than treating the metal-laden plants as hazardous waste, the project explores the potential of phytomining. This involves harvesting the resulting biomass to recover valuable minerals, effectively turning a cleanup effort into a sustainable source of raw materials. This “bio-ore” serves as a bridge between ecological recovery and industrial utility, minimizing waste streams resulting from the remediation process. These recovered elements are then transformed into the foundation of a local green economy. By recycling the town’s mining wastes through the development of bio-based construction materials that serve to encapsulate toxic aggregates, the initiative recycles mining wastes into products, generating new economic opportunities and adding new forward-looking scenographies to the strange conditions of this former ghost town. Ghostfields neutralizes the environmental impacts of the past and builds a regenerative loop where the scars of this industry provide the literal building blocks for a cleaner future. Initial demonstrations of the potentials of new material systems shape the architecture of new subsurficial firefighting facilities and structures supporting a public landscape of remedial operations. Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa // Geoffrey Thün

The End of the American Dream I

Gulshat Roziali & Taylor Horsfall

This project begins with the quiet acquisition of several decommissioned Titan II missile silos outside Tucson, Arizona—remnants of a Cold War landscape organized through deterrence, dispersion, and invisibility. Rather than treating these sites as ruins or memorials, the proposal reframes them as generators of a distributed architectural system operating across the desert. Three interventions form a loose network of destinations, each engaging a different register of space—cosmic, perceptual, and climatic—while collectively mediating overlapping territorial systems.

Layered cartographies situate the silos within broader infrastructures: Cold War defense networks, contemporary regimes of border surveillance, migration routes, and patterns of land ownership. These mappings reveal the desert not as empty terrain, but as a highly controlled field shaped by policy, technology, and environmental risk. Within this context, the project positions architecture not as a singular object, but as an organizational device—one that selectively reveals, conceals, and redirects existing spatial logics and social possibilities.

The most visible layer of the project aligns with the legacies of land art, supported through cultural institutions and touristic economies. A second, less apprehensible system engages the conditions that structure movement across the borderlands: remoteness, exposure, and the precarious distribution of resources. Rather than resolving the frictions that span these conditions, the project recasts relations, leveraging interventions to reframe existing infrastructures and produce new relationships between territory, movement, and occupation.

The End of the American Dream II

Taylor Horsfall & Gulshat Roziali

Above ground, the project registers as a series of austere, abstract interventions. A mound-like earthwork aligned to celestial movements situates the silo landscape within longer temporal cycles, while a mirrored pavilion discloses an intimate yet sublime encounter with objects recovered from the desert, destabilizing fixed distinctions between self and other. These elements present as legible figures within the landscape—visible, accessible, and formally controlled.

Below and between them, a different spatial logic emerges. The silo chambers are reclaimed as subterranean reservoirs, where groundwater, thermal mass, and evaporation produce enclosed atmospheric conditions in resistance to the exposed desert above. Accessed through narrow apertures and descending paths, these interiors support longer durations of occupation and introduce a space of refuge organized around water and climate rather than visibility.

Across the territory, a distributed system of objects, traces, and subtle spatial cues extend beyond the sites themselves. Wayfinding mechanisms operate through informal and adaptive means—echoing existing practices of navigation that waver when faced with mirage. These elements remain largely imperceptible within the broader landscape, allowing multiple publics to occupy the same spaces within alternate timeframes and towards different desires.

The work operates as a mediating system, where architectural interventions, environmental processes, and material traces together organize visibility, movement, and duration across overlapping yet asymmetrical efforts to dwell in the desert borderlands.