Cultivating Earthworks of the Anthropocene: A Laboratory for Land and Environmental Art in Lime, Oregon

Abstract

Extractive landscapes provide a perspective into the rapidity of surficial geomorphosis occurring worldwide resulting from the human impact of resource mining. This perspective is often concealed and upon the depletion of the mined resource these landscapes are regarded as waste, rather than the necessary product and engineered geology of modern society. These earthworks have the potential to reveal the implicit polarity between the accelerated growth of the Anthropocene and the native growth of the landscape they occupy. By addressing landscape through the frame of earthworks, this thesis seeks to cultivate these territories with the intent of generating a cultural awareness of their presence and value. This design investigation addresses a cultural response to resource extraction in the Anthropocene through the adaptation of such landscapes for artistic explorations, such as land art, material research, and photography.This approach generates a site for land art practice and an artist in residency outpost. In developing architecture to serve the site and program, this thesis implements the spatial and material characteristics of land art in order to provide spaces that frame the surrounding context and respond to the latent site conditions such as climate, topography, and site history. The goal is to produce architecture that is both dependent on and a descendent of the landscape.