Out of Site, Out of Mind: Reading the Ground as Architectural Language in Waste Landscapes

Abstract

The wastescape is a type of de-industrialized and contaminated landscape. Bound by water and unseen in urban areas, they often remain outside of our consciousness. Current remediation practices involve intensive operations to rid harmful toxins; however, they exchange improved environmental health for social disconnect and erasure of place.

These issues of remediation are approached through an ecological and social lens, observing wastescapes as working landscapes. The architecture emerges from analyzing our past and present perceptions of water infrastructure and deconstructing the ground as layers of natural and cultural stratum. Reusing the Powerhouse building site in Victoria, British Columbia and its remedial methods, the project proposes a new urban strategy, a series of pavilions and a water treatment plant. This thesis makes evident the site’s natural processes while acknowledging its industrial past, ultimately aiming to develop an architecture that creates a public connection to remediation while revealing a vital ecological landscape.