SCENARIO 05: Extraction
  • Fall 2015
  • Edited by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

Introduction: Extraction

by Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner

Extraction sustains our society. The economic value of raw materials regularly outweighs concerns about the practices and processes required to bring them to market. But have we really grappled with the complex systems that landscapes of extraction expose?

Butte Montana: A Case For The Mining Metropolis

by Bradford Watson & Sean Burkholder

Extraction is an ugly process. Still, the vast resources present beneath the ground and the motivation to pull them to the surface are intimately tied to the settlement and permanent occupation of the landscape.

One Percent: Mining Bone Valley

by Rob Holmes, Lauren Sosa & Christie Allen

Florida is the epicenter of phosphate mining in the United States. The sheer scale of the impact of this extraction on the Floridian landscape is immense. As it grows, phosphate mining is producing enormous accidental monuments to the current American way of life.

The True Cost Of Coal: The First Installment

by J. Henry Fair

Coal mining produces some of the most visceral landscapes of extraction, literally leveling mountains and consuming farmland and forests to access the mineral seams below.

Museum Of Lost Volumes

by Neyran Turan

After a long meeting, the unanimous vote was held to ban further Rare Earth mining and to build a museum that would house and preserve remaining Rare Earth mines of the world, and would carry their legacy to future generations.

Crossing The Line

by Jamie Vanucchi

NY bans fracking; PA allows it. Just south of the NY/PA border, some of the most intensive drilling occurs in an area where the Marcellus shale is deep, thick and most productive. How powerful is a policy line? Where is this line solid, and where is the line blurred, broken, or not there at all?

Grounding Water

by Matthew Wiener

Unfortunately, landscape architects will never build a “solution” to groundwater, nor will they devise a method for reversing almost a century of wanton extraction.

A Monument To Mining

by Alexander Breedon

Australia’s economy and its cities are inextricably linked to coal. This proposal for a polemical “monument to mining” questions Australia’s relationship with coal mining and addresses the dualistic spatial relationship between the city and its regional territory.