Emilie Evans

Supervisor: Professor Hélène Frichot

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Geographies of Deep Time

Today, the Dam Wall is deemed a retired water storage facility and sits upon the site as a post-industrial relic, embracing its decay. This thesis explores the importance of the temporality of the Dam and its site, which is rich in its suggestion of former lives, where contemporary time and deep geological time flow in tandem. Situated within the entangled temporalities of past, present and future, this thesis proposes a series of interventions on the site: an Observation Tower, a Repository, and a Seed Bank. These interventions speak to us about broader environmental concerns and reflect upon the importance of paying attention and bearing witness to the conditions of ‘now’.

In her text The Mushroom at the End of the World anthropologist Anna Tsing asks: ‘what kind of human disturbances can we live with?’ As an extension of this, my thesis asks: through increasing our timeframes of observation, how can architecture exist in the conditions of indeterminacy in which we live today, and what happens to and what will remain of architecture when we are no longer around to use, maintain and care for it?