Taha El Barazi

Borders and Territories

The Landscape Post-Mortem: An Ode to Excess

This thesis investigates the forces shaping the built environment. It tackles the underbelly of a coal mine, the ‘dead’ leftovers generated by industrialisation. Dead sites are an indication of ephemerality, manifested by indeterminate forces shaping the landscape. These leftover spaces are celebrated by the initiation of a ritual through the landscape, introducing architecture that mirrors different stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance are each transformed into precise expressions according to their inherent characteristics. After the establishment of a symbiotic relationship with the landscape, each intervention suggests a state of tension through its expression, capturing and freezing the state of impermanence of each site. Each intervention is a mirror of both the stage of grief with which it is associated and the condition of the site it sits on. Through these interventions, the landscape is interpreted as a series of interventions frozen in time, constructing the Landscape Post-Mortem.

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