El Cantalar cliff is in beautiful Benissa, on a Mediterranean coastline that has become an iconic image of “the good life” for millions of people around the world. Its white sandy beaches and gentle seas form an essential part of this image, but in the era of climate change, it is no longer possible to design and build a beach. Sand is the most mined mineral on earth, and the second most consumed natural resource after water. The fantasy of its permanence in relation to rising sea levels is becoming increasingly expensive to subsidize, and it is precisely this image that we have abandoned in our proposal. Instead, we begin by understanding the temporality of our beach in Benissa. Sand represents a moment in geological time in the passage of silica from unweathered rock to the mineral terminus of phyllosilicate clay.

In Benissa, the sand produced by the weathering of its rocky coastal shelf is continually swept away by the strong currents produced by the Mediterranean’s merger with the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, the site is characterized by eroded rock material that is too heavy to be swept away, but deeply weathered and textured by its exposure to the warm Mediterranean climate. Our project finds its ‘time’ in this moment between rock and sand, where the textures and contours of the coastline take shape.

We propose to reuse this rocky material on-site to intensify this texture, suggesting new ways of fully inhabiting the geological moment we find ourselves in. In this project, the goal is to imagine new forms of inhabitation that are appropriate to this geological moment, rather than replacing the coastline with forms that are more familiar. By taking the erosion of rock as our architectural typology, we find new possibilities for intensifying our capacity to experience and relate to the non-human temporalities that we find ourselves subject to in this changing world, the New Mineral Kingdom.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

TTS The project is an entry to a competition organized by the Benissa Town Hall, Alicante, for a masterplan for Cala Advocat, with the aim of revalorize and pedestrianize this beach. The three of us decided to partner because we knew each other’s work and felt that, despite the different approaches, we both share a similar way of understanding design and landscape. Seth and Tat had consistently been working on soil, and Lluís Alexandre had done some research on the real estate boom in Spain, which significantly affected the coast in Alicante.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?

TTS Our project begins with a series of simple questions: In what time do we live? In what geological epoch do we find ourselves? In our proposal A New Mineral Kingdom, we take the current climate crisis as an invitation to pause on this question: when are we? On what timeline do we find ourselves when we stand on the site of this proposal?

This is a question that is always implicit whenever we decide to design with climate change in mind. Every object of design contains within itself a conceptual model of the climate that is based on a simple assumption: the past is, more or less, our template for what will continue to happen in the future. If climate change is anything, it is a name for what happens when that assumption fails, and today it is failing more than ever before. This represents a crisis for design, and this is the crisis our proposal seeks to respond to.

KOOZ How does the project approach the act of designing within our contemporary anthropocene?

TTS Architects always have a client and, as a practical matter, they need to be very careful who they work for. The problem of trying to imagine how we might design within the contemporary anthropocene is that the athropos turns out to be a very bad client. Who is this anthropos anyway? What does she want? For this reason, we tend to prefer the term “capitalocene” or “plantationocene” to “anthropocene,” as it does less to obscure the very particular social and historical formations that brought about the environmental crisis and political impasse, we find ourselves in today. In other words, we don’t think there is anything universally human, or inevitable, about this crisis and we would turn down any architectural work that such a universal human might offer us. If we wrote a design manifesto, it might include an imperative not to work for anyone who can’t be located in space and time. So for our project in Benissa, the question of how to design within the contemporary Anthropocene might have been framed a little more narrowly: what does this specific community need in order to fully inhabit the dynamic and changing boundary between the sea and its rocky coastline, given that both sides of this boundary have been buffeted by the storms of progress that characterize our contemporary geo-social condition, with sea-level rise and Spain’s economic crisis shaping the ‘site’ as we found it. In this sense, part of designing within our contemporary geological condition is thinking stratigraphically about a site as a kind of aftermath rather than a tabula rasa. It is a mistake to think you can simply start over on a site. It also means thinking stratigraphically about the design proposal as itself another layer being added to this aftermath. Too often designers indulge in the architectural fantasy that they are somehow making a “new” site or replacing the existing site with a new design. If the anthropocene is anything, it is precisely this fantasy, that we can subordinate something like a coastline to our grand designs, as if we could make the sea and the rocks emissaries of our own ideas. It’s the fantasy that the earth can be made into an employee of some kind. Thinking stratigraphically about design means placing yourself at the end of a long timeline, as merely the most recent idea to wash up on shore so-to-speak, rather than the author of these layers. It also means understanding the geo-social stratigraphy of our own architectural proposal, and in this regard, there are some simple questions we should ask: where do our construction materials come from? What kinds of social relations are required to access these construction materials and install them on-site? What systems of exploitation might we perpetuate in the realization of our project? What infrastructures does our project require, and what kind of world do those infrastructures assume in order to function? These are the stratigraphic layers of the project itself.

KOOZ What are for you the opportunities which can arise in “suggesting new ways of fully inhabiting the geological moment we find ourselves in”?

TTS One of the main problems we confront in this particular geological moment is not really knowing where we are anymore. Standing still, the climate is literally changing where we are. One day we live on dry ground that hasn’t flooded in a thousand years and the next we find ourselves in the middle of a raging river. Think of the recent images from western Germany or Zhengzhou. California will have to spend a billion dollars or more to bury its electrical lines because the forests they traverse are now too dry not to combust whenever a tiny spark is thrown from a suspended wire. We have to remember that climate is geography, in this sense. So, the question has become: how do we live when we no longer know where we are? I think one of the ways we do this is to build cairns, and in a way, our project in Benissa is a kind of cairn. In a literal sense, cairns are just piles of rocks stacked in an intentional way, which are found all over the world to help people navigate as they walk long distances. The landscape changes but the rocks stay stacked. In this sense, cairns can be understood as a general architectural typology that arises whenever a shifting landscape needs a landmark or datum. Datums are fixed points that allow us to see change, helping us navigate and orient ourselves. The point of a cairn is not to resist change, or even to anticipate the direction of change. Rather, the point is to triangulate change in order to know which way to go. Fully inhabiting this geological moment means becoming better at navigating change, by becoming more sensitive to what’s going on around us. Instead of building a wall to resist sea level rise, a cairn might help us track how fast the water is rising.

In our case in Benissa, we’re tracking another set of forces using this same logic. In Benissa, the site is bounded by an eroding cliff that compresses the beach between its steep slopes and the sea. The loose unconsolidated material that makes up this cliff rains rock material down onto the beach, necessitating safety nets and retaining walls. In other words, it’s precisely what you’re not supposed to see on a postcard of an idyllic Mediterranean beach. Our project challenges this one-directional gaze and tries instead to find ways of actually inhabiting this moment of collapse. Instead of imagining new and better ways of hiding the cliff from view, we want to recognize it as a protagonist at this site. Our project develops strategies for reclaiming and reusing this eroded material to register the beach as a precarious and intermediary space between the erosional forces of the sea and the cliff.

The idea is to embrace another image of “the good life” by inhabiting the forces of erosion rather than clinging to the cliché of white sand beaches, but there is something difficult about this position that we have to face. Watching a landscape erode as opposed to stopping the erosion, or watching sea-level rise as opposed to building a wall to contain it, is not a commonly embraced strategy among architects. It certainly doesn’t win competitions. Perhaps another way of putting this is that, as an affective register, architecture really struggles with the genre of tragedy. We mentioned above that architecture always has a client. What kind of client wants tragedy? And yet this is precisely the kind of thinking we need to get better at if we’re ever going to escape the illusions of control and environmental mastery that produced this geological moment. Tragedy shouldn’t be confused with sadness. Here, tragedy should be understood in Nietzsche’s sense: the wisdom of tragedy.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imaginary?

TTS The architectural imaginary is our greatest power and also our greatest weakness. In landscape terms, our favorite example of the architectural imaginary is a golf course. In one of his books, John McPhee describes visiting a golf course in Louisiana with a geologist, who points out that all of the architectural forms that make up a golf course ––its sand traps, round lakes, rolling hills and tufted grass–– are all post-glacial geomorphologies produced by retreating glaciers in Scotland. So, to make a golf course in Louisiana you need to build a post-glacial landscape in the middle of a river delta that, needless to say, has never seen a glacier. In this sense we might talk about the hidden geology of our architectural imaginary. In Benissa, we were asked to make a beach, not a golf course, but beaches also contain strong forms with hidden geologies. What’s a beach without white sand and a gentle slope? We don’t often think of how that sand is produced, or why it hasn’t been swept out to sea by storms and tides. Immense climatic and tectonic forces at planetary scales combine to produce the feeling of tranquility and leisure that a sandy beach gives us, unless of course we just truck the sand in from somewhere else. Artificial sand beaches are geologically identical to a golf course in this respect. We have to remember that the word “imaginary” derives from “image.” As architects we traffic in images, particularly in images of the so-called “good life.” Today we might ask: what is the geology of our image of “the good life”? What kind of climate does that life require? More relevant to our proposal might be the question: if our image of the beach has a set of geo-climatic requirements, what happens when those requirements are not met or the geo-climate changes? Does the image change or do we abandon it? In either case, the architectural imaginary is precisely what we’ll need to find a new form of life under these conditions. This is to say that there is no future scenario in which the architectural imaginary is not crucial, but what is even more crucial is to know when our images are failing us.

Bio

Thinking through Soils is formed by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Seth Denizen and Tat Bonvehí Rosich.

Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich is a licensed Spanish architect and urban designer with an interest in living systems, climate and soils in urbanized territories. She is currently teaching at the Landscape Department at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where she was named 2017-2018 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow and serves as Design Discovery Landscape Architecture Coordinator. Previously she has taught both, Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia as well as Architecture and Industrial Design Department at Iowa State University and Urban Design at ETSAB-UPC Barcelona. Her designs, built and unbuilt, have received several awards and have been published in Detail, Plataforma Arquitectura and Quaderns, among others.

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco is a New York and Madrid based architect, curator, and scholar. He was the chief curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 together with the After Belonging Agency. He was a Critical Studies Helena Rubinstein Fellow 2017-18 at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and an IKKM-Weimar Princeton Summer School for Media Studies Fellow 2016. His design work has been recognized with several prizes, including the Simon Architecture Prize 2018, the Bauwelt Prize 2019 and the FAD Prize 2017 for Architecture Theory and Criticism. He was a finalist for the Lisbone Triennale Millenium bcp Début Award 2019 for architects under 35.

Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. His published work is multidisciplinary, addressing art and design, microbial ecology, soil science, urban geography, and the politics of climate change. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California Berkeley, and his doctoral research investigates the vertical geopolitics of urban soil in Mexico City, where he is working with geologists and soil scientists to characterize the material complexities and political forces that shape the distribution of geological risk in Mexico’s urban periphery.

The project "A New Mineral Kingdom: Masterplan for Cala Advocat" has been realized in collaboration with Irene Domínguez and Pablo Cevallos-Zúñiga.