Learning from the First Nations of Alberta Canada who engaged in a series of Tar Sands Healing Walks against oil extraction, the project proposes a path on the site of the prospective decommissioned Syncrude Oil Company. Along the route are five interventions each based on collaborating with nature in the bioremediation of toxic landscapes. The research focused on the inhabitants, now erased and displaced, of a site faced with extraction and destruction, from human to more-than-human dwellers.

From the long colonial history of the site tied up within oil production, First Nations and other indigenous communities have faced violent exploitation. As a result the tar sands projects are considered to be ‘a slow industrial genocide’ against first nations bands and tribes, as well as Metis and Inuit populations. The project understands this through three main aspects; the forced removal of indigenous dwellers from their lands, the subsequent destruction of these lands and lastly the false promise of their treaty rights for a right to clean air, water and access to their lands.

Along with the colonization of the indigenous humans, is the total destruction of the these habitats for all other organisms. The site, previously a healthy ecosystem almost untouched by anthropogenic industries, is part of the Canadian boreal ecosystem one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs. The project considers the landscape as the architecture, and these dwellers as both the clients and stakeholders. As well as this, the project relies upon methods of bioindication. Through understanding the limits at which life can thrive, survive or cease to exist, and how to read individual organisms along this spectrum, bioindication becomes a language with which to read the landscape. The project proposes a 20km long path, taking around 5 hours to complete, with 5 interventions along the route from West to East. More-than-human perspectives have driven the design from plant, to animal to substance. Each intervention allows the participant to perform a different mode of walking through topographies of sulfur, moving Up, Within, Through, Around and Over.

The project was developed at the Royal College of Art.

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

CBT The destruction of the environment by the Syncrude factory is only one example of the effects of extractivist industries on the health of their surrounding ecosystems. In order to address this, it is impossible to think architecture as separate to nature. The project stands on the grounds that we must reconsider who we are designing for and on whose behalf we are speaking. The proposals consider the landscape as the architecture itself and the human and more-than-human dwellers, now erased and displaced, as both the clients and stakeholders. Exposed by the environmental and racial climate, the project tries to learn from indigenous pedagogies rather than appropriating them, the First Nations and Metis populations whose rivers ‘used to be blue now they are brown’ engaged in a series of Tar Sands Healing Walks surrounding these ziggurats. In line with this the project proposes a 5-hour long walking route with 5 interventions along the way. Each design facilitates a different mode of moving through topographies of sulfur. For each intervention, more-than-human perspectives have driven the design. The project questions the agency of design in the remediation of toxic landscapes by focussing on its relationship with substances and organisms.

KOOZ How does the project approach and define a "healthy ecosystem"?

CBT Ecosystems are constantly in flux; natural hierarchies change and species evolve. Therefore, the project doesn’t consider there to be a specific answer to what a ‘healthy’ ecosystem is when specific species can thrive in one system and cause the extinction of others at the same time. Additionally, the idea of a healthy ecosystem is a human notion and as questions around the current climate crisis and mass extinction suggest, we need to shift the perspective away from solely anthropocentric ideas of nature. That being said, it is obvious that this landscape is under serious threat, species of caribou have dropped at unaccountable rates, the river is polluted with arsenic and the Boreal Forest and its countless inhabitants that were once there has been deforested for this and multiple other oil production facilities in the area. The interventions within the project propose ways of reading the landscape as well as remediating, particularly through the use Bioindicative species as a way of witnessing, measuring and understanding the changes.

KOOZ How does the design seek to inform the regeneration of the landscape in the years to come?

CBT The project is situated after the collapse of fossil fuels and the inevitable decommissioning of such production facilities. It considers a future post-industrial sulfur cycle that measures or remediates the contamination of this landscape of which a 20km strip of land has been outlined as the site crossing through the Boreal Forest, the tar sands, the ‘borders’ of Syncrude, its tailing ponds and the Athabasca River adjacent. There are 5 interventions, each facilitating a different mode of experiencing them whether that is moving Up, Within, Through, Around or Over these topographies.

Firstly, a ladder for lichen, based on the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, reaches up 180m high (the ATTO reaches 325m) in order to be able to measure air qualities and sulfur dioxide emissions at the same height of the stack chimney of Syncrude.

Secondly, the bioindication of crops and crop rotation systems hope to aid the remediation within the tar sands, through planting species that can survive in highly acidic soils initially. Acid levels, and pH fluctuation is measured here with a series of deposition collectors, coated in bioindicative treated fabrics that change colour dependant on pH, similar to litmus paper.

Thirdly, it is questionable whether the sulfur of the ziggurats, although supposedly pure, has not been contaminated as a result of its processing, it is instead left for future generations as a monument of waste, an elevated walkway has been constructed through them. Fourthly the tailing ponds, specifically Mildred Lake, once one of the world’s largest man-made earth structures filled to the brim with toxic waste must be treated, the removal of the waste and the restoration of the lake is considered by the intervention that tries not to obstruct this fragile land and proposes a protective pathway around its circumference. A mesh structure allows mosses to grow through and on it and people to circulate around it, whilst a fence-like line of poles inhibits the caribou that migrate through this site from drinking the contaminated liquid. Lastly the long and winding bridge that reaches over the Athabasca River. Studies have shown that arsenic binds to rust particles and can then be filtered out thereafter. The bridge, made of Corten steel and rusted columns reflects the meanders of the river by maximising the surface area of submerged rusty columns. The result is a performative route, finding the longest way across the river. Of course, it cannot filter out all of the arsenic from the river, but this sensibility and concern is immediately made visible when the design is questioned.

KOOZ What role should academia hold in the sensibilisation of young architects towards the relationship between architecture and landscape?

CBT All architecture is situated in some form of landscape and these landscapes are the sites of multiple issues often disregarded in architectural education. Of course, different institutes are catered to different types of architecture and its necessary to have a broad range of future architects, but in an age where the power of the architect to destroy landscapes and contribute so heavily to the climate crisis accounts for such a large proportion of the problem it becomes fundamental that academia should focus much more heavily on this issue. The relationship between architecture and landscape includes multidisciplinary ways of engaging with its history, politics, biodiversity and populations that ‘environmental’ programmes that sit independently of design projects in architectural academia seem too often to exclude.

KOOZ What is for you the role of the architect within our contemporary society?

CBT Architecture is now such a multidisciplinary practice that engages with an often confusing number of topics that its hard to categorise what an architect is today. At the Royal College of Art for example there were 13 different studios to choose from each with an entirely distinct set of principles that guide an even more distinctly different set of briefs. This diversity in teaching alludes to a hugely diverse range of architectural roles within our society. For this project the role of the architect was to address the ecological and political history of the site, the colonisation of the indigenous populations who lived there previously and surround it now, and the destruction of the landscape. Although projects are spoken about in terms of the design interventions proposed the majority of the year-long studio was research based, entirely engaged with investigating ‘ways in which the built environment is entangled in biochemical pathways during an era of increasingly evident man-induced alterations to the global climate.’

KOOZ What is the power of the Architectural Imaginary?

CBT During the project, and the studio, we read through a lot of discourse, philosophy, research and critical texts on the questions the brief raises. A lot of discourse on ecological thought speaks of the Age of Enlightenment as a turning point in our relationship with the world around us as the moment of our disenchantment with it. In many ways it is considered that this disenchantment in turn led to the disregard and disrespect that resulted in our current climate crisis. Some writers propose new ways of thinking ecologically as periods of re-enchantment and so, for this project, the power of the architectural imaginary allowed us to design and re-associate our practice within this philosophy, it gave us the freedom and time to research and be critical of that research.