TA: Ashwatha ChandranEcotone | The Sentient Ruins: Ecological Recovery at Abandoned Basalt Quarry Champaner
The studio invites its participants to propose ECOTONE ARCHITECTURE i.e., architecture to act as an inorganic component of a post-industrial multispecies landscape; because ecological forces have the agency to subvert any ordered architectural intervention. It explores the question of survival by discovering what manages to live in the ruins of such a landscape by looking for evidences of collaborative survival there. It proposes re-appropriation and remodeling of the distressed ecological components of an abandoned quarry site into a place for ecological recovery premised on creating research facilities related to bio-resource of the region.
Quarries are a reflection of ceaseless exploitation of natural resources using violent methods such as dynamiting to the extent that the landscape becomes distressed. Such landscapes offer a renewed opportunity to put back the ecological process in order by landscape reshaping which is favorable for the ecosystem, local economy, and improvement of people's living standards. In that definition, post-industrial landscape has the potential of making us reflect upon the fluid and porous distinction between value and waste.
