Attached Otherwise
Staying with the Ground: Developing Spatial Actions for Excavated Landscapes and Extracted Matter<Attached Otherwise> investigates architecture as a geological practice. Architecture participates in environmental and economic systems through extraction and resource economies. Stone, soil and minerals are displaced, yet these material processes rarely remain part of architectural thinking. The project asks what responsibility architecture has after extraction and what spatial actions can emerge from this condition.
The research begins in Salzburg, where a former quarry became a theatre. This existing condition inspires the project's first case study before expanding to quarries and post-industrial landscapes across Europe.It records cuts, blast faces, exposed strata and displaced material as traces of extraction. Rather than treating terrain as a resource, the project approaches it as an active field that records time, labour and material decay.
These sites become the basis for <Future Fossils>. Geological fragments and excavation sites are documented, 3D-scanned and translated into architectural scenarios. They are prototypes for new spatial actions after extraction that propose futures for both (I) excavated terrain and (II) material removed from it. Excavated land becomes public forums, cultural infrastructure and places of assembly. Extracted material remains in local circulation through local re-use, rather than disappearing into anonymous supply chains. Thus, an invisible economic and material cycle becomes visible and tangible.
Publications and workshops extend the research into different contexts. Participants investigate extraction sites through mapping, collecting and making. They develop spatial and territorial studies and discuss how architecture might remain <attached otherwise> to the landscape from which it emerges.
<Attached Otherwise> proposes new spatial futures for excavated landscapes and extracted matter. It reconnects architecture with its geological origins, making this relationship visible as a spatial and territorial condition.