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Lignite Intimacies: Gardening Industrial Remnants

Part 2 Project 2024
Anna-Lena Mueller
Aarhus School of Architecture | Denmark
Lignite extractions’ legacy on Eastern Germany’s landscape is visible from space. For over a century, giant machines have been making and remaking Earth’s geology as it never existed before.

This thesis intertwines two cultural practices of Eastern Germany, namely lignite mining and allotments, understanding them both as forms of gardening that reflect cultural views and colonial ideas and shape local landscapes and cities.

The project has been developed through a methodology that tries to understand and link relationships across a multitude of scales and times, to recognise the consequences human disturbance and proposed interventions might have within the site, yet the design aims to encourage, support and adapt to possible changes within this fluctuating landscape.

Various mappings, news articles and government reports are used to understand the territorial scale of the project, while interviews, site visits and archiving of more-than-human stories is used to understand local, situated scales before re-entangling the two.

In doing so, I argue that we can design tangible links between previously disconnected parts of a system, connecting the vast with the intimate, machine and landscape, the global and the situated, humans and non-humans, and mining and gardening, and create design strategies that operate in the gaps.

Anna-Lena Mueller

Tutor(s)

2024
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