Detail View: Graduate Thesis Collection: Mining Crops: Coupling strategy of infrastructure opportunism for abandoned mines

Title: 
Mining Crops: Coupling strategy of infrastructure opportunism for abandoned mines
Creator: 
Kaser, Derek M.
Subject: 
Thesis (M.Arch.) -- Architecture
Subject: 
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Architecture
Rights: 
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract: 
As the growth of a globalizing culture’s demands for raw materials continues to rise, the process of mineral extraction continues to consume viable farm land. After the resources from strip mining are exhausted, social stigma hides the potential of a productive landscape and alternative economy. Vertical farming confronts these urgent issues of environment degradation and provides the opportunity for projecting a future infrastructure through bundling multiple processes with spatial organization. The process of land reclamation of ecological disasters only perceives to correct the damages. In actuality, the resulting landscapes cannot produce the necessary nutrients to sustain food production. A coupling strategy can be introduced to the strip mine, after reclamation strategies, to capitalize on a productive landscape. This intensive, dynamic system is capable of processing disparate, extrinsic matter outside of its discipline proper.1 By disregarding natural cycles, this strategy provides the capability to exceed the land’s ability to provide abundant resources. Architecture is reintegrated as a systems-based organization, within the broader globalized exchanges of economic, ecologies, and land use; expanding on an open system that continuously interacts with and adapts to its environment.2 This thesis focuses on turning an ecological disaster into an agriculturally productive and ecologically sustainable site by exploring the destructive forces of open pit mining, the reclamation process of an ecosystem, and the development of a coupling strategy for agricultural production within an open pit mine.
Publisher: 
Savannah, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design
Date: 
2014-05
Format: 
PDF : 150 p. : ill