Of Water and Matter
A Material Practice for Post-Extractive Landscapes
L.M. Selcho (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
AS Alkan – Mentor (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
Chiara Pradel – Mentor (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
H.F. Eckardt – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
R Cavallo – Mentor (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
In the post-extraction landscapes of the Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier, the relationship between water and matter no longer follows natural rhythms—it is charged, reactive, and unfolding. Here, contamination is not a singular event but a condition that accumulates, binds, weathers, and seeps across geological and temporal scales. Conventional restoration frameworks respond with binary visions of compensation and separation. This thesis takes a different approach—remaining within the unsettled terrain, it traces the transformations already in motion.
Water, long drained to make space for mining, returns to a stratigraphy fractured and unsettled by decades of extraction. It moves through disrupted sediments, activating chemical reactions that carry heavy metals and acidity through soil, into groundwater, and toward the surface. Matter does not passively receive these flows; it absorbs, resists, and transforms them. This interaction forms the foundation of the thesis: a material practice rooted in territorial specificity, where design engages the dialogue between dissolution and deposition, contamination and gradual reconfiguration.
By reworking site-bound matter, the project proposes infrastructural prototypes that respond to their environment not through resistance, but through participation. Each intervention is situated, embedded in cycles of absorption, stasis, and release. Rather than proposing resolution, the thesis offers a framework for ongoing negotiation—where design operates within, rather than above, the entangled realities of water and matter.