Replicant Architecture
graduate thesiscritical matters: latent typologies, military infrastructure, climate analysis, mapping, land-use
Project Index
1. Abstract
2. On Archiving + Necropolitics
3. World Map + Architectures
4. Closing Thoughts
1. Abstract
2. On Archiving + Necropolitics
3. World Map + Architectures
4. Closing Thoughts
Advisor:
Emily Kutil
Recognition:
2023 U-M Graduate Thesis Honors
Honorable Mention - Territorial Studies
Emily Kutil
Recognition:
2023 U-M Graduate Thesis Honors
Honorable Mention - Territorial Studies
Abstract
This thesis transforms white-box archivist practices into living models for knowledge preservation. Situated within the contexts of an escalating climate crisis and tumultuous geopolitical landscapes, it imagines potential futures in which architecture is leveraged in conjunction with tacit knowledges, reinventing archives in opposition to necropolitical models and failing power structures.
This thesis rejects the artificial preservation of order as a condition of hegemonic necropolitics. A series of six imagined architectures operate across twinned heterotopic landscapes, utilizing a hybrid system of translation to transform and resist authoritarian typologies. These multi-scalar proposals, dubbed ‘Replicant Architecture’, relinquish the power dynamics that traditionally structure indexical knowledge, recombining, regenerating, and recentering Life in archival practices.
This thesis transforms white-box archivist practices into living models for knowledge preservation. Situated within the contexts of an escalating climate crisis and tumultuous geopolitical landscapes, it imagines potential futures in which architecture is leveraged in conjunction with tacit knowledges, reinventing archives in opposition to necropolitical models and failing power structures.
This thesis rejects the artificial preservation of order as a condition of hegemonic necropolitics. A series of six imagined architectures operate across twinned heterotopic landscapes, utilizing a hybrid system of translation to transform and resist authoritarian typologies. These multi-scalar proposals, dubbed ‘Replicant Architecture’, relinquish the power dynamics that traditionally structure indexical knowledge, recombining, regenerating, and recentering Life in archival practices.
On Archiving + Necropolitics
As the climate crisis escalates, new modalities for existence must emerge. In one such supposed future, nation states have fragmented and redrawn boundaries, prioritizing watershed management. In North America, the National Guard has dissolved as an institution, its resources rolled into an expanded Coast Guard to mitigate the chaos of rising waters within systemically ‘valuable’ coastal territories. This military reallocation leaves many sites vacant for lack of administrative bandwidth, including Camp Grayling in the Michigama Megaregion. In this scenario, now-demilitarized Indigenous lands have been returned to Anishinaabe and First Nation stewards who care for its forests and streams.
Elsewhere, an island off the coast of Norway is enveloped in geopolitical precarity; Svalbard’s embedded archives have begun to fail. Vaults designed to freeze biodiversity and ephemeral knowledge are actively flooding, leading to simultaneous unplanned germination and premature decay within its cryogenic halls. Military forces compete in a standoff for control of the island’s satellite ground stations, image databases and natural resources, placing all proximal archives at further risk.
An extranational agency of recombinatory architects, infrastructure salvage crews, and climate strategists works to transfer the precarious archives to more stable territories, beginning with the former site of Camp Grayling. To transform failing white-box archivist practices into living models for knowledge preservation, this global network operates carefully in conjunction with Anishinaabe land stewards, reinventing the ‘archives’ in opposition to the necropolitical models that have threatened life in the first place.
In Necropolitics, a term coined by Achille Mbembe, neoliberal democracies expose their own citizens to danger, inequality, and violence as a prerogative power exercised to protect the interests of an abstracted ruling class. Necropolitical risk frameworks determine who may live and who may die. This thesis rejects the artificial preservation of order as a condition of hegemonic necropolitics.
Rooted primarily within spatiotemporal and ecological domains, ‘Replicant Architecture’ (R-A) uses a hybrid system of design across landscapes to transform and resist authoritarian typologies. In place of paranoia, fear, and domination it offers commonality, reciprocity, and connection. R-A relinquishes the power dynamics that traditionally structure indexical knowledge, recombining, regenerating, and—following Mbembe—recentering Life in archival practices, “making room for the Other.”
+ The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, found on an island off the northern coast of Norway
+ Camp Grayling, Michigan, the largest National Guard training ground in the US
These two territories fall on the opposite side of the line for many issues, particularly when it comes to archiving in the face of precarity and risk. Climate change, geopolitical neutrality, respect for and consideration for Land, and pasts of resource extraction all intertwine to draw strange parallels between both landscapes.
In the first, we see a method of archiving repeated throughout Svalbard’s landscape: embedding and freezing. This model takes seeds (life) and attempts to proof them against time, decay, and entropy (death). This is, of course, the nature of indexical knowledge: sealed boxes, temperature control, limited access. The seed vault operates to hedge against disaster in the future, but in doing so wrests control of the archive away from the global systems that it is meant to preserve by hiding knowledge in a frozen landscape. These systems operate within the contours of the aforementioned necropolitical framework. However, we see that even at its height, these power structures cannot control everything. These systems are fundamentally flawed and actively failing. In recent years, the Vault has repeatedly flooded as permafrost on Svalbard’s arctic landmass melts due to anthropocentric driven climate change, placing the fragility encased within at peril.
In a world where time and space are subject to abstractions like the grid, conceptualizations like the second, what does it mean to design for non-indexical knowledge, design not for control, but for life? How do we digest the practices in one landscape so as to reenvision archival practices in the other?
This project comes at a crucial moment for Camp Grayling - already standing as the largest US National Guard training ground, at 148k acres, the military installation is seeking a land acquisition of an additional 160k acres (since this text was written in March 2023, the initial land acquisition proposal has since been rejected by the DNR due to public awareness and backlash). This thesis not only rejects this additional land acquisition, but imagines a future in which the camp has been decommissioned and returned to First Nation stewardship. All elements found within the following proposal are an implementation of attitude towards life (not necessarily founded in remediation, though remediation follows). It also centers cultivated materialities and scalar time thinking to expand frame of reference beyond purely speculative and experiential work. It assumes a future that is optimistic, made intelligible through a series of allegorical architectures.
Most importantly, it does not consider these architectures as singularities or objectivities. They are projections, imaginations, and possible futures.
They are not Uses, but rather, Moments...
World Map + Architectures
Finding its footing within Grayling, our journey follows a narrative through the Land. Six proposed studies meander through an environment riddled with histories of extraction, depletion, imposition, and exhaustion. These studies undo as much as they build up, and attempt to represent multiscalar timeframes within composite imagery.
01. embassy( i )
Subtitled 'Architecture of Ingenuity', the embassy serves as a ground-ing point for all our subsequent explorations. The structure frames typical traps and tropes of the industry which we actively seek to avoid - simultaneously, it highlights the provocations with which we engage. With regard to the former, the architecture overly indulges in technocratic solutions for environmental protection and so-called closed loop systems; solar panels plaster the facades, wind turbines softly whir on the horizon, and tanks of algae grow, utilized for the dual purpose of purifying the waters of nearby Lake Margrethe and serving as an experimental biofuel. Evidences of externalized loci of control are manifest everywhere. This is not what we seek to do.
This is not to say these things cannot help; however, this architecture stands as a critique of insular modes of thinking that presume the power to save a planet previously priviledged to not bear the scar of the anthropocene upon its face.
For this project, embassy( i ) answers the question, what does it look like when we operate within existing frameworks and what can we do to avoid these pitfalls?
02. the wind keeper
Following a path out of the former camp, southerly along a dirt road, we come upon a desolate, burned, and bombed out landscape. Here, an artillery range once wreaked havoc upon the forest. This site is now home to the precious withdrawal from Svalbard’s cryochambers: jack pine seeds that now repopulate the land.
The structures that stand here take on the form of a pavilion, transitory shelters for the contents encapsulated within and moments of reprieve for the visitors interacting with the archive. They come in a variety of forms, with some being more open and others forming a porous membrane. These conditions allow everything from birds to pollinators to inhabit the archive, enabling a living, breathing system of collection and redistribution in a landscape otherwise inhospitable to life. Humans here have begun a system of maintenance for this self cataloguing system. Minimal monitoring takes place, just enough for the architecture to practice awareness.
These architectures may serve as the starting node for the reinterpretation of white box archivist practices, reinterpreting the seed archive as a living model.
03. forest of fossils
Just south of the artillery range, we are met with a strange sight in the landscape. The once contiguous forest is punctuated with newly abandoned oil rigs; due to the transferral of governing power, prioritization of environment and being, and a transition to more renewable energies, the delerict frames of past fossil fuel extraction riddle the wooded land atop rings of compacted earth.
Structures ring the pollutant equipment, sanctioning off the land in need of phytoremediation. Microbes are strewn in the middle of these rings, restoring the land slowly. The slope of the roofing prevents most large animals from interacting with the toxic soils, while still allowing exit from the center. The oil rigs themselves form a sort of grafting trellis for the forest flora the spring up around, and we begin to see fauna such as the black bear return to these areas after being driven off by activity of extraction.
04. a song for the arctic
A new structure here bridges the ground, forming a three part relationship between humans, birds, and fish inhabiting the land. Ideas of minimalism, repopulation, and coexistence form a system for interface for each of these groups. An observation deck dances across the land; a protective ring forms nesting grounds for native sandhill cranes; a sunken structure creates shallow breeding grounds replicating amenable conditions for the reintroduction of the Arctic Grayling.
This stage for interaction embraces the rebirth of knowledge, as well as the transience of knowledge (an acknowledgement of the ‘Floating World’, buddhist ukiyo, in which everything is impermanent). Its adjacency to the Manistee river forces an engagement with cyclical timescapes, involving nesting, birth, and migration. This architecture embodies design for the Other, and requires critical attention to the positioning of self within the landscape and adjacent to non-human actors.
05. a monument to nothing
Here stands a monument to nothing. Upon this site, we explore the ideas of memetic replication, or as Carlos Fausto writes about the Amazonian Yanesha people, the act of forgetting as a tool of appropriation. By choosing to forget, we also choose what to remember. This memorial honors nothing from the past of extraction - not tools, not systems, not capitalist ‘pioneers’ nor their typologies of building. Rather, it remains cryptic and stands among the stumps, new life grafted upon the surface amid soil unable to do so for itself.
Alongside the monument, bamboo is seeded throughout the area; traditionally considered an invasive species, the hardy plant is known to grow in soils unable to support other life, revitalizing the land as it does so. This reversal of an invasive quality stands alongside the stumps born from invasive harvest, creating a field embedded with inverse relationships and in some distant future the return of the native pine trees to this area.
06. chamber of reflection
This final Moment reflects on the thesis as a whole. It is a means for testing, a way of seeing. It is self-critical and reaches out in ways meant to connect with similar sites across the world.
This act of simulation could be considered prophecy, or simply just the projection of many possible futures upon the landscape. It is a methodology for visioning a living future.
Closing Thoughts
I’d like to acknowledge River Valley Revolt, an activist group whose work in the Grayling Michigama region helped elucidate the history of militant activity in the area. I’d also like to acknowledge the Anishinaabe people whose land remains occupied by military forces to this day, lamenting this fact while remaining hopeful + vilgilant for living futures.
I’d like to reemphasize that my project is envisioning a future opposed to the current expansion of Camp Grayling; it is opposed to the use of land and complicity of architecture in creating places to reherse systemic violence and suppression of agency, here and elsewhere.
It is my hope that the work I conducted pursuant to this architectural thesis, whether it be cataloging, investigating, or simply imagining a vibrant future, has helped orient my skillset towards the furthering of the Other, and contributes to a future with more life and less violence.
I will leave you with a quote by Donna Haraway, referenced from “Situated Knowledges”, a text that helped me articulate some of the more nuanced and emphemeral qualities of this work in its early and continued stages of existence.
“We seek not knowledges ruled by nostalgia for this presence of the one true Word and disembodied vision. We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited vision, not partiality for its own sake but rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about individuals.”
Thank you.