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REPLICANT ARCHITECTURE

M.ARCH GRADUATE THESIS

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This project was completed in the designer’s final year of the Master of Architecture program at U-M.

The project was advised by Emily Kutil and recognized with an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Thesis Prize under the category of Territorial Studies.

critical matters:

+ latent typologies
+ military infrastructure
+ climate change
+ land-use
+ OSINT
+ mapping
+ tacit knowledge

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.

Sited within the contexts of a decommissioned military training ground and in response to the increasingly precarious spatiotemporal domain of modernity, this work is optimistic, speculative, and ambitious when dealing with a reality that continues to have a grim outlook on climate trajectories, risk mitigation, and the prevalence of necropolitical governing models. Most importantly, this work tries to imagine possible futures for all land occupied by military + police training grounds, architectures dedicated to mimicking other architectures to impose order through violence - this is applicable from Camp Grayling to Cop City, and further underscores the need for multiplicity and subjective thought in the face of prevailing singularity and objectivities.

On Archiving + Necropolitics

This project begins with an imagined future timeline; 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.”

Siting

Early work for this thesis began with a process of collection; this method of cataloging was inspired by the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), with many of the sites and practices captured being drawn from the vein of ‘land use’ as a categorical classifier. Using this method of cataloging, a precursory meta-archive was assembled as a tool for project orientation. Of the practices and projects organized within the fold, two emerged as critically engaged with archival and necropolitical practices:

+ 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

A cursory scan of these sites identified latent typologies embedded within the uniquely heterotopic landscapes. Satellite relays, mining infrastructure, vestigial structures, and airports all coalesce on Svalbard into a curiously post-extractive attitude - now focused on adventure tourism and climate science, this disposition serves as a thin veil for continued geopolitical and economic interest in reuse/reorientation of exhausted land. Archives reoccupy the shafts of coal mines, replacing the contents with digital media, genetic material, and historical artifacts. One particular vault studied (the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) is an archive dedicated to replicating agricultural gene banks from around the world, often touted as a doomsday proof vault. Despite this projected image, the vault still faces challenges in its operations, including flooding due to climate change and permafrost melt. Using the seed vault as a starting point – selected from a field of latent typologies – Replicant Architecture began a process of translation and reinterpretation, seeking out new possibilities for land previously plagued by the scarring of anthropocentric-centered morphologies.

Further analysis reveals 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. Replicant Architecture seeks to translate between two seemingly disparate, polarized, and deeply complex sites; it identifies shared moments and spatial interventions, seeking to learn from one in order to undo the other.

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.

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.

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?

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...

Finding its footing within the former Camp Grayling, Replicant Architecture follows a narrative through the Land. Six proposed studies meandering through an environment riddled with histories of extraction, imposition, and exhaustion. These studies undo as much as they build up, and represent multiscalar timeframes within composite imagery.

embassy (i)

The first of the six allegorical architectures is found at the former command center of the military training ground - ‘embassy(i)’ contains an info center, a research lab, offices, and a paperwork/photo archive documenting historical land use at the site in question. Collocated on site are myriad tools and arrays used for environmental conditions monitoring, including collecting atmospheric data and water samples.

This embassy serves as a grounding point for subsequent explorations by framing out an antithetical typology embodying the traps and tropes of an industry that too often embellishes the reach of its agency; this overreach is compounded by complicity when engaging with power structures and material ecologies. This embassy is useful simply because it embodies and visualizes what we seek to avoid. The architecture indulges in overly technocratic solutions - solar panels plaster the facades, wind turbines whir softly on the horizon, and tanks of algae are used both to purifying the polluted waters of Lake Margrethe and as a source of biofuel. Evidences of externalized loci of control are manifest everywhere. The embassy shows us what it looks like when we operate within the existing frameworks that pervade modernity.

This architecture stands as a critique of insular modes of thinking and production that presume the power to save a planet previously privileged in not bearing the scar of the anthropocene upon its face.

the wind keeper

Following a path out of the former command center, southerly along a dirt road, we come upon a desolate, burned, and bombed out landscape. Here, an artillery range once cleared a swath of forest to drill death delivery methods, genericized for global contexts. This site is now imagined as home to a precious withdrawal from Svalbard’s cryochambers: jack pine seeds, once populous and not too long ago endangered, now repopulate the land and take root amid patches of pockmarked earth.

As the reseeding process is underway, the artificial structures that stand here take on the form of a pavilion - they are transitory shelters for the contents encapsulated within and moments of reprieve for visitors interacting with this new form of living archive. They come in a variety of formal configurations, with some being more open and others forming a porous membrane. This range of conditions is not meant to adapt to global contexts, but rather allow everything from birds to pollinators to reinhabit the archive and reinterpret it for their own use thus enabling a living + breathing system of collection in a landscape otherwise rendered inhospitable to life.

The wind keeper is a stand-in for more natural remediation, and is meant to decay with time, decenter itself, and become reappropriated by the systems that eventually re-find their home as the native jack pine flourishes. It is a scaffolding, just enough architecture upon which to graft.

This intervention may serve as one imagined starting node for the reinterpretation of white box archivist practices.

forest of fossils

South of the artillery range, a once contiguous forest is punctuated by freshly abandoned pumpjacks, derricks, and horseheads. The derelict frames of these rigs riddle the wooded land atop rings of compacted earth, evidence of past private extractions that strangely co-occupied military-owned land. These new rings form a barrier around the abandoned equipment, sanctioning off the land where traces of industrial activity remain.

A sort of interment is performed as soil is phytoremediated, equipment is dismantled, and toxic material contained. The rings are sloped inwards so as to discourage interaction with the healing patches, and to allow egress from the center. Portions of the horseheads and derricks that can remain form a grafting trellis for the forest flora that springs up around it, reclaiming the territory. Slowly, we see the return of megafauna like the black bear - these creatures have largely vacated the area due to industrial and military activity surrounding Grayling.

This intervention attempts to blend with its environment and stitch together pockets that have been undone. It focuses on repairing what has been damaged and containing what continues to cause harm.

a song for the arctic

Along the Manistee River, we see one of two majorly polluted wetlands adjacent to the former camp at Grayling. Here, the military relentlessly dumped PFAS, exceeding allowable limits established by EGLE, the DNR, and the regional state government administering to Michigama. Operating above the law and with regard for neither environmental desecration nor judiciary reprimand, the end effect of this militant indiscretion has resulted in the complete destruction of avian nesting habitats and the extinction of the native Arctic Grayling, a fish after which the area was originally named.

R-A deposits a delicately footed structure here, bridging from firm soil to wetland marsh - the gantry forms a three-part relationship between humans, birds, and fish inhabiting the land and filtering through the water. Minimalism, repopulation efforts, and principles of coexistence guide this system - a multifaceted interface emerges for each of the three focus groups.

An observation deck dances across the grass, suspending bipedal visitors away from the marsh.
A protective ring forms permeable, shielded nesting grounds for native sandhill cranes.
A sunken version of the same structure creates shallow and stable breeding grounds, waters that were previously dredged, replicating amenable conditions for the reintroduction of the Arctic Grayling.

This vertically integrated stage for interaction facilitates and embraces rebirth of knowledge while celebrating its transience. Its adjacency to the Manistee River forces engagement with cyclical timescapes, inherently connected to the activities of nesting, birth, and migration historic to the area.

This advent embodies design for the Other, and requires attention to the positioning of oneself within the floating world, ukiyo, and adjacent to the ever-present pantheon of non-human actors.

a monument to Nothing

Further north, almost beyond the bounds of the camp’s territory but still engulfed within it, a patch of old growth forest stands - it’s the last of its kind in Michigama. These forests were preserved during an age of heavy logging in the region that ravished the land. Ironically, the only reason these ancient trees still stand are because they were set aside as a monument by the very timber barons that clear cut the area. Even within the bounds of the preserve itself, museums + monuments to logging and logging practices abound. A field of stumps can be found here as well, studding the earth within swaths of open land - the clearings rip patches of the old growth forest open to the sky, a direct result of poor timber harvesting practices and irresponsible land management that began to eat into this stand of trees right before they were protected. These stumps, charred and immovable, have rendered the surrounding soil barren, and permanently prevent future growth of the same tree species without a complete replacement of the entire topsoil layer.

These stumps could be considered a counter-memorial, a preserve within a preserve that does not allow us to forget the giant trees that once stood proud, nor the extraction that rendered them unable to return to this land.

Here, in the patch of barren earth, stands a monument to Nothing - a counter-monument to accompany the site of the counter-memorial. Upon this soil – and just for a moment – ideas of memetic replication (the act of forgetting) are deployed as a tool of appropriation. By choosing to forget, we also choose what to remember/enshrine. This monument honors nothing from the past of extraction - not tools, not systems, not capitalist ‘pioneers’ nor their typologies of building wrought from stolen harvests. Rather, it remains cryptic and sits quietly among the stumps that serve as witnesses; it bides its time while new life is grafted on its surface, and new plants revitalize the surrounding soil. The land begins its own process of forgetting amongst the wooden graves of its ghosts.

chamber of reflection

The final installation of six imagined architectures finds itself nestled amid the wires, piping, and ruins at the heart of the former camp previously occupying Grayling. Rising out of the husk of an old command center—situated along a strip of pavement once understood as an airfield—a Prophecy Chamber hums softly; its tensile domes house projections, coiled cables snake through tall grass back to the embassy, and satellites creak into place to take aim at the heavens to communicate with stars. Visitation to the Chamber is a requirement when passing through these lands, asking nothing of the visitor except a moment of their time to reflect and reposition the self. In the same way this land was previously used as a grounds for testing, mapping, and deploying machinations of military procedure and protocol, it now serves as a place for projecting alternative futures and resisting its own appropriation towards disagreeable modi operandi.

This final Moment reflects on Replicant Architecture as a whole, both as a collection of spatial moments and as a thesis positing that what exists is only one possible version of what could have been. Replicant Architecture is a means for testing, a way of seeing, and a blaze along the trail to outright refusal of modern industry; it is a path running alongside and intertwined with the need to rethink production, consumption, and material culture. It is self-critical, and extends its reach to connect with similar sites of simulation and necropolitical positionalities across the world.

The act of informed Simulation could be considered Prophecy at times, the partial visioning of a possible moment embedded in the landscape. Every act of design envisions a possible future, assumed or intentional - Replicant Architecture envisions a future opposed to conquest, control, abject Use of land, and the complicity of Architecture in creating places to enact or rehearse systemic violence. It seeks to restore stolen agency and commandeer the spatial skillset of the modern architect towards a future with more life and less violence.

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.

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.

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