The View from Down Here: The Airfield Beyond Empire

Abstract

North Field, a World War II-era airfield on the island of Tinian, embodies the enduring impact of military infrastructure on land, people, and memory. Once the busiest airfield in the world, its relentless flatness and placelessness reflect a larger system of logistical landscape left frozen in time. “The View from Down Here” critiques the U.S. Department of Defense as the world’s most prolific landscape architect, shaping global terrains through both infrastructural transformation and its representation. Using archival and field research, counter mapping, and speculative design, this project unsettles the airfield’s rigid flatness. Taking on North Field’s four runways, site-specific interventions expose buried histories still held in the landscape, re-presenting the infrastructure of empire at a multitude of scales and temporalities, where the present intertwines with the past and future. This project re-imagines technical landscapes as sites of remembrance, resistance, and life; asking the question―what happens after empire and wasteland?