Waste, Monument, and Incomplete Permanence : The Terrils Jumeaux in Nord-Pas-de-Calais

Abstract

This thesis begins with a question about preservation. If the object is a single building, it can usually be framed through conservation, restoration, renovation, or adaptive reuse. But what happens when the site is not a building, and not even a conventional infrastructural ruin, but an artificial landscape? Focusing on the Terrils Jumeaux, twin terrils, or slag heaps formed from coal-mining spoil, in the UNESCO-listed Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin, this project asks how such a site should be preserved when its primary archive is already the ground itself. Historically, the site moved from farmland to coal mining, then to spoil heaps, waste ground, ecological surface, and eventually to a heritage landscape. What makes the terril important is that it is both highly visible and historically residual: materially, it emerged as industrial byproduct, yet from a distance it reads almost like a mountain, with the silhouette of a monument. Rather than simply extending UNESCO’s designation of the basin as heritage, this thesis asks how preservation should operate at the scale of this specific site, where the history of extraction survives not as a building or ruin, but as a transformed body of ground. Because the Terrils Jumeaux are a pair rather than a singular object, the project takes their twin condition as the basis for preservation through juxtaposition rather than equivalence. One terril is left largely untouched, open to erosion, weathering, vegetation growth, and temporal indeterminacy. The other is actively entered through excavation, where rooms are carved into the terril ground for exhibition, archive, research, conservation, reading, observation, and public gathering. In this excavated terril, cutting into the ground becomes an archaeological act, even though the landscape itself is artificial. The displaced terril material is not removed as waste, but collected, studied, and curated as evidence of the site’s formation. Vegetation, climate, and surface change are also brought into the project through rooms that observe, archive, and exhibit the terril as a changing body. Through the contrast between these two conditions, the thesis defines preservation as incomplete permanence: not the stabilization of a finished past, but the careful maintenance of tension between exposure and intervention, erosion and excavation, monumentality and residue, memory and change.