Architecture of Elsewhere: A Center for Accountability at the Site of Extraction

Abstract

Contemporary building and design practices suffer from an inherent detachment from the harmful extractive processes that sustain them. To transition away from a carbon-based economy, architecture must become an active agent in narrowing the gap between itself and these hidden externalities elsewhere. The Center for Accountability seeks to address the issue of elsewhere by offering a new model for hyper-local mine governance in Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, where several harmful copper and nickel mines await regulatory approval. It functions as a regulatory facility that incentivises best practices, centers local and indigenous knowledge, and challenges the neoliberal underpinnings of contemporary extraction. The center not only employs a Federal Land Trust model as its conceptual framework, but it architecturalizes the many regulatory and supporting bodies within it in functional and perceptual ways. Regulatory bodies shift, rotate and float around the user, who is given open access to the facility through a pedestrian circuit. Visitors may visit the Center to protest mine operations, collaborate with activists and scientists, or simply eat a meal alongside mine workers, all while bearing witness to the transforming landscape around them. The Center’s largest components - its structure, cladding and foundation

reuse elements from the abundant shuttered mine facilities that dot its immediate site, allowing the building’s form to act as a floating datum against which the landscape might be measured.