Reshaping Remnants: Architecture Amid Inheritance and Uncertainty

Abstract

The way we design architecture today is teleological in its approach. Architects face a crisis of relevance in an era of uncertainty and climate change, where rigid design processes fail to engage with ecological crises and material realities. This thesis critiques the discipline’s short-sightedness and reliance on predetermined standardization, proposing an alternative design methodology that embraces inherited, irregular conditions and designs for geologic timescales—working with surplus materials, composing rather than dictating form, and allowing longevity to drive architectural response. Using the post-strip-mining Appalachian landscape and discarded stone as fodder, Reshaping Remnants explores how hyper-local, material-driven sequencing and land-based timescales can redefine architectural practice. The project stitches waste rock and debris strewn in the aftermath of strip mining into a field of structures that restore the watershed while addressing immediate human and non-human needs. At the same time, it challenges architecture’s conventional temporality by designing for earthly timespans, suggesting that true sustainability emerges when architecture outlives its short-term purpose and transgresses the limited purview of teleological thinking. Architecture, like all terrestrial life, is not static. How can it transcend the hubris of immediate authorship and instead transform through time, accommodating emergent futures and contextual abundance? By designing for longevity and leaving space for contingency, this approach resists the notion of fixed form, arguing that architecture becomes truly sustainable when it shifts from imposition to orchestration—choreographing the conditions it inherits rather than forcing material to obey a predetermined vision.