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Architecting an Empty Tomb From the Scars of Mining's Past

Alexis Quinteros Salazar's "Mining Cenotaph" suggests new ways to reclaim, resettle, and memorialize our ruins.
Photo via Alexis Quinteros Salazar

Ruins have a particular connotation in the modern Western consciousness as classical buildings fallen into disrepair. We associate the term with crumbling columns, the shell of the Roman colosseum, the remains of an ancient civilization that we can look to and wonder: what went wrong?

What we don't consider as much are the ruins of our present day.

"Ruin porn" has emerged to describe the fetishizing of contemporary ruins, such as the abandoned factories of Detroit that are being slowly rehabilitated out of their ruinate status. But it's not just old buildings that become ruins. Through mining and drilling, the leveling of forests and mountains, we've turned our natural landscape into ruins, too.

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Like the fenced-off remnants of old Rome left for tourists to ogle, the independent Chilean architect Alexis Quintero​s Salazar wants to turn those ruined landscapes into museums, starting with his home country.

Photo via Alexis Quinteros Salazar

Salazar's "Mining Cen​otaph," a hypothetical proposal set in Andacollo, Chile—and winner of one of the Royal Institute of British Architects' prestigious President's Medals—transforms an abandoned copper mine into an institution that allows visitors to contemplate the environmental and political impact of mining. The museum is built into the mine's leftover crater, stretching down into the excavated absence that forms the paradoxical substance of the mine.

In the region's native Quechua language, Andacollo means "copper hill." "It was at the height of its activity about 60 years ago, when there was copper and gold mined in commercial quantities," Salazar wrote in an email interview. "The project seeks to understand the phenomenon of mining waste"—called tailings—"as part of a fundamental historical and symbolic legacy in the identity of Andacollo."

It's fitting that Salazar calls his work a cenotaph, Latin for "empty tomb." It suggests a monument that stands for an absence—just as a mine is something of a monument to its missing metals. The term is often used as a reference to the 18th-century French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée's proposed Cenotaph for Newton, an impossibly large spherical building whose empty interior chamber would be punched with holes to simulate the constellations rotating around the Earth.

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Photo via Alexis Quinteros Salazar

Salazar's museum has an echo of those constellations. Cut-outs in the top of the structure bring in light, and at the same time serve as a metaphor for the mining process—shedding light on the consequences of mining, both literally and figuratively.

"He takes that same approach and puts it into this very terrestrial circumstance," said Geoff Manaugh, ​editor of BLDGblog and a critic of experimental architecture. "With this dirty, mined-out hole in the ground, he still brings in the stars." Turning the mine into a tomb is "a first step towards the revitalization of a current negative memory and historical burden," the architect explained.

During a family visit to an old nitrate mine near Iquique as a child, Salazar was struck by how the infrastructure of the mining town enshrined the hopes of its miners for better lives—the mine itself like a scar leftover from a moment in Chilean development, when natural resources were sacrificed for economic gain.

A national park is one example of such a landscape museum—we want to preserve the untouched nature, but we can't put it behind glass.

"Mining manifests as an identifying feature in history," Salazar said. It doesn't matter whether we decide to monumentalize our environmental degradation or not, because Chile's historical fingerprints are already a monument, "petrified by landscape architecture and time."

Salazar's project fits in the vein of historic preservation, but it twists our conventional notions of what an important ruin should look like. Why shouldn't we view our ruined landscapes the same way we view the fragments of bygone civilizations? "It's interesting to take this notion of public experience and bring it to a place people tend not to look at or think about," Manaugh said. A national park is one example of such a landscape museum—we want to preserve the untouched nature, but we can't put it behind glass.

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The Mining Cenotaph takes this preservation one step further, directing it toward something we might not want to acknowledge, but should.

Photo via Alexis Quinteros Salazar

Salazar's intricate transformation of the mine into an exhibition is part of this educational process. "If you only just put up a historic plaque and say this is the site of a former mine, you're not going to get people the necessarily interpretive distance to see it differently," Manaugh said. "But by bringing people into museum you can effect a different type of experience."

This hypothetical mine museum transforms an old, unused post-industrial space in a way that New Yorkers might find familiar in the High Line—an elevated railway that trains occasionally (and fatally) fell off of before it became a public park surrounded by high-rent condos. But great architecture sometimes has a way of erasing history completely, masking places we might once have thought were dangerous or distasteful. The strength of Salazar's project is that he chooses to embrace the place's history instead of whitewashing it.

The same strategy was used in Peter Latz's Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in Germany, a park that flows in and around an old coal and steel factory but leaves the enormous mechanisms of industry untouched. The modern ruins remain as a reminder of what it took to make the country what it is today. But adaptive reuse also makes the space more dynamic than a static museum—it's a living, breathing park. "Adaptive reuse is based on the fact that most architectural structures have a much longer lifespan than the people and activities that initially generated it," said John James Pron, an architecture professor at Temple University. "Buildings must have functions to activate them."

Photo via Alexis Quinteros Salazar

We can no longer afford the luxury of fetishizing old ruins—not when there are new purposes that could be retrofitted to the defunct structures of our past. Glass can't surround everything. "There are so many damaged landscapes in the urban hinterland and cities are getting so crowded that people are getting pushed further out," Manaugh says. "We're discovering broken landscapes on the periphery and we need to resettle them."

In the case of the Mining Cenotaph, landscape is becoming architecture and architecture landscape. Buildings are becoming ruins and ruins are becoming buildings. We are finding new ways to work within the scars we've carved in the earth and learning how to populate them again, to turn old wreckage into new habitats without repeating the same mistakes.