Life : Propagated
Columbia GSAPP Advanced Studio V
Year: 2022 Fall
Location: Tomkins Cove Quarry, Stony Point Town , New York
Type: Research Lab
Instructor: Lindy Roy
Team work: Myungju Ko, Agnes Anggada
Just as humans accelerated existential change to our world’s ecosystem, our project hopes to accelerate the regrowth of life, propagating and creating a symbiosis between humans and nature. We are taking a stance of welcoming the entropic process as part of the natural cycle of life, which creates a constantly changing and emerging new nature. “Life: Propagated” will act as a substrate which allows organisms to live, grow, and exist in its reemerging life sustaining environment.
The quarry is quietly alive, growing, flooding, constantly changing, and flora and fauna species slowly adapt with the water level change and propagate to higher ground as time goes by. Our approach is to reorganize, redistribute, and reconfigure these existing resources on the site. By carving in and building around, we aim to reorganize new negative spaces for humans and species to inhabit, interact and observe.
Stony Point Town Flora and Fauna
In the 1600s, the town was home to the Ramapough indigenous population until the first Dutch settler arrived in the 1640s. Then, Colonial Dutch and English settlers began to purchase land from the indigenous population. The land once thrived with indigenous flora and fauna species until the 2 Tomkins Brothers purchased 20 acres of land to produce lime in 1838. Since then, economic growth skyrocketed in the town based on the industry of limestone mining. 174 years later, after extracting 275 feet deep and 200 acre wide of limestone, in 2012, the quarry operation was finally stopped. As a result of this extensive extraction, the local ecology conditions have been permanently changed.
Most of Stony Point is currently under the “protected” category because of its threatened natural communities and rare flora and fauna. So these are the threatened fauna species we found from the New York Department of Conservation, that ranges from birds, reptiles, fish, and insects.
What is now an abandoned mining site was once a nature-centric economy, home to mammals, birds, fish, plants, fungi, and bacteria. It is such a shame that a quarry this small relative to the huge parks, river and nature surrounding, could create such a negative impact to the indigenous ecological communities.
Tomkins Cove Quarry
BEFORE MINING:
So as I have mentioned before, pre-1938 when the Ramapough indigenous population still occupied the area, Tomkins Cove was a diverse, natural landscape of hills and valleys, forests and wetlands, marshes and streams, with plenty of different ecological communities. The different populations lived in the relative state of homeostasis.
DURING MINING:
100 YEARS AGO, The formerly low entropic-state changed drastically due to logging, burning, and excavating limestone. Natural flora and fauna habitats and self-sustaining ecosystems were disturbed and destroyed, the layers of the earth’s strata were manipulated and exposed, and water and air compositions were also altered. This created the imbalance of human influence as being too great to the rest of the biosphere.
AFTER MINING:
10 YEARS AGO, after 174 years of excavation finally stopped, the drastically changed terrain caused extensive water loss and soil erosion, exposing an extensive amount of bedrock to the surface, and also seeping groundwater into the center of the quarry. This all resulted in an almost unworldly environment, contrasting to its surroundings, and a unique state of site conditions.
NOW and FUTURE: So, our site can be seen as one of the examples of accelerating entropy created by an industrial society. We imagine the future of the quarry as embracing the unique microclimates with the newly exposed surfaces in sun or shade, altered compositions of soil and water, as new habitats teeming with new life.
Sunlight, Soil PH, Humidity
There are emerging microclimates in our site, and we thought that there are three main factors that shape the habitats for new lifes, which is sun, humidity and soil.
- Sun (Sunlight Exposure Diagram)
Human behavior has created a new surface morphology and soil structure of lands. By digging into the ground with heavy equipment, a hierarchy of shadowed parts and sun-exposed parts was created in the changed terrain.
The trees that had previously gently covered the terrain eradicated and the quarry sunlight exposure surface becomes dynamic, as you can see here, reddish color indicates more exposure to the sunlight and the blue indicates the opposite.
2. The Second one is the Soil PH
After mining, the pH of mine soils significantly increased due to the solid wastes. and the pH value was significantly correlated with soil nutrients and enzyme activities; and thus, tolerant grass species are more easily established in such an alkaline soil.
3. Humidity
Also, since the quarry intersects aquifer, it severely affects the transport of groundwater. The water may just flow out of the aquifer into the mine pit at very high velocity, which has a critical impact on the surrounding humidity. Also, since the quarry lagoon contains a better water quality because it has lower nutrient concentration, it has a large possibility to contain a novel ecosystem.
These three factors form each axis, creating an environment in which not only the indigenous species present on the site, but also plants growing only in wetlands that had not previously thrived or water weeds growing in alkaline water. In addition, hard water enriched with minerals through mining operation has also made limescale crystallization in surrounding terrains. This model acts as a metaphor of life in the quarry, which can grow spontaneously according to the changing entropic scenarios.
We mapped out the possible life cycles of different threatened fauna that can live in symbiosis in one big ecosystem. Each species has its own lifecycle and habitat needs, such as the birds feeding off of the dragonflies, and the dragonflies needing some humid soil shallow waters to reproduce, and butterflies feeding off of the flowering plants nectar and reproducing on the oak trees, also microorganisms in the soil and waterfowls feeding off of aquatic vegetation.
The trail will give humans a wild garden experience, planting seeds to show how life can grow out of something as damaging as an abandoned quarry. Some of the steeper trails will have a built structure that can be an artificial reef for aquatic life to propagate on as water levels rise. With the uncertainty of the future, slowly the trails could be submerged underwater and the quarry will be a place to commemorate the possibilities of life after a catastrophe.
Our approach is to reorganize, redistribute, and reconfigure these existing resources on the site. By carving in and building around, we aim to reorganize new negative spaces for humans and species to inhabit, interact and observe.
New mounds will be made out of these dug out soils. This will be a place where flora and fauna are encountered with humans. Nature will belong to the spaces, in the interior and exterior, through the sunken plaza, watering holes and mounds on the roofscape.
And this new space will be connected with the quarry by one linear staircase. We are calling this a “Periscope” which means “an instrument for observation over, around or through conditions that prevents direct line-of-sight from concealed position.
Periscope is the literal and metaphorical connection between nature and humans. It is not uni-directional, but it is two-sided. the device for access to the nature and also being observed by outside)
PERISCOPE Plan
This opaque linear tunnel cuts through the earth and goes deep into the center of the quarry. Through a delicate linear walkway we are trying to be minimally intrusive to the environment, but still providing access to the deepest level of the quarry. This periscope will have openings to the trails around the quarry, and humans will be able to experience, observe and research land and aquatic life.
Similar to the structure of the trail, the periscope extends to the bottom of the pond to become an artificial reef for aquatic life to propagate on as water levels rise.
Roof Layer : The roofscape has curving mounds with new paths and vegetation, and sand ripples capture rainwater to the watering holes.
Ground Layer: Sloping ramps gradually bring humans and species into the ground level.
Underground Layer : The water tanks are located underground to store rainwater for reuse.
We are imagining a scenario where the spaces are inhabited for ecologists and researchers, with spaces that could be programmed as auditorium, library, research labs and storage, and office spaces. But we imagine the spaces for flexible use, such as being a place for communal living or working, for the local communities or as a place for refuge in the future.
With the irreversible impact of industry, land cannot physically go back to what it was before. Instead, we hope to reevaluate the relationship between nature and construction as not just merely reconstructing based on aesthetics, but thinking beyond and designing with thoughtfulness and towards an uncertain future.
By embracing nature to reclaim the land, we hope that our project can be a model where humans and nature can live in symbiosis, and where significant change in our mindset can be implemented, away from human centric design but towards a life centric design.