This unit aims to expand architecture as a support structure for acting in troubled sites at the intersection of environmental, political, and social crises. We focused on sites and situations that suffer from the impacts of the petroleum industry in the ecologies around Mossmorran Chemical Plant in Fife and examined what architecture can do in preparing the ground towards a post-petroleum world. The preparation of ground involves combining the questions of topos, typos, and tectonics with the issues of temporality and performativity, to better understand architecture as a work in process and acts of preparation, repair, transformation and maintenance.
Experimenting with various methods such as Fictions, Characterisations, Thick Sections, and Construction of Tables, students sought to thicken the description of the site and imagined post-petroleum scenarios. The design of support structures brought precision to such scenarios and made them realisable. The projects collectively invite us to pay attention to the complexity of constructing a world that is uncertain and vulnerable and that requires constant maintenance, support, and care.