A planet in the scale of a pellet in the stomach of a shiner in the dream of a gull

The course is organized as a research-by-design seminar that charts environmental uncertainty and contends with the role of spatial practices in territorial and ecological transformations. Central to our attention is the region of western Pennsylvania, its rivers, forests, fracklands, cities and its associated social, political, cultural and material geographies. Fluid, unstable and queer, this is a territory in which binaries between natural/artificial, human/ non-human, land/water begin to crumble. The seminar will foster interdisciplinary thinking and new methods of research and documentation, bringing architecture closer to social engagement, environmental policy, and on-site fieldwork. In the seminar we will reclaim the map as a projective and narrative device to produce evidence and trace multispecies alliances across different scales in this ecologically sensitive environment. During our weekly meetings, we will read, lead individual and group tutorials, have discussions and guest lectures from interlocutors, environmental activists and advocacy organizations in the region.

Abundant in anthracite and bituminous coal, the mines of Western Pennsylvania fueled the proverbial Second Industrial Revolution during the late nineteenth century. With gas trapped in the sedimentary rock of the Marcellus Shale, which stretches throughout most of the Appalachian Basin, the region became, once again, a productive node in the intimately-connected global energy network. At the western edge of Pittsburgh’s Low Plateau on the bank of the Ohio River in Beaver County an ethane cracker plant —the scale of 150 Astroturf-covered soccer fields—processes those very petrochemical byproducts of fracking and turns them into plastic “nurdles.” The size of a small pearl, these pre-production plastic pellets are the elementary unit for most of the plastic products that surround, seal, build, protect, disrupt, and pollute life on this planet. The cracker’s tentacles unfold hundreds of miles across the region with pipelines and rail system of freight cars to meet drilling sites that extend thousand feet below the ground. It is in this extractivist nexus where reproductive violence is enacted, maintained, and governed but also where it is most exposed and, perhaps, vulnerable.