ZACH SMITH An American Miner’s Cemetery
ADVISOR: Hansjörg Göritz
BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURE
Since the dawn of time, Man has scoured the Earth for its useful minerals, its energy, often polluting the environment and surrounding populations with its practices. In a future scenario, where renewable sources of energy have replaced coal and other fossil fuels, TVA must provide retribution for those whom they have wronged. Kingston Fossil Plant, the site of a fly ash spill in 2008, shall become an American Miners Cemetery, a place for all those whose lives were shorted by the refining of resources. TVA shall revitalize the expansive fields of fly-ash detention and replace them with orchards of trees. The fly ash on site shall be generated into masonry construction products. This fly ash, the product of the precious resource that has shortened the lives of so many people, will forever memorialize them in profane, eternal stones. The smokestacks and generator frame cuts shall remain in a silent courtyard of stillness, invoking profane and sublime emotions upon those of the future who visit this place. They will come here and they will see these monuments. These are the monuments of energies past. Huge in scale and terrifying in being, they will teach people who exist in the future about the mistakes of energies past.