Guilty Landscapes

Guilty Landscapes Marco Nieto

Autopsia in Abstentia

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Surface Ex_Tension

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Fluidic Echo

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Extractive Exchange

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Ashes to Ashes

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his portfolio’s motif is curated around the examination of a range of landscapes that have been effectively manipulated by various forms of environmental exploitation - nuclear collapse, coastal cultivation, inadequate waste infrastructure, copper extraction, and desert waste - that control and suppress optimistic design strategies. These areas are landscapes where the experience of beauty and peace is complicated by the memory and knowledge of our anthropogenic impact on the environment, thus creating guilty landscapes. The sites that have resulted from the neglect, uncertainty, and malfeasance of these regions have become voids, or sociological blind spots. The existing voids act as petrified reminders of an overwhelming trauma that challenge any desire to forget, rupturing symbolic worlds and social order.

However, they can also be utilized and re-staged as a tool to raise awareness, sensitivity, concern, and action that documents a hopeful relationship between flora, fauna, infrastructure, and energy.

The following projects represent explorations of reorienting phenomenology, correcting our mistakes, and considering the world during and after planetary acupuncture, once it has crossed the finish line and the concept of collapse becomes a bygone era. By synthesizing the cosmology of parallels between guilt and atonement, I learned that we must be able to look at the past conditions of transformation, present conditions of neglect, and the future possibilities of resilience in order to overcome collapse and prevent voids as they happens around us. A simple suggestion of malleability for climatic interventions can provide a platform for environments to seek the help they need.

Marco Nieto

Autopsia in Abstentia A post-mortem examination of a post-nuclear landscape

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his thesis explores the complicated history and identity crisis of Chernobyl by examining its post-mortem reality through ameliorative apparatus that allow it to heal from its trauma. It investigates the death or fallout of an event while not being present at it by using the remnants and traces of its existence.

This has helped create a profound framework focused on process and factors of time, allowing for the embedding of five specific interventions that react and respond to the pain of the existing environment: Radiosynthetic Needle, Bioremedial Bubbles, Reverse Repository, Half-Life Lab, and Carbo Conclusus.

The specific conditions or issues that are targeted include nuclear destruction, nuclear waste, memory and storage, information and monitoring, and carbon capture. These apparatuses vary in scale and scope in order to better comprehend the magnitude and severity of nuclear collapse by fragmenting the site into understandable bits. By fusing high-technology with high-typology, the interventions work in tandem and achieve synchronization between artificial and natural as opposed to obstructing each other’s goals, resulting in an industrial idyll that uncovers and stimulates the autopsy of collapse.

Chernobyl, Ukraine Adaptive Apparatus Spring 2020 Special thanks to thesis advisor El Hadi Jazairy Burton L. Kampner Memorial Award for most outstanding thesis project Featured in SuckerPunch Featured in Study Architecture

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Autopsia in Abstentia Introduction 04

Marco Nieto On April 26th, 1986, a safety test on the backup cooling system of reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine was deemed so routine that the plant’s director didn’t even bother showing up. However, it quickly spiraled out of control as an unexpected power surge and steam buildup led to a series of explosions that blew apart one of four reactors. Considered history’s worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl disaster released an unfathomable amount of radiation in the atmosphere, and killed 31 people directly, including 28 workers and firefighters who died of acute radiation poisoning during the cleanup. Experts believe it likewise caused tens of thousands of premature deaths related to cancer throughout all of Europe, though the exact number is disputed and actively hidden by the government. To this day, the area around the plant remains so contaminated that it is officially closed off to human habitation and the plant itself is covered by a steel sarcophagus. The site now functions as a critical area of horror that is riddled with complicated memories of pain and guilt.

Timeline of the Chernobyl incident and its repercussions.

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Autopsia in Abstentia History 06

Marco Nieto By assembling an open landscape system made of diverse interventions in close proximity to the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Autopsia in Abstentia is able to focus on re-working and appropriating a set of conditions that affect the local, environmental, and biopolitical. Each of the five interventions target existing issues where the experience of beauty and peace is complicated by the memory and knowledge of human’s impact on nature and work together as a larger system that examine the possibility of co-habitation and co-existence.

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Autopsia in Abstentia Conceptual System Plan 08

Marco Nieto

Radiosynthetic Needle Nuclear disasters annihilate all traces of identity-driven spaces, forcing the environment to be caught between states of heterotopia and reality at the same time. Now existing on the edge of nostalgia, these evidence fields that once yielded multispecies and multicultural life have lost their mosaic of temporal arcs and spatial rhythms. Nothing can be done except to wait thousands of years for the planet to slowly heal from its wounds. This intervention, embedded deep in the radiated landscape, proposes an adaptive apparatus that expedites the long healing process at the hyperobject scale through various mechanical processes that target contaminated environments through geo-engineering.

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Autopsia in Abstentia

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto Imagining the landscape as a body in pain, the system resembles a thin needle that pierces the earth and stimulates a healing response through the Pripyat river, relieving Chernobyl of its dysphoria. The benefit of a vertical organization allows for multiple responses to occur simultaneously, each affecting a separate stratum of the earth. A magnetic field in the form of an umbrella shields communities from radioactive rays, deflecting them in directions that avoid organic life. A preventative measure in the form of polar arrayed dosimeters scans worldwide channels in search of abnormal radiation levels. A rotating axel generates biological reductive agents that are dispersed towards tagged events and mitigate contamination. These technologies function as an underwater watchtower, scanning the surrounding sites for any potential problematic traces that can be dealt with.

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Autopsia in Abstentia Section Perspective 12

Marco Nieto

Bioremedial Bubbles Transuranic nuclear waste, a byproduct of nuclear production, is not only harmful but also inutile in that it does not boast a current means of recycling. Often abandoned in remote and distant sites, over 250,000 tons of this waste is left to sit idle, unable to produce a beneficial function for society. This intervention looks at the bioremediation of radioactive waste and proposes the use of radiotrophic fungi to catalyze chemical reactions and allow for decontamination, turning the half-life of harmful radiation into the second life of harmless chemical energy that could be utilized in local communities as a replacement for unsustainable fossil fuels.

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Autopsia in Abstentia

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto The intervention, whose forms are derived from mushrooms and their caps, offers an educational experience for users through bridges and transparent facades. These bubbles grow fungi capable of radiosynthesis through a complicated chain of events. A concrete activation chamber located directly underneath the base of the half-dome hosts nuclear waste, allowing its radiation to contaminate egg-shaped bulbs above. Cryptococcus neoformans, a melanin containing fungi that is stored in the decanter on the left, is macerated by a liquid solution that is then extracted through pneumatic pipes and dropped into nozzles leading into the prepared bulbs, igniting the radiosynthesis process.

After several weeks of being housed in a climate-controlled growth sphere, the chemical reaction has taken place and produced a transmuted form of nuclear waste that is useful to future generations.

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Autopsia in Abstentia Section Perspective 16

Marco Nieto

Reverse Repository Current containment protocols call for the storage of millions of barrels of highly radioactive waste in secure underground chambers 2,150 feet beneath the surface where they remain isolated until their risk has diminished, which could take up to 100,000 years. This waste is often transferred into large concrete storage casks where they are then disposed and stored of in deep geological spaces called repositories.

It is imperative that these sites remain undisturbed for the duration of the decaying process, in effort to ensure public and environmental safety. This intervention proposes the memorialization of the traditional underground organization and ritual of a repository through an above-ground marker that acknowledges the burial process while additionally warning present, near future, and distant future visitors of the consequences and dangers it possesses.

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Autopsia in Abstentia

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto The spaces surrounding and leading into the scheme offer an educational means for the public to understand the intellectual journey relating to the nuclear industry and its funeral procession. As they begin to approach the culmination of the site marker, and further stimulated by anechoic qualities and a reorienting experience, they begin to acknowledge the danger of human intrusion. Symbolized by a massive resonance chamber, the final monument itself actively animates the ideological capacity of the intangible waste hidden far below the earth.

Sounds echo throughout the chamber, allowing users to reflect on the afterlife of nuclear waste and the birth of our permanence. The qualities of this monolithic architecture designed for the future also functions as an experimental exhibit for the present through a vertical memory wall that contains soil samples and artifacts of nuclear events.

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Autopsia in Abstentia Section Perspective 20

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Half-Life Lab Half-life is the time taken for the radioactivity of a specific isotope to decay to half of its original value, becoming safe to handle. Scientists use this method of dating to determine the approximate age of organic objects and thus the story of its origins and their history of human use. The exploration into this characteristic property creates an awareness of mortality, death rates, and lasting signatures. In other words, understanding halflives can allow us to frame our pre-determined existence within the greater rhythmic cycle of time. This intervention provides monitoring, data storage, laboratory equipment, and information accessibility in order to provide a new transparency to the nuclear industry and their efforts, while also incorporating research utilities for speculating a post-nuclear society after geo-engineering; the second half of our lives.

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Autopsia in Abstentia

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto This intervention takes the form of an open-ended infrastructural framework, allowing necessary facilities to plug in when necessary over the lifespan of the project through pre-fabricated vertical cores and deconstructable steel components, creating architectural attachments or quasi-parasites that pursue curiosities. The research center can simultaneously perform studies of the landscape, containment of nuclear energy, climate engineering experiments, geological manipulation, and other interventions of the micro and macro scale that communicate a willingness to explore the rhizomatic and infinite relationships the site and its complex qualities has to offer.

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Autopsia in Abstentia Section Perspective 24

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Carbo Conclusus Carbon has a fascinating function as both the universal building block for life due to its ability to form complex, stable molecules with itself and other elements, as well as the toxic consequence of anthropogenic activity that is burning our planet, particularly through the abuse of fossil fuels. Modern building-scale carbon management technologies, such as direct air capture farms and geologic carbon sequestration, offer promising solutions for allowing our planet to take a deep, clean breath and provide carbon-neutral resources for our species. This intervention proposes hortus conclusus, enclosed gardens that are maintained and supplemented entirely by an array of deployed carbon dioxide capturing strategies, allowing the bipolar chemical element to become a tangible, ameliorative, and recyclable process that benefits the survival of displaced and deprived ecologies.

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Autopsia in Abstentia

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto The capturing of carbon dioxide from the compromised condition of the atmosphere allows for it to be integrated in controlled greenhouses as solar fuel, either densified into consumable pellets or directly pumped into greenhouses. These methods proceed to boost the plant’s photosynthesis and yields by up to 20%. Hydroponic systems, garden racks, and a vertical basket allow for visitors to escape reality and enter an oasis of sustainable byproducts. The aim of these spaces is to promote and assist an increasing biodiversity, creating an enhanced environment that grows and thrives in light of apocalyptic conditions.

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Autopsia in Abstentia Section Perspective 28

Marco Nieto As a spatial and temporal terrain, the landscape of Chernobyl is continuously changing in unpredictable ways. Chernobyl is steered by the relationship of the site with its specific and complicated context and history – creating an evolving system instead of a static image. The five interventions take advantage of the slow, natural procedures of growth, maturity, and decay by assuming the role of systems that are guided by time and process. Their behaviors are determined by both external conditions and mechanisms of control. This systems approach goes beyond the concern of staged environments and happenings, it deals in an adaptive fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts and planetary acupuncture.

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Autopsia in Abstentia System Evidence Field 30

Marco Nieto

Surface Ex_Tension An instrument for aquatic urbanism

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urface Ex_Tension aims to mitigate issues of coastal cultivation, over-population, expanding off-shore aquaculture, climatic refugees, and other marina deficiencies. While situated in one location, the following system is a proposal that is not tied to or constrained by a specific geography, but rather attaches itself to the edge condition of a landmass that is the coast. This allows Surface Ex_Tension to act as a metaphorical bridge that links together unlike coasts and conditions through an adaptive and organized framework of industrial support structures that bolster social, economical, and commercial aspects to better serve both humans and nature.

This specific version of Surface Ex_Tension is located off the coast of Antofagasta, a port-city in northern Chile. Chile occupies a long, 200-mile wide strip of land that stretches over 2,670 miles South to North, covering everything from the frigid Austral Zone to the desolate scenes of the great Norte Grande.

Antofagasta finds itself in the dramatic East-West axis, where it stares peripherally at both the vast Pacific Ocean and the driest area on the planet, the Atacama desert. Due to the incredibly varied climate presented in such a short span, Surface Ex_Tension exists in this location in order to illustrate the potential and malleable nature of this model and offer insight into how it could be applied to other contrasting or similar regions of the planet.

Antofagasta, Chile Coastal Attachment Summer 2020 Director’s Choice Award for ArchOutLoud’s “WARMING” Competition Featured in ArchDaily Featured in Archinect Featured in Bustler Done with Luis Arjona, Jonathan Craig, and Philip Elmore

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Surface Ex_Tension Introduction 32

Marco Nieto The notion of urban territory has remained land-based in its applications and in the language of architectural discourse. Conversely, water has been interpreted mainly as a resource or complementary object, rarely as the key subject of urbanity. The subsequent creation of a coastal extension brings into light the political potential water has as both a speculative claim on territory and a system for bargaining. Representing only a segment of an ideal system, this spine covers a wide array of facilities dedicated to creating an aquatic instrument that reconfigures the domain of territoriality and its influence on architecture and planning by focusing on “hydro” driven concepts and not just “terra” derived practices.

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Surface Ex_Tension Site Isometric 34

Marco Nieto

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Surface Ex_Tension

Floor Plan + Perspective

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Marco Nieto

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Surface Ex_Tension

Floor Plan + Perspective

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Marco Nieto

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Surface Ex_Tension Floor Plan + Section Perspective

The typology for these structures is inspired by traditional fishing villages found in Asiatic communities. By borrowing certain cues that offer flexibility, the form provides housing, social interaction, farming systems, coral reefs, desalination stations, and layered opportunities for sustainable innovation.

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Marco Nieto

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Surface Ex_Tension

Worm’s Eye + Perspectives

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Marco Nieto

Fluidic Echo A cultural wastewater landscape

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ecause sewerage infrastructure is veiled – either purposefully hidden from view or seamlessly entwined with other parts of the built environment – but underlies vast territories, it’s difficult to examine and pinpoint how it impacts our lives. It’s also difficult to ponder what potential sewerage has as a benefit to the long-term vitality and health of cities, since it’s often inaccessible. The failure to identify these problems and potentials is a lost opportunity for planners and designers. However, if we consider sewerage infrastructure as a matter of concern rather than just the matter of waste, then it can become part of a broader dialogue where its sensible and social realities and effects are as important as its engineering function.

Fluidic Echo’s design strategy takes the form of a “plastic ecology” – a malleable and simultaneous combination of ecological infrastructures and cultural programs that stimulate the prospects of the bleak and contaminated conditions of Willets Point. The mechanical advantage of this strategy allows the selfcontained system made up of intersecting parts and processes to be accessed by the public, overcoming the schism between waste and habitation. Each step is varied and operates through graduating scales of exchange, incorporating elements designed to operate individually and in unison. As a synthetic wastewater cultural landscape, these infrastructures suggest new forms of social life and aesthetic experience.

Willets Point, Queens, New York City Urban Design Strategy Fall 2020

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Fluidic Echo Introduction 44

Marco Nieto The project began with mapping, which sought to access and understand the inadequate sewer infrastructure in Queens, Therelationship project began with mapping, which sought to access its to the pattern of urbanization aboveground, and understand the inadequate sewer infrastructure in and where sewerage may become accidentally sensible due to Queens, its relationship to the pattern of urbanization infrastructural failure. This is done by examining sewersheds, aboveground, where points, sewerage mayandbecome networks of pipes and and discharge intersections pockets accidentally sensible due to infrastructural formed by sewerage infrastructure, and heat maps thatfailure. distill This is done by toexamining sewersheds, of the areas that tend be the most vulnerable ornetworks compromised pipes and discharge points, intersections and pockets through the collection of complaint calls and the neighborhood’s formed by to sewerage infrastructure, and heat maps that relationship topography. distill the areas that tend to be the most vulnerable or compromised through the collection of complaint calls and the neighborhood’s relationship to topography.

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Fluidic Echo

Sewerage Map of Queens

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Marco Nieto Previously highlighted in the map were the four wastewater treatment plants in Queens, and utilizing Kevin Lynch’s five qualities for an image of the city, a similar logic is applied to these plants in effort to uncover patterns that showcase how waste both becomes legible and demands legibility. These urban chunks are a very small portion of what keeps urban spaces well-managed, but their operations and organization could be interpolated in Fluidic Echo.

The material inputs, outputs, and processes of these treatment plants are then documented to uncover phenomenological opportunities for intervention. The 14 treatment plants in New York City receive 1.3 billion gallons of influent every day and undergo a five-stage 10 hour long process that mimics how natural landscapes purify water before it is then discharged as clean water back into rivers. But there are certain leftover materials and sensations, such as waste, biosolids, odor, and steam, that could potentially be leveraged as building blocks for the project.

(Above) Exploring wastewater treatment plants as objects of aesthetic sensibility.

(Below) Byproducts and highlights of the wastewater treatment process.

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Fluidic Echo

Examination of Wastewater Treatment Plants

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Marco Nieto With wastewater treatment plants in mind, now there were a series of formal precedents that could be further studied in order to enact an urban design proposal. But rather than taking the form of a discrete object or single venue in the center of the Iron Triangle in the form of a traditional plant, Fluidic Echo utilizes the idea of a loop to create a fully accessible circuit that activates the entire site and its surrounding context through a cultural wastewater landscape.

(Above) The traditional lot of a treatment plant is a closed campus.

(Below) The proposed loop promises an open and productive circuit.

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Fluidic Echo Formal Logic 50

Marco Nieto A preliminary study was conducted of the site’s geometry and contextual relationships to productive and cultural points of interest in Queens, such as other wastewater plants and scenographic sites, to create the geometry for the loop. The loop functions as both an organizational tool for programming and a platform for negotiating the way life and waste can be intertwined, while pointing to other notable sites in the borough.

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Fluidic Echo Site Study 52

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Adjacent Programs

Phytoremediative Point Grid 53

Fluidic Echo Additional Site Studies Circulation

Identifying Existing Industrial Vacancies 54

Marco Nieto The loop presents itself as a re-distribution of the typical wastewater plant. Each structure and phase that was previously documented is spread out and linked by a winding pathway that sutures public life into public works, allowing the fluidic devices to be enjoyed culturally and recreationally. In its final realized form, the project explores the importance of bringing the invisible processes of wastewater treatment into the visible public space.

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Fluidic Echo

Overall Site Plan

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Marco Nieto The mechanical advantage of this strategy allows the self-contained system made up of intersecting parts and processes to be accessed by the public, overcoming the schism between waste and habitation. As a synthetic wastewater cultural landscape, these infrastructures suggest new forms of social life and aesthetic experience.

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Fluidic Echo Site Isometric 58

Marco Nieto The six main stages that comprise the majority of the wastewater loop are upgraded versions of their respective phases in the typical wastewater treatment plant process. By becoming architectural interventions rather than remaining infrastructural objects, they’re able to curate a human experience around waste rather than above or through it.

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Fluidic Echo Infrastructure

Screening

Desalination

Clarifiers

Aeration + Disinfection

Sludge Treatment

Discharge

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Marco Nieto The top half of the project features a water-based experience. By extending Willet’s Point to the North and into Flushing Bay, the community is directly connected to the water, reconciling the bay as a new public and productive space. This comes in the form of a new recreational promenade, docks, observation deck, gardens, pools, and more.

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Fluidic Echo Site Plan 62

Marco Nieto The bottom half of the project takes inspiration from the Flushing Meadow Corona Park to the South and the residential areas to the West and collapses them to create a new natural and cultural district. This includes an aquarium, public lawns, a museum, an apartment building, and various educational wastewater programs that link them together.

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Fluidic Echo Site Plan 64

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Fluidic Echo Perspectives 66

Marco Nieto

Extractive Exchange The re-staging of a copper mine into an e-waste facility

Extractive Exchange proposes an architecture that engages the scale of humankind’s present consumptive behaviors and the resulting consequences by staging new methods of extraction and disassembly within the lifecycle of e-waste set against and within the constructed landscape of the Morenci Copper Mine. We propose a regenerative agenda that shifts the identity of Morenci into a speculative and fully automated management center for our e-waste processing, reconstitution and disposal. Our work is entangled with questions of environmental urgency, global extraction and waste flows, and an obsession with cycles of production, consumption and waste streams.

By unpacking the totality of e-waste and bringing it full circle to the extracted minerals found within copper mines, we hope to reveal new possibilities that are both hi-technology and hi-typology.

Design of the facilities for the project learn from and draw upon the existing formal qualities and technologies of the site. Be it in the form of conveyor belts, concentrators, leaching pits, or flat stockpiles, our design approach seeks to repurpose, re-assemble, and re-deploy these elements into “re-combinants” that shift the meaning of once destructive processes into ones that atone for their production.

Morenci, Arizona E-Waste Maintenance Facility Winter 2021 Done with Kady Cramer.

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Extractive Exchange Introduction 68

Marco Nieto The Morenci Copper Mine is the largest open-pit copper mine in Arizona producing over 800 million pounds every year, the highest mass extracted at any mine in North America. This production feeds America’s need for copper, satisfying the demand of our hyper-consumptive contemporary condition. The process of extraction at Morenci has been enabled by massive mechanical systems, machines and innovations in processing that are constantly revised to maximize production. Containing relics of old and unused machinery on site in stockpiles, Morenci’s pit is simultaneously an active and evolving byproduct of extractive processes, and a reliquarium of outmoded technologies. Given its profound transformation over time and the sublime landscape that has resulted, the copper mine also acts as a physical construct with which we can measure and trace the impact of human interactions with our environments. Once exhausted and abandoned by its operations, copper mines like Morenci are resounding scars - petrified reminders of anthropogenic and exploitative activity. Current practice requires such sites to be reclaimed - the process by which the landform is returned to its original contour profile. Our fascination with the processes surrounding extraction revealed a stream of products that contribute the most to demand, but also carry a potential for alternate models for ‘reclaiming’ due to their inherent embodiment of processed copper - electronic goods.

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Extractive Exchange

Situational Exploration

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Marco Nieto Almost 50 million tons of e-waste (electronic waste) are generated worldwide every year, clogging our global waste-stream. The material flows of e-waste circumscribe different territories and connect different industrial systems, from the mine to the factory. However, its most destructive environmental impact is when it produces a landfill. A large volume of these second hand, condemned, and discarded electronic goods that utilize copper arrive in “developing” countries such as Ghana as an illegal export propelled in part by lack of e-waste regulations in the United States. This results in an augmented landscape with an abundance of devalued waste electronics as characterized by bizarre scenographies such as televisions forming ad-hoc bridges to span toxic water bodies. E-waste comes with an exploitative and damaging dimension of human labor that is unavoidable due to the containment of valuable materials within electronics, requiring manual handling and attention to its disassembly. This global phenomena threatens severe environmental damage and risk to human health that warrants rethinking and restaging. We approach the context of the Morenci landscape replete with its remaining systems and machinery as a site in which alternatives might be imagined.

Mapping the portions of the Morenci Copper Mine with the most room for improvement due to nodes of overlapping infrastructure, energies, and extraction.

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Marco Nieto Thus, we propose a regenerative agenda that shifts the identity of Morenci into a speculative and fully automated management center for our e-waste processing, reconstitution and disposal. Our work is entangled with questions of environmental urgency, global extraction and waste flows, and an obsession with cycles of production, consumption and waste streams. By unpacking the totality of e-waste and bringing it full circle to the extracted minerals found within copper mines, we hope to reveal new possibilities that are both hi-technology and hi-typology.

Operational plan that shows how the project re-programs artificial and natural conditions into a synthetic landscape that generates new life and activity.

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Marco Nieto As a re-staging of the disassembly process, the project envisions a series of three interventions that propose new landscapes for the collection, sorting, shredding, recycling, and visitation of e-waste. This mechanical choreography accepts our present condition and finds new fantastical, but grounded worlds for human and material cohabitation within the spectacular opera of a ‘new circularity’.

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Extractive Exchange Site Interventions 76

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Collection Cathedral A floating vehicle that uses the magnetic charge of copper mines to float and collect electronic waste from local sites to be processed and recycled. These vehicles are made in the truck maintenance facility that already exists on the site and re-purposes previously decommissioned trailers, dump trucks, and other industrial vehicles. This allows the functionality of the floating vehicle to reflect the utility of its previous form, so they range in size and typology. This solves the problem that we found in our research that most communities and populations simply do not know how to recycle their e-waste or where to dispose of it, so these vehicles roam and orbit the nearby landscape, picking up and collecting these electronic goods.

Accompanying this is the Collection Cathedral, an intervention that repurposes smelter smoke stacks into vertical chutes that act as beacons for the vehicles to deliver the objects, releasing them from the consumptive ecological grasp of the surrounding areas.

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Extractive Exchange

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto The collection facility houses the preliminary stages that must be followed when treating e-waste before metal, glass, plastic, chemicals, cartridges, batteries, and so on can be manually separated and shredded. As the floating vehicle dumps e-waste into the smokestack chutes, it is filtered into separate paths: a top floor and a bottom floor.

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Extractive Exchange Section Perspective 80

Marco Nieto E-waste on the top floor is regarded as uncontaminated and therefore proceeds neatly through a conveyor belt onward where it is monitored by staff. The next phases of treatment include dust extraction which is discarded in an environmentally compliant manner through vacuums, and the introduction of strong overhead magnets that help separate steel and iron from other wastes.

Specific waste regarded as complex or polluted is brought to the bottom floor through a series of magnetic chutes within the larger smoke stack structures and is then treated with an acid leach that sanitizes the goods from any harmful surface exposure before they proceed. It follows the same treatment as the waste on the top floor, before finally surfacing to the ground level where it is carried by conveyor belts to other parts of the site.

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Extractive Exchange Perspectives 82

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Migratory Mediator However, some mechanical processes require circuit boards, copper, and aluminum from other wastes particles to be separated from each other. So the second intervention, the Migratory Mediator, acts as a medium for the act of disassembly and houses the machinery necessary to sort, shred, and recycle electronic products.

Inspired by machines that are required to be mobile due to the ever expanding nature of copper mines, this building borrows that quality and travels to different parts of the site through a track. Using the existing operational plan to distinguish points of requisite within the landscape, such as acid ponds, elevated plateaus, and isolated slag zones, the Migratory Mediator links together these disparate districts.

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Extractive Exchange

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto The building fits into various pockets around the site, allowing its function to shift from burning to shredding to recycling according to its location. This intervention utilizes storage and organizational techniques denoted by objects such as bins and cranes to pick up waste that was collected by the previous intervention.

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Extractive Exchange Section Perspective 86

Marco Nieto Vertical stacks are closed off for the burning of plastics from copper wires, robotic arms are used for the dismantling of circuit boards before they arrive at shredders, and magnetic ducts are placed throughout to separate valuable metals from shredded glass, plastics, etc. which are then broken down even further to prepare for their own re-use.

The Migratory Mediator also acts as a people mover, housing small interventions that allow visitors to oversee these activities safely. Every year over the course of a single day, the mediator shifts its gears and stops its processes in order to ferry visitors to the site’s gift shop, which is located at the bottom of the deepest pit in the Morenci Mine. By being forced to move around the site at the crawling pace of the machine, one observes the site from the standpoint and pace of the process.

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Extractive Exchange Perspectives 88

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Synthetic Screen Tying these all together is the Synthetic Screen, an intervention in the form of a visitor tower that fills in collapsed portions of the Morenci Copper Mine, offering observation points and a unique sense of verticality for outsiders to absorb the varying competing scales of the site’s proposed e-waste management facilities. Here, one may partake in a view that is otherwise foreign to the horizontal span of the mine and leave with a deeper understanding of the consumptive situation.

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Extractive Exchange

Intervention Introduction

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Marco Nieto The intervention showcases the massive view of the site that was produced by the mine’s extraction by offering a viewpoint for visitors to look down into the massive pit. Through the structure and materials of the architecture, this sublime view overlaps with the residual scars below.

By doing so, it begins to showcase the competing scales of the site by illustrating the irrelevance of the human body when it’s compared to such an immense scalar gap.

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Extractive Exchange Section Perspective 92

Marco Nieto The visual technique of the mesh screen allows visitors to differentiate the image of Morenci from a lived experience, almost like a camera lens that accurately showcases a specific moment within the site as opposed to the vast expanse of Morenci’s totality.

The over-sized structural system constrains the visitor to the intentional views of the process, marking fixed points along its path where its users hardly recognize the monumental scene behind it, making Morenci an object that moves from background to foreground throughout one’s occupation of this vertical icon.

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Extractive Exchange Perspectives 94

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Ashes to Ashes An industrial city hall in the desert

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nspired by Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and ideologically in between a ‘factory of labor’ and a ‘factory of leisure’, Ashes to Ashes re-imagines City Hall as a cybernetic incubator for human experience and interaction. Using Burning Man and an evocative amalgamation of industrials forms to propagate a social environment that is both ethereal and non-temporal, it helps create a ‘factory of society’. By integrating the post burn materiality and liturgical logics of ash, its sustainable and spiritual meanings create a familiar yet foreign sight that, as the burning ‘mantra’ intends, melds both institution and industrial into a singular civic structure that eventually, through erosion, gives up the ghost.

Catharsis and creation through annihilation is embedded within the spirit of Burning Man, as signified by the climax of the event; a symbolic ritual in which a large wooden effigy of “The Man” is immolated, meant to touch as many people’s lives as possible before it flickers away in the wind. Stories have been shared of burners who have lost loved ones and have experienced the burn as a release of negative thoughts and emotions that have been eating them away, allowing them to return to their lives in a restful and peaceful state. As a result, the ashes left over post-burn are incredibly rich with emotion and memories of those who attend, manifesting a sense of permanence in light of the temporary experiences.

Black Rock City, Nevada City Hall Fall 2018

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Marco Nieto As traces from the past, silos, grain elevators, smokestacks, and other similar structures are left standing idle, yet monumental, in our postindustrial landscapes. They’re seen as physical manifestations of highly functional thinking. Standing shiny and still in semi-rural and rural landscapes, these structures are the formal columns of contemporary temples that represent industrialization and progress. Thus, they possess high recognition value and are extremely visible from afar, no matter the context. By utilizing these ethereal remnants of a past civilization, alongside the sustainable potential of the ash within the landscape, the zeitgeist and adaptive ideology of Burning Man can be enhanced by giving new purpose to decommissioned, forgotten monuments that are pollinated across our country. By mixing high-technology with hightypology, artificial with natural, memory with experience, permanence with the temporary, a city hall for a non-city can now properly exist between realities.

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Industrial Approach

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Section Perspective A-A

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Section Perspective B-B

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The above obliques show the assembly, growth, and erosion of the site, city hall, and Burning Man as a whole as it seemingly heads towards a more corporate and mainstream festival. Year 0: Decommissioned and acquired industrial infrastructure from external locations are transported to site and assembled into their proper locations. Using existing structure and techniques and placing them in the desert creates a familiar yet dreamy sight which feeds into the ‘Matter Out Of Place’ studio mantra and the Burning Man ‘Leave No Trace’ philosophy. Year 5: Civic programs are made out of fly ash bricks during the construction phase, using the industrial structures which were previously installed and provide resources and support. Work is done during a post-festival festival, where volunteers are invited to collect ash immediately after the burning and start work on the city hall. Year 7: Ashes to Ashes is fully assembled, providing a spiritual connection to Burning Man while also forming the backbone for organized chaos like never before seen. Year 20: Burning Man as a whole heads towards a more corporate and mainstream event, attracting sponsors and attractions that distort the original premise. Year X: In a distant future, Burning Man and its subsequent facilities are reduced to ruins due to environmental conditions and disuse, becoming one with the desert and creating a new attraction.

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MARCO NIETO 630-885-7173 | marnieto@umich.edu | https://marnieto.com/

EDUCATION Ann Arbor, Michigan Aug 2020 - April 2021

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Master of Urban Design

Ann Arbor, Michigan Aug 2018 - April 2020

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Master of Architecture

Champaign, Illinois Aug 2014 - May 2018

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies

WORK EXPERIENCE Morphosis Los Angeles, California July 2021 - Present

Design Earth Boston, Massachusetts May 2020 - June 2020 Taubman College Ann Arbor, Michigan Jan 2020 - April 2020 Gensler Chicago, Illinois June 2019 - August 2019

DESIGNER Contributed deeply to the production and development of 3D models, drawings, presentations, renderings, and animations for a large-scale confidential project.

Work included travel to the Middle East and participation in various high-profile meetings.

RESEARCHER Assisted in the conceptualizing, research, and initial designing of multiple possible interventions for a new project.

GRADUATE STUDENT INSTRUCTOR Assisted in leading comprehensive discussion sections for Master’s students in John McMorrough’s “Architectural Theory and Criticism” course.

ARCHITECTURE INTERN Contributed to the conceptualization, development, and refinement of several massings and analysis for a large-scale confidential project.

ORGANIZATIONS NOMAS Champaign, Illinois Oct 2016 - May 2018

PRESIDENT AND PROJECT PIPELINE COORDINATOR Organization for minority architecture students Promoted excellence, community engagement, and professional development of its members Organized a volunteer program called Project Pipeline that brings design to children

SKILLS Digital

After Effects ARCGis Blender Grasshopper Illustrator InDesign Lightroom Microstation Photoshop Premiere Pro Revit Rhino V-Ray

Analog

3D Printing Laser Cutting Molding Plaster Resin Welding

AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS WARMING COMPETITION ArchOutLoud’s competition centered on global warming and climate change

Director’s Choice Sept 2020

BURTON L. KAMPNER MEMORIAL AWARD A memorial award that is presented annually to one student in the thesis program whose final design project has been selected by a Super Jury as the most outstanding

First Place May 2020

ASSOCIATION OF LICENSED ARCHITECTS (ALA) STUDENT MERIT AWARD Acknowledges architectural students who have exhibited exemplary achievement throughout the year

First Place Feb 2018

CRITICAL MASS Student choice award for best studio project in each year

First Place Feb 2018

EDWARD C. EARL PRIZE Awarded to students in the School of Architecture who display excellence in their final studio project for the semester ARCHINECT’S “GET LECTURED” FALL 2017 LECTURE SERIES POSTER Fans of Archinect get to vote for their favorite architecture lecture series poster SESQUICENTENNIAL DESIGN COMPETITION UIUC Competition celebrating the school’s 150th anniversary

Nominated 3x Honorable Mention 1x Dec 2016, May 2017, Dec 2017 Fourth Place Dec 2017 First Place May 2017

EXHIBITIONS INCOMPLETE CITY Incomplete City Workshop

Taubman College Nov 2019

ASHES TO ASHES (TAUBMAN COLLEGE STUDENT SHOW) Institutions Studio

Taubman College April 2019

A3 BUTTON HISTORY AND TIMELINE Personal

Illinois School of Architecture April 2018

WAV_ES (Edward C. Earl Prize and Critical Mass) Arch Design and Development Studio

Illinois School of Architecture Dec 2017

PRAIRIE TOWER (Edward C. Earl Prize) Arch Design and the City Studio

Illinois School of Architecture May 2017

NODE (Edward C. Earl Prize and Critical Mass) Arch Design and the Landscape Studio

Illinois School of Architecture Dec 2016

Marco Nieto marnieto@umich.edu https://marnieto.com/ 630-885-7173