3. Room One Thousand, Sediment
Part of the editing team for both text and graphics, UC Berkeley CED 2023
* Team awarded Douglass Haskell Award by the Center for Architecture
Photos courtesy of Room 1000 and Emily Ely.
The eleventh issue of Room One Thousand investigates architecture’s relationship to history and society’s terrain using geological terminology. This issue’s title, Sediment, serves as a starting point for authors to consider how their projects relate to historical landscape formation. The metaphor will serve as a tool, not a universality, that provides vocabulary to discuss and explore abstract architectural concepts in new ways. We seek articles that reveal how architecture plays an active role in historical terrains and how humanity plays an active role in architectural terrains via memory, societal narratives, identity, perception of place, and more.
More than plain metaphor, sediment is increasingly the literal substance of politics; we find ourselves entangled in fights over microplastics in our soil, mine tailings clogging our rivers, and clouds of anthropogenic dust settling in our lungs, exacerbating existing geographies of racial inequality. Sediment is not only an archive of the past but also the terrain of present struggle.
Responsible for the editing of photos and text for the article “Material Witness: Sediment and Carceral Architecture in Lorton, Virginia” by RL Martens.