2023 AA Prize for Unbuilt Work – Honourable Mention

Jury citation

Lyell’s Lament is an attempt to confront the abandoned network of exhausted copper mines on the outskirts of Queenstown, Tasmania. Prior to its establishment as a mine in the 1890s, the area was a temperate rainforest, but the process of mining has stripped the mountains bare, creating a lunar-like landscape.

The jury was impressed by the way Lyell’s Lament sets up a tension between the destruction of the landscape and what writer Richard Flanagan has described as the resulting “terrible beauty.” The project spatially realizes this tension through a series of four experiments titled “Earth,” “Water, “Air” and “Metal.” Rather than proposing a museum that illustrates the problems of mining (which might be a more common response), this scheme places people into the sequence of mining itself.

Imaginative and formally beautiful, Lyell’s Lament prompts deeper thinking about environmental destruction. Compelling imagery tells the (somewhat esoteric) story and, although unlikely to succeed as a built project, the concept provides an important commentary on the pressing issue of damaged land.

Architect’s description

“In architecture, contemporary ideas of environment are presented either through the positivist tones of management, efficiency and performance or through apocalyptic narratives of catastrophe and conservation. At this juncture, rather than seeing the environment as something needing to be managed and maintained, or as purely natural, needing to be preserved and protected, can we instead talk about an alternative opportunity in architecture that projects the environment as aesthetic and monumental, and thus offer a renewed and more nuanced dialogue between man and nature?

“Lyell’s Lament is an intervention in an abandoned copper mine on the outskirts of Queenstown in the western ranges of Tasmania. A former temperate rainforest, this site is a monument to the dilemmas attending modernity’s relationship to nature, and reflects the larger economic, political, and social constructs of Tasmania. The abandoned network of exhausted subterranean mines and infrastructure finds itself today without purpose. However, through the weird contrasts and fierce polarities of its context, the area has ironically become a place of terrible beauty.” (Richard Flanagan)

This proposal directly confronts these polarities of devastation and beauty, value and uselessness. The intervention consists of four subterranean volumes, corresponding to the natural elements that have been altered on site – earth, water, air and metal – arranged along an existing tunnel. It uses existing infrastructure to inform movement, and mining processes and techniques as spatial generators. Its visible form is fashioned from the displacement of rock excavated from the volumes – a direct and tangible expression of the imbrication of extraction and construction.

Rather than a destination, the intervention is imagined as a path that humans momentarily navigate, exploring the thorny relationship between environment and development. The resulting experience disturbs conceptions of the “pure” Tasmanian landscape, rendering visible our hopeless dependence on the extraction of resources and its ecological impact. This is not an endeavour that strives for ecological redemption, nor does it assume a position of historical critique or even offer answers. Instead, it explores the complexity of the relationship between humans and nature to find a position of conscious and intelligent humility towards our place in nature.