Earth Crust Relics is a speculative field study exploring imagined archives where infrastructure and atmospheric residue are no longer external to cultural memory, but enmeshed within it. (Fig. 1) These ‘relics’ are not physical artifacts, but rather the traces and residues left behind by human activity, which become part of our cultural memory. Here, preservation is not a process of saving, but a ritual of revealing. The use of visualization is a microcosm of what is crucial to understanding our way of being. We exist now, but we might exist when a relic emerges. I will bring you into the notion of what a relic is.
As I define it, a relic is a memory linked to physical space. (Fig. 2) You might have seen a warehouse or an interstate, but for another, that might be a memory relegated to a time when it was constructed, used, or seen to collapse. A relic is personable but shared all at once. There is a vital feeling that an Earth Crust Relic must be our link to one another. I want to pull out the idea that monuments of visceral sites are just a reflection of our inner selves. A warehouse has this concrete, brutal facade, but the interiors are empty, modular, and fixed on being used for storage. (Fig. 3)
These relics, fabricated objects, and data-driven diagrams are presented as if they are signage of what’s to come. Through this fiction, Earth Crust Relics asks what it means to preserve and hold entropy in the open and in ourselves. (Fig. 4) To make legible the slow degradation of environmental systems and the bureaucratic and physical structures that enabled it.
The EPA records become mythic as well. Their language “threshold exceedance,” “asbestos abatement,” “containment failure” echoes like a liturgy of collapse. Each phrase reads like a solemn chant, marking the moments where systems failed and control slipped. Once bureaucratic placeholders, these terms, which refer to the technical jargon used in bureaucratic systems, now hum with prophetic resonance. They don’t merely describe; they foretell. In this reimagining, the numbers don’t inform, they haunt. They recur like aftershocks in the archive, building a palimpsest of quiet disaster, a layered trace of events that were neither sudden nor isolated. (Fig. 5)
Their transformation into artifacts is not aesthetic; it is elemental. These records are no longer read but felt into graphs, maps, and networks, manipulated with symbols or taken out of context to reimagine content without context. Each material reflects a convergence of decay and surplus. Though fictive, this work insists on a more profound truth: infrastructure is never stable. It only appears so from a distance. Like tree rings forming around a central rot, the evidence of collapse becomes embedded rather than erased. It endures in the forms we choose not to see. (Fig. 6) I am not attempting to insist on a dystopic way of viewing our world, but a conscious way of seeing our present. There is a legitimacy in seeing time pass while places and spaces transform.
Within this context, Warehouse City emerges as a parallel investigation that treats the warehouse not simply as a backdrop to economic life but as a critique of environmental and regulatory spatial allowance operations. Its flatness, repetition, and anonymity are precisely what make it powerful. These are buildings that evade attention, evade design history, evade heritage. And yet they proliferate with urgency, clustering at the margins of cities, sprouting in deregulated zones where policy loopholes allow for unchecked expansion. To study the warehouse is to examine the margins: governance, built environment, and cultural valuation.
These spaces are volatile monuments to the excess of goods, labor, and time. Some are filled with obsolete inventory and expired commodities. Others are hollowed out and re-skinned, their facades mimicking the aesthetics of tech campuses. But even as their surfaces change, their foundations whisper of buried histories.
Like the artifacts in Earth Crust Relics, warehouses are documents. But they are not singular. They are systemic relics, macro-archives of accumulation and abandonment. They record the movement of products, policies, and people. And yet, they are also obscure. They are infrastructures of invisibility, where labor is hidden, excess is stored, and time is leased by the square foot and measured in cubic opacity. Warehouse City invites its viewers to ask: What happens when these structures fall into ruin? What truths are stored in the dust on their shelving units, the hinges of their fire doors, and the cracks of their poured concrete floors? What would it mean to treat these buildings as heritage, not because they are beautiful or enduring, but because they are instructive in their instability? The warehouse is not merely a space of storage, but of delay. A temporal container where futures are suspended, waiting to collapse, reappear, or be scavenged by a different kind of world. (Fig. 7)
Returning to Earth Crust Relics, this speculative archive does not aim to restore the past or conserve its structures. Instead, it performs a reverse preservation: it stages the breakdown. It renders visible ruin already in motion. In doing so, it resists the instinct to sanitize or memorialize. Instead, it allows entropy to speak as a language one inscribes in what we abandon, what we overproduce, and what we fail to maintain. Like the meandering path of an airline route, randomness holds value even when the overall contour forms a cohesive relic (Fig. 8)
This is not a conclusion, but a beginning, a fragment of a larger proposition. Those artifacts, especially those outside the purview of traditional institutions, carry the burden of entropy. The objects we leave behind (or choose to remake) don’t simply represent decay; they embody decisions, silences, and consequences. In the imagined archive of Earth Crust Relics, preservation is not a moral imperative. It is a mirror. It reflects not the future we hoped to build but the collapse we allowed to unfold.