STORED FUTURES
This thesis prototypes a remediation-and-reuse infrastructure in Granton, Edinburgh, where soil remediation and material recovery operate as a singular, timed process. While architecture can act as a pollutant, it can also be retooled to function otherwise under specific protocols. Through a series of projects in Granton - an area that retains the material memory of its industrial past - the thesis addresses asbestos, heavy metals, and organic pollutants embedded in the soil.
Rather than pursuing conventional remediation strategies, the project organises phytoremediation fields as long-term occupation buffers. It explores non-extractive architectural approaches shared between the local community across decades-long processes of recovery. A staged framework links the presence of contamination to occupation, defining when and how spaces can be safely used. These strategies extend beyond the Pitt Market site toward the city scale, where brownfields and construction sites are understood as a system of material flow and recovery.
Grounded in a survey of the materials released through the warehouse demolitions planned under the Granton Masterplan, the thesis treats deconstruction as a generator of programme, where available components determine and guide form and use. Observed practices of reuse and storage at the Pitt Market, where our live-build project was developed, shaped the design methodology and expanded its scale.
Architecture here takes the form of staged storage, where reclaimed materials are sorted, stacked, dismantled, and recomposed. The structure is therefore not separate from storage, it emerges from it in phases, as material accumulates and the ground remediates. Together, these moves invert the supply chain: demolition becomes procurement, sorting becomes tectonic practice, and remediation sets the tempo of construction.
