{Marmoraton}

Entry to the Marmoraton Mine Site

My thesis will investigate the design opportunities created by the transition of a former open pit iron mine and current aggregate production site, into a pumped storage facility. The site is located in Marmora Ontario (formerly named Marmoraton Iron Works) and plays an integral part in the town's history and public life. The mine is privately owned and trespassing is strictly and actively prohibited, however it is still used and visited by community members and tourists. If the pumped storage scheme becomes a reality, this prohibition from use will become even more strictly enforced. I plan to explore how design can mediate between the operational demands of active industrial operations, and the recreational desires of a small town.

Swimmers on Access Road Edge

I am interested in the legacy of Mining operation sites in rural mining towns in Canada. I am interested in the way that these sites embody a town's history as well as its relationship to the landscape. I believe that the way that these privately owned sites are used as public space exemplifies the status of the subject in the landscape, and future changes to these sites' use will be key to understanding this continually evolving relationship. Design can play a role in this exploration by mediating between the apparently conflicting interests of public and private space. I am also interested in how these sites are being adapted, particularly as components of a national electrical grid, and how that may signal a new relationship of the subject to the landscape. Making these new forms of infrastructure visible will create both vital and interesting public space as well as provide a platform for the discussion of the civilizational effect of consumption on the landscape.

In "Inventing Canada" Suzanne Keller argues that rural Canadian settlement and development during the nineteenth century was fundamentally informed by the emerging science of geology, statistical technology, and an unprecedented demand for material resources because of the industrial revolution. The project of creating a comprehensive geological survey was fuelled by the discourse of utilitarian nation building which sought to expand upper and lower Canada's economic capacity to achieve political autonomy. The ability to conceive of Canada as a nation that incorporated more than just its military and shipping towns was tied to an understanding of the land as geologically unified.

William Logans Geological Map of Canada, 1864

Source: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/021014/f1/nlc011033-v6.jpg

Denis Cosgrove argues that landscape painting, and the practice of estate design that it inspired, developed from the same geometric technology employed by land surveying. The same Euclidean technology which enabled artists to represent the world realistically using perspective also enabled the conversion of the english commons into privately owned enclosures for the purpose of sheep grazing. (Cosgrove 46) The technology of landscape quantification creates both a new way of seeing the land, as well as a new economic position of the individual to the land.

Cosgrove follows the etymology of the word prospect from its early meaning of a view outward to its sixteenth century meaning of a commanding sight. (Cosgrove 55) According to the OED, the use of the word as a verb to describe the exploration of a region in search of mineral wealth came into existence in the early to mid nineteenth century. (OED) This evolving meaning follows a change in modes of inhabition and economy. The Early use of the term places the subject as an undefined observer of the land. When prospect is used to refer to a specific commanding location, Cosgrove suggests that the subject becomes an owner of land. The landscape is a surface that you generate economic wealth upon. When prospect is used to describe the process of geological observation and inventory for the purpose of mining, the subject becomes an optic agent of the state and industry and the physical components of the landscape are seen as a source of economic wealth. Just as euclidean technology provided the means to convert open land into distinct property units, the discourse of natural history and statistics provided the means to classify an entire landscape according to its economic value.

In Canada, this latent value was realized by building towns and populating areas with promising geological finds. These towns were often entirely built and owned by the mining companies. This level of ownership meant that mine management was able to exert a level of social control over its employee residents unseen in an urban setting. Recreational activity took place in a mine owned hall and was directed by mine management. (Baldwin 83) Homes in the town were built on rented land and could be demolished by mining management provided the home owner was given thirty days notice. (Baldwin 85) In the early twentieth century Canadian law separated mineral rights from surface rights, extending the separation of the inhabitant to the land to ninety percent of the country. (Natural Resources Canada)

The township of Marmora and Lake has 3,912 permanent residents. It is located almost exactly at the midway point between Toronto and Ottawa. The Greyhound bus rest stop for the route that follows highway seven stops just outside of town. The township, originally named Marmora Iron Works, was founded by an act of parliament on April 14th 1821. (Wikipedia) The town was located close to very rich iron deposits to provide a workforce to support the extraction of these and other mineral deposits. The founder of the Geological Survey of Canada, William Logan, mentions Marmora during his early campaigning for the undertaking of the survey.

Source: http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/lab/virtual_museum/images/photographs_2.jpg

The Marmoraton site was developed after magnetite ore was found there in 1948. The discovery was the result of a government funded aeromagnetic survey.

Source: http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/lab/virtual_museum/images/photographs_8.jpg

The find was purchased by Bethlehem Steel Mills of New York. When the mine was at full operation it employed 300 people. Much of the ore from the site was used in in steel manufacturing for the construction of skyscrapers in New York. During the excavation of overburden seventy million tons of waste rock was removed. In the end the mine produced 1.3 million tons of iron ore.
Source: http://www.ruralroutes.com/1299.html

After it reached the end of its lifespan as an iron mine, the property was eventually purchased by Aecon, Canadas largest publicly traded construction and infrastructure development company. Aecon began an aggregate production facility that processed the massive amount of overburden that had been removed during mining operations. This facility is currently operating.

Aecon has entered into a partnership with Northland Power, an independent green power developer, to transform the open pit and its surroundings into a closed loop pumped storage facility. The water filled pit would be partially drained into a reservoir on its own banks, then when electricity rates are high it is released back into the pit through turbines, generating up to 400 Megawatts. (Northland Power)

Source: http://www.northlandpower.ca/WhatWeDo/PrerevenueProjects/Project. aspx?projectID=130

These three stages of resource succession trace a further transformation of the relationship between the human subject and the land. The production of iron facilitated the construction of skyscrapers which fueled high density urban developments. These dense developments depended on a further abstraction of property from land. The production of Aggregate met a demand for large scale infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and drainage systems which supported the rapid mobilization of objects. Concrete infrastructures permitted people to move faster, water to move faster, goods to move faster, and capital to move faster. Highway infrastructures connected fast moving, dense urban centers to each other and to the resources that sustained them. This type of network construction occurred alongside the construction of global economic and information networks. The implication of the mine landform within the power grids energy distribution processes is a hybridization of the land as a resource, and land as the surface upon which object mobilizing networks are formed. The pumped storage facility will engage the same forces as a hydroelectric dam does, only instead of moving water as a result of primarily climatological and land based conditions (the water cycle, topography) it moves water as a result of economic conditions (supply and demand) . It acts like a resource but is motivated by a network

My argument is that technologies that enable new ways of entraining the landscape to economic processes also alter the perceived relationship of the individual to the land. These alterations tend to follow a trend away from a subject vs. object relationships (the individual as observer of the land) towards co-subjective relationships (groups of interconnected objects mutually informing each other). I believe that this site contains all of the remnants and markings necessary to reveal this trend.

My goal is to create an intervention on the site that will transgress the private property boundary of the site and reveal the complex interactions of site based objects and human general economy.I want people to walk across the unremoved overburden towards the horizon of Iron and feel as if they are walking on a thin crust of earth filled with molten rock hurtling through space.

I want people to observe the remnants of production like astronaut archaeologist vandals.

I want them to measure the length of their body in free fall against the against the enormity of the extraction processes and results. After they have resurfaced in the water, I want them to feel the pull of the continent wide electrical grid.

I will achieve this through designing a minimal intervention that choreographs the shared use of the site without overpowering its inherent beauty. The intervention will be built from the enormous quantity of materials available on site. It may make extensive use of drystack stone walls, acoustics and ruderal ecologies. To explore modes of revelation I will interrogate the aesthetics and economics of each individual resource, as well as the mechanisms that enable their exploitation. I will undertake a close reading of the site through multiple site visits in different seasons. I will make drawings upon the site.