This speculative Moss Morran Wetland restoration project uses drawing and model making as a means to express alternative means of understanding and valuing land to begin the post-petroleum future. This creates a new value system for appreciating the material and immaterial qualities of our environment through the active negotiation between users, environment and program.
This project is about considering the peatlands (and the broader landscape) with as much reverence as the community of Fife. To view both participants as stakeholders that need to regain their agency through a post-petroleum future. A tea house will be used as a program to engage the wider community, providing a civic function as it creates an environment of interaction between groups of people. The action of sharing water between each other becomes a metaphoric device of sharing resources with their surroundings. This sharing with the landscape will occur through a series of water collecting devices. The water tanks and reservoirs on site will be used to expedite the natural process, slowing down and raising the water table. To consider themselves and the architecture they use as part of a continuum that have a symbiotic relationship with the landscape. This continuum will be achieved through the analogy of furniture, the frame and the plate. The frame being the base and the plate being the floor plates which can be seen as independent entities which can be built and changed over time by the users of this proposal.
The challenge becomes how we can interact with a landscape beyond only visual means to understand it better without disturbing it due to its fragile composition. These interactions will then be possible in these structures through the different events that will occur, surrounded by the peatland, supplementing as context that people will relate to their experiences and actions.
