This unit aims to expand architecture as a support structure. It seeks to explore potentials for architecture to release and facilitate action in troubled sites at the intersection of environmental, political, and social crises. We focus on sites and situations that suffer from the impacts of extractive industries, particularly petroleum and oil, to examine how architecture might operate in these situations to enable alternative futures.

We situated these questions in four ecologies of Muds, Middens, Mines and Movements around Mossmorran Chemical Plant in Fife. The Unit studied and worked with four tectonics parameters of Resources, Sequences, Constructions and Inhabitations. Experimenting with a variety of methods such as Architectural Devices of Unknowing, Construction of Tables, Thick Sections and Fictions, students imagined and designed post-petroleum scenarios and novel typologies that assist us to move towards and inhabit a world that would no longer get stuck in petroleum industry and its products.