PASS THIS ON

In Germany, the energy transition is ending decades of coal extraction. This leaves our generation with obsolete infrastructures, devastated land, unbalanced ownership structures, and unresolved responsibilities. Meanwhile, this rupture equally unlocks possibilities to contest property and channel funding. PASS THIS ON investigates how to communally inherit ruins of extraction and reclaim potential resources.

Through Protocols and Fictions, three case studies imagine possible futures for the Rheinisches Revier: UNBUILDING the obsolete power plant Frimmersdorf proposes a process of careful dismantling and sorting, offering an alternative to demolition and capitalist redevelopment. The obsolete coal infrastructure is recoded for recycling rubble into debris blocks. A fictive reuse shop (www.passthisonshop.com) illustrates the potential for the whole region of carefully cataloging materials on site and making the processes transparent and accessible. The ruin becomes a shared resource, facilitating reuse practices. REACTIVATING the abandoned village of Bürgewald replaces plot boundaries with public grounds and land trusts. To counter speculation and sprawl, backyard extensions evolve into a systematic renovation tool to densify, expand, and connect the existing. Material reused from the power plant demonstrate how reuse can shape circular economies and redefine functional architectural details. A wall made from the recycled debris bricks from the power plant serves as a central renovation tool, structurally linking old and new spaces while organizing thermal zones within the houses. HIJACKING the last extraction site at Manheim recodes existing mining infrastructure to challenge the uncertain promise of a future lake. Groundwater pumps, originally designed to drain the mine, are reprogrammed as fountains to invite alternative water flows and foster post-natural ecologies. A jetty built from mostly reused materials from the power plant provides human access in the otherwise non-human landscape. The intervention shifts the temporal logic of the mine, embracing a landscape in transition: a wetland unfolding beyond the horizons of extraction and speculation.

Each intervention acts as a seed for a renewed relationship to the ground and its politics. Together, they sketch the outline of a broader network of care - for land, for materials, and for both human and non-human inhabitants. As small parasites within the vast ruins of extraction, they uncover the potential to reframe architecture as a practice of unbuilding, reactivation, and hijacking.

Text von Hanna Lindenberg-Kappmeyer und Isabel Grohe.