Forbidden ground : evolutionary natural legacy and decaying disaster heritage

Abstract

Memorial landscape normally includes material and abstract landscapes that can be used to mark a thing or to memorize future generations, to initiate material and abstract landscapes of human groups' associations and memories, as well as materiality of historical or cultural and political relics or abstract landscape. However, contemporary architectural monument focuses on form and representation of architecture itself and its symbolic significance rather than the land and ground, leaving important marks of landscape, as well as the land clearing and the cultivation by local societies. This thesis criticizes and argues that the landscape process and human operation is a more critical way to be as a monument to an event. It involves earth, water, plants and other landscape elements and senses related to an event, as well as to human being. The landscape is not a static idyllic scene but constantly evolving over the time and space with materials migrations. Therefore, a monumental landscape of an event could be evolving and keeping changing from classical aesthetic to a relative aesthetic and system esthetic, unveiling its economic, socio-political and ecological values. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and to test the theory for designing landscape monument and monumental landscape as a evolving process. The investigation and intervention in the thesis reveals that monumental landscape design deals with integrated timescale, high level of complicacy of materials and uncertainties in future. The design simulates and manifests natural patterns that could change the environmental and sociopolitical ecology of a place. Proceeding the set of strategies and sequence of operative tools, the thesis proposes a strategic 50-years masterplan for the development of the site, which is one of the biggest technogenic disaster in the world – Chernobyl accident of 1986, responding to different political hypotheses, with complex issues.