Zachary Elliott


Design Projects

  1. Embracing the Ruin
  2. A Torrington Square Adventure


Design Research

  1. Encountering the Riverine Park Nexus
  2. Green Space in Denver
  3. Molten Wastelands


Photography

  1. Architecture
  2. Landscape
  3. Urban

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MLA Landscape Architecture at The Bartlett                    BA Geography (First Class) at Oxford                        Freelance Photographer                    

© Zachary Elliott 2024

Embracing the Ruin


MLA Landscape Architecture / Y1 Terms 2 + 3



Levant Tin Mill
Crumbling structures rise out of the mist, hinting at but not revealing their former uses. This is a landscape rich with ambiguity: materially molten, symbolically vague.



Embracing the Ruin explores how we can ride with the messy ambiguity of decaying dressing floor landscapes, celebrate the unique ecologies of post-industrial places, and tell heritage narratives through sensitive landscape interventions.

Based at Geevor and Levant Mines in Cornwall, this project invites visitors to imagine, reflect, and learn about the history, present state, and futures of this tin mining landscape. The open-ended, fragile, and ruinous nature of the site is largely retained.

Interventions are sensitive to preserving archaeological traces in the landscape, as Geevor Mine is a protected monument, Levant Mine’s dressing floors are well preserved, and the ambiguity of the ruin central to the site’s character. Rather than ‘cleaning’ up the landscape for the sake of visitor comfort, a series of landscape fragments are proposed as imaginative portals into the mine’s past, its current ruinous state of decay, and speculations on how the site will change, weather, and be interpreted in the future.

The ruin moves between being a vehicle for imagination and a way to understand the past, present, and future through specific readings and/or inhabitations of the landscape.




Tramway Summit
Using a disused tramway embankment to stage a series of surveying perspectives over the Levant dressing floors.




Seating and Wayfinding
Created ruins that blur the boundaries between existing ruin, industrial sculpture, and landscape intervention.




Settling Tank Wetlands
Repurposing settling tank bays as phytoremediation testbeds, spotlighting metallophytes and embracing the ecosystems made possible by post-industrial toxicity.


Shifting Steps
An empty gabion staircase rises out of the re-created coastal heathland towards the gravel summit, a ghost of former field boundaries buried deep beneath the gravel stockpile.


Gravel Cut
A cut made into a gravel stockpile stages an intimate encounter with the sheer mass of material extracted in mining and the claustrophobia of working deep underground.