Wei Zhao


Master of Architecture with an Emphasis in Interior Architecture

A quarry is an area where rocks such as aggregate, limestone, and granite are extracted for building material. Quarries are a necessity for human civilization. Man extracts cement, concrete, asphalt, and gravel to build house foundations, transportation structures, and other industrial forms to cast civilization. What this civilization may have left behind in its development is an earth that has been opened and hollowed out. Quarries all over the world, like scars on the earth, are an irreversible problem. Nature’s journey takes millions of years, but because of the needs of human civilization, excavations destroy it overnight, even shutting down its living systems, so that it becomes dead space.

The idea is to reveal the existence of abandoned quarries by rethinking the relationship between human civilization and nature through these destroyed area of land, and to stimulate the public to think about their destruction of this earth and then consider the potential for more positive and collective relationships with nature. The problems of human civilization and nature reflected by quarries open a dialogue between contemporary people and nature.