Open Collections

Abstract

200 Grandmas: Tending to a Post-Industrial Garden is a speculative design-research project that reframes architecture as a practice of care. Care, in this definition, extends beyond the anthropocentric body to encompass the intricate web of multispecies entanglements that sustain life. It includes repairing and maintaining built and natural systems, from preserving furnishings to fostering ecological health across generations. And so, in a world marked by societal fragmentation and environmental disconnection, this thesis explores care as a framework to transform post-industrial sites into spaces of radical togetherness through the rituals of gardening, cooking, and feasting. Using Vancouver’s Old Foundry site in the False Creek Flats as a case study, the project reimagines the site of neglect as a regenerative ecological and social landscape. Grounded in the site’s layered history—from rich tidal mudflat, to industrial hub, to vacant, contaminated lot—soil is drawn as a living archive of human and more-than-human entanglements. Through speculative scenarios, it imagines phased interventions where food production, cultural spaces, and remediation practices foster multispecies reciprocity over the 200 years it takes to generate one centimeter of healthy topsoil. Phytoremediation strategies—phyto-stimulation, phyto-stabilization, phyto-degradation, and phyto-layering—are applied as temporal spatial frameworks. Rather than offering fixed solutions, the project envisions the site as a space of ongoing experimentation—where slow, deliberate acts of care gradually transform the soil, preparing it for the day when False Creek’s waters might return, and we might once again harvest from the land. Representation is central to the design methodology: speculative drawings, sectional narratives, planting cards, and scrolls visualize evolving relationships between soil, species, and intergenerational time. A cast of “grandmas”—human and more-than-human—grounds the story in a multispecies pedagogy that invites learning, care, and co-creation. Drawing becomes a method of holding complexity, where architecture is not a fixed object but a continuous act of tending. Ultimately, 200 Grandmas offers a scalable framework for post-industrial urban remediation—culturally rooted, ecologically sound, and deeply relational. It questions what it means to build sustainably when the soil itself is a protagonist and care becomes architecture.