Tiantian Dun
Chenlong Zhang
Landscapes are not passive backdrops; they are records of human intention.
Our project is situated within Dinorwig Quarry in North Wales — a landscape once shaped by natural geological processes over millennia, and later irrevocably transformed by two centuries of industrial extraction from the late 18th century to 1969. What remains is a vast open terrain of industrial ruins, where the original topography has been overwritten by the marks of human labor and ambition.
While the initial competition brief called for the construction of a singular concert hall, we questioned whether such a closed, isolated structure could truly capture the layered and evolving essence of this site. In response, we propose an immersive performance landscape — a spatial stage where body, sound, and form engage directly with the quarry’s ruins and terrain.
As Carl O. Sauer noted in his seminal essay Morphology of Landscape (1925), every landscape is a palimpsest: a layered text inscribed by successive human interventions over time. Our project embraces this idea, reading the quarry not as a blank canvas but as a living archive of human presence — a testament to both our capacity to shape and scar the land in pursuit of utility.
Rather than attempting to erase the industrial traces, we seek to activate them, transforming these remnants into performative spaces charged with narrative and memory. Through a careful analysis of the quarry’s various industrial relics and their spatial qualities, we identified distinct ruin typologies and mapped their distribution across the site. From this, four specific performance stages emerged, each framed by existing ruins and landscape features.
These stages are not isolated entities but are interconnected by the quarry’s natural contours, forming a narrative path through pits, cliffs, and winding routes. In this way, the audience is no longer a passive observer but an active participant — moving through, inhabiting, and becoming entangled within the unfolding spatial narrative. The mountain itself becomes a dynamic stage, where the choreography of movement shapes perception, and where past and present, ruin and performance, memory and invention, coexist in continuous dialogue.
