02 · Isle Royale, Lake SuperiorAdapt UP
Collective habitation lifted clear of the abandoned copper mines of Isle Royale, on ground that cannot be built on.
SITE
Isle Royale, Michigan
Program
Collective housing, shared cores
Medium
Mapping, data drawing, cutaway
Reading
Mine shaft as datum
01 Research
Six mines were cut into Isle Royale and abandoned. The contamination they left is still in the water.
The island carries the earliest known mining settlement in Isle Royale at the Prehistoric Mine and the last closure at Lucky Bay in 1939. Between them sit Prospector, Island, Saginaw and Datolite, each recorded with what it left behind.
The readings are specific. Saginaw is the largest system on the island and eighty percent of its contaminants are arsenic and lithium. The Prehistoric cave systems hold large quantities of acidic water, the Island Mine shafts hold high CO₂, and Datolite sits among more than a dozen shipwrecks in the Lake Superior region.
Site survey — the central cluster where the shafts concentrate.
Isle Royale — six mines located, each with what it left in the water.
02 Observation
Contamination is not evenly spread. Sampled and plotted, it resolves into a field with densities.
Plotted point by point across the island, the readings produce a matrix rather than a boundary: heavier where the shafts are, thinning toward the shoreline, with gaps that carry nothing at all.
That matrix is what the project treats as ground. The shafts themselves are the only reliable verticals, so they become the datum, and the surface between them is what cannot be trusted.
Extraction against geologic age — decades of removal against millions of years of strata.
Contaminant field — plotted point by point, densities and gaps.
03 Translation
Habitation is lifted onto stilts set on the shaft positions and linked laterally, so nothing rests on the disturbed surface.
Each dwelling becomes a rounded vessel carried on a single column. The columns land on the shaft grid; the surface below is left to recover and to hold water.
Lateral tubes tie the vessels to one another rather than to the ground, so the collective is structurally continuous above and untouched below.
Side elevation — flotation, deck, canopy, planting.
04 Architecture
A linked colony of pods over a flooded floor, the terrain left as wireframe beneath it.
The finished cutaway keeps the site legible as data: contour and mesh rather than solid rock, so the ground reads as something recorded rather than something built on.
Above it the pods are unambiguous objects, domed and framed, joined by the tubes that carry movement and services between them.
Collective cutaway — pods on the shaft grid, the flooded floor left below.
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