The project investigates how architecture can materialise in unstable site conditions, such as the shifting grounds of the Garzweiler coal mine, and whether former inhabitants can reclaim such a place. By reframing extraction as a political agenda and drawing from the logic of site machinery, the design proposes a reconfiguration of the ground plane through a territory-based landscape framework.

Programmatically, it engages nearby communities through educational resources on the perpetual burdens of a condemned post-mining landscape, while offering a platform for expression and broadcasting. The building seeks to redistribute power from the mining company to local inhabitants, while enhancing research around environmental rehabilitation. Labs and geological archives occupy stable terrain, while an overhanging cliff partition houses transmission and editing studios, establishing the ‘Pirate Radio’ initiative.

The design methodology embraces methods through which architecture can form a symbiotic relationship with the tools that enable its creation, particularly by examining mobile carving, inhabitable voids created by excavation, and the spatial effects of shifting topographies.