From Fossil to Vessel

FINALIST of Archi-Hack: Gas Station

+ FINALIST

Archi-Hack: Gas Station

[18955]

From Fossil to Vessel

Team

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Beneath the gas station, a hidden moment is now exposed, where the city breathes through a network of buried veins—pipes, tanks, conduits. Infrastructure that once fed machines, now obsolete, still lingers underground. The site, excavated like an archaeological dig, reveals its industrial past—a buried network of tanks, pipelines, and conduits that belonged to an oil-driven city. These relics of fossil fuel infrastructure are unearthed, reprogrammed, and reactivated, no longer serving machines, but humans.

This is not a pit of extraction but a “third space“ for the city, where exhaustion meets renewal, not combustion. The old fuel tanks, exhumed from their entombment, become atmospheric chambers—thick with mist, dense with oxygen, lined with slow-growing gardens. Pipes, once rigid and unseen, are cut open, rerouted, and reactivated—now conduits of hydration, warmth, and purified air. Some glow with filtered light, others channel energy like veins of an inverted underworld, turning buried infrastructure into a living, breathing system.

This is a reframing of urban metabolism. The age of gasoline is reaching its end, leaving behind a network of ruins, we kept the infrastructural pattern, but shifted the purpose. The station still fuels, but in a different way.

Jury Comments

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[ratemypost]