Ground Matter is a prototypical proposal to reimagine the role of adaptive reuse for a decommissioned Coca-Cola Bottling Plant in Houston, Texas. The project responds to the urban condition of impervious surfaces prevalent across Houston’s cityscape and proposes a new post-industrial landscape that aims to bring permeability to the site. The existing buildings on site are minimally intervened into, with most of the design focusing on the ground surface between the existing structures. Five ground ‘operations’ of excavating, perforating, routing, skinning, and stacking are implemented across the site to create new typologies of landscapes such as a Valley, Forest, River, Wetland, Grassland, or Mountain. These typologies either ‘eat’ into or ‘stack’ onto the existing buildings to enhance their operational and programmatic capabilities. Ground Matter is thus a post-industrial landscape and a localized manifesto to tackle an urgent urban condition through the blurring of edges between built architecture and natural landscape that is operationally responsive and responsible but also programmatically varied and provocative to provide settings of occupation.
