Project by Ellie Nolan and Valentina Lizcano
This project reimagines John Johansen’s U.S. Embassy as an Irish American Mining Heritage Museum, using mining as a lens to tell larger stories about immigration, labor, resilience, religion, and the future. Workshops, archives, and classrooms extend these histories through active making, allowing visitors to carry the narrative forward through craft. The design is rooted in material investigation and the idea of mining the embassy itself, preserving the original schokbeton facade and introducing Irish stones in multiple grains, from smooth to rough. Through these choices, the museum links the history of extraction to the work of adaptive reuse, transforming the embassy into both an artifact of memory and a generator of new cultural life.
