Students in Anthropocene and Herd (ARC3020) — a thesis-prep research studio taught by Gilles Saucier, Christian Joakim, and Gregory Neudorf — were asked to research fundamental elements of nature and then use them as inspiration for the creation of objects. Later, for their Master of Architecture thesis projects, each student would use their objects as the basis for the design of a building.

Rachel began her research by taking nature walks in a forested area near her home. As she walked, she gathered a few objects off the ground: twigs, the stalks of ferns, acorns, pine cones, and so on.

Then she created a series of plaster blocks, with the natural objects she had collected cast inside. "I thought it was the natural next step for me," she says. "I was thinking about how to capture these moments of time."

She experimented with different ways of creatively destroying her plaster objects, to simulate the natural effects of erosion over a long period of time. Some of her creations, she burned:

Others, like this plaster cast of a snowball, she melted:

Her next step was to find ways of expanding her material investigation to encompass a particular site: the Lakeview area, in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. "I spent a long time looking into the layers that make up the history of the site," Rachel says. "You have the Lakeview Generating Station. It was the largest coal plant of its kind in the world before it was decommissioned in 2005. There's a wastewater treatment plant, which is still there. And on the bottom southeast is a conservation zone, which was for me really funny, because it's like they're trying to rehabilitate this site that is so incredibly damaged through human intervention."

Rachel found a geotechnical report that detailed the results of a bore-hole analysis of the soil in the area where the power plant once stood. Each hole revealed a miniature history of the site, written in minerals and pollutants.

A drawing of the Lakeview Generating Station boreholes, extruded.

Rachel wanted to find a way to capture and visualize the Lakeview area's natural change over time, just as she had done with her plaster objects. She created a series of images that show the slow work of natural processes, including bird migration patterns, wind patterns, and erosion patterns. She also created renderings of the bore holes, showing the layers of sediment extracted from beneath the power plant.

Her final renderings show all these elements — the birds, the boreholes, the shoreline — layered into a single section, superimposed on an image of one of her plaster casts. "You can see the object and the existing site," she says. "I believe all these elements are the layers that create my object."