Rock>>City>>Rock

What will the footprint of human action be long after we are gone?

In Rock>>City>>Rock, we explore architecture as a geological actor. Exploring urban transformation in the age of the Anthropocene, we trace the everyday ways in which human efforts engage with earth's materials to build urban worlds - but also, how uncertain these processes can be.

Digging down into the underneath of cities, we fracture the earth's surface, manipulating its ancient geologies for urban construction. Geological material is also used to make new substances: concrete, glass, brick are types of'anthropic rock': human-made rocks that create a fourth category alongside igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary.

But urban processes can be fragile, subject to instabilities above and below the surface. Disputes emerge, construction projects stall, materials reach their limits, buildings start to crack and unruly ecologies emerge in their wake. In our times of climatic and political crisis, the socio-geologies of architecture meet more-than-human pushback. Eventually, imperceptibly slowly, the material debris of cities - the glass, concrete, stone - will compress into a new urban stratum. Beneath the earth's surface, the traces of urban pasts will become part of the planet's geological future.

Rock>>City>>Rock is part of an ongoing collaboration between James Muriuki and Constance Smith. Through images, objects, video, and a joint discussion, we bring our work into conversation with Nairobi-based architects Cave Bureau, whose work addresses the anthropological and geological context of the African city in the Anthropocene.