ABSTRACT
The North American continent is threaded with highways, rail lines, pipe lines, and shipping lines for the transport of extraction equipment and for the transport of fossil fuels from the continental interior to markets in Asia. These lines and pipelines are critical to the future of the global climate and, as such, are actively contested in terms of conflicting property, corporate, human, and ecosystem rights. This contest reinforces the critical importance of this category in a taxonomy of architectural space. In this study, we apply traditional modes of architectural site analysis to this non-traditional architectural site. The resulting body of work invites reflection on the role of architectural criticism and design practice for the future of fossil fuels and for the future of the global climate.
