This was a student project by Harshat Verma for Kristi Cheramie's course for LARCH 6910 in Autumn 2018. The design brief was to create a ‘memorial to change’ in our given sites. My site, Thingvellir, Iceland has a unique geological feature which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. It is the only place, on ground, where two tectonic plates, North American and Eurasian, are drifting apart from each other every year by approximately 2cms as a result of crustal rifting and volcanism. A ridge valley gets formed between the Almannagjá and Heiðargjá faults, the former being in the American tectonic plate and the later in the Eurasian tectonic plate. The design is born out of fissures which developed on either ends of the falling ridge valley. The fissures that have developed on both sides are used to create the two landscape entities that get combined in the middle to form an iconic landscape feature in the ridge valley, called the Vessel. Each fissure showcases the stacking of numerous number of individual lava lobes over the years. The lava lobes can reveal how long it took for it to be formed and also tells us the temperature of the lava. The fissures on either ends, help in collecting snow during winters and discharges water along a straight drain line during the warmers days, creating a green belt that connects between the two tectonic plates, while taking the visitor to the central land-art piece; the Vessel. While walking along the green belt, vertical markers are placed showcasing how close the tectonic plates used to be before drifting. Every steps taken by a person accounts for about 65 years of tectonic drifting. The vessel is a formation of a grey matte’ titanium cast of the two fissures on either ends. The N.American fissure forms the above ground art piece and the Eurasian fissure forms the foundation holding the N.American fissure. The vessel as the names suggests also acts as a way to store snow during the winters and leaks out during the summer, forming its own ecological system around it. The vessel can also be entered from ground level which allows visitors to experience the fissure from the inside. With the subsequent years of drifting, the distance from the closest vertical marker can also be observed that tells us the drifting in the coming years for our generations to observe.
