Canada’s Pacific Northwest is experiencing accelerating glacial retreat, intensifying atmospheric rivers, prolonged drought, and increasing wildfires. These events affect not only humans but also render more-than-human ecologies vulnerable. The relentless pursuit of economic growth fuels an ever-expanding demand for resource extraction, erasing, reshaping, and altering cultures while terraforming landscapes. This drive for control over resources, environments, and people accelerates extraction, destroying biodiversity zones, displacing communities, and exacerbating racial, social, and economic disparities as they become more deeply woven into the planetary polycrisis.

The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 showcased British colonies and their valuable natural resources as evidence of the empire’s extractive triumph. The exhibition presented Canada as an inexhaustible resource, highlighting the nation’s timber wealth and mineral abundance as evidence of the empire’s prosperity. This option studio revisits that exhibition to trace the extractive geographies it celebrated and their present condition in the midst of planetary crisis. The Pacific Northwest region of Canada, particularly the historical ‘All Red Line’ corridor, will be the focus area of the option studio. Built alongside the Canadian Pacific Railway, the ‘All Red Line’ established physical corridors and stamped a colonial logic along which communication and resource flows passed exclusively through state-controlled territory, a jurisdictional claim that continues to be invoked today to route pipelines across unceded lands.

This option studio redefines delineated resource grounds, infrastructure, waste byproducts, and atmospheric territories as a “thickened ground” condition encompassing interconnected, non-scalable processes and flows. The “thickened ground” will be explored as an alternative ontology in which processes do not distinguish between substance and significance, nor between nature and culture. Commonwealth nations share interconnected histories shaped by the British Empire’s consolidation of power through resource exploitation, Indigenous displacement, migrant labor, and large-scale extractive practices. These shared legacies present an opportunity for the option studio to design future scenarios that seek alternatives to the historical regimes of expansion, resisting colonial attitudes and systems of perpetual growth through the exploration of alternative regimes of power, property, and production through techno-ecological relationships within a framework of territorial commons

Each student will investigate extractive geographies through archival research and the creation of counter-narratives. Students will assemble these records into a Counter-Empire Exhibition, located in the extractive geographies, where the landscapes can suggest reparative design actions. Students will choose architectural, landscape, and infrastructural elements such as pavilions, infrastructures, gardens, or convening rooms from the 1924 exhibition and reimagine them as reparative spatial proposals aligned with current Commonwealth policy, including the Living Lands Charter and the Apia Ocean Declaration.

The studio consists of four phases: 
• Phase 01: From Above–Counter-Narratives 
• Phase 02: From Within–Land and Energy as Medium (including a field trip to London for archival research at the V&A, the National Archives, the Imperial War Museum, Kew Gardens and the Commonwealth Secretariat) 
• Phase 03: From Below–Future-Kin
• Phase 04: The Counter-Empire Exhibition

The teaching and learning schedule includes a series of guest lectures and a range of mapping, narrative, film and modelling workshops aligned with each of the phases.