Leaving the surface: Occupying the unstable

In this project, I’m exploring what it means to live in a world where collapse is not  something sudden or exceptional, but something continuous and ongoing. The project is based at the Krystyna Tower in Bytom, which is a post-industrial site shaped by decades of coal mining. I see the tower not just as a structure above ground, but as part of a much larger vertical condition that stretches down into the unstable void left beneath it.

What interests me is the contrast between what we can see and what remains hidden. The tower itself is visible, solid, and historically connected to ideas of control and stability, while the underground void is invisible, even though it holds the real scale of instability. For me, this a-symmetry reflected a broader condition today, where collapse is not understood as a distant future event, but something already present within everyday life and the environments we inhabit.

Because of this, I don’t treat the underground simply as a physical space. Instead, I study it as something shaped by psychological tension, anticipation, and material displacement. In this context, architecture is no longer about creating permanence or fixed stability, instead it becomes a way of responding to instability.

What makes the project urgent is the idea that Bytom is not an isolated case. It can be understood as a prototype for many places facing environmental, economic, and extractive forms of collapse. So the project ultimately asks how architecture can operate when instability is not temporary, but permanent, and when the challenge is no longer how to avoid collapse, but how to inhabit it.

The project began with an interest in verticality and the hidden spatial conditions that exist beneath the surface. The vertical condition was explored through three interconnected typologies: the mine, the ruin, and the bunker, each shaping the project spatially and conceptually.

The mine reveals how extraction transforms landscapes, producing a continuous relationship between underground voids and surface formations. The ruin is understood as a material trace of industrial processes and economic exhaustion, exposing the long-term consequences of extraction while opening possibilities for alternative forms of inhabitation. The bunker introduces themes of concealment, anticipation, and uncertainty, representing architecture shaped by protection rather than visibility.

Together, these typologies frame the site as a layered vertical condition where histories of extraction, abandonment, and future uncertainty coexist above and below ground.

Rather than isolated typologies, the mine, bunker, and ruin are understood as interconnected conditions within the same spatial system. Each emerges from processes of extraction, insecurity, and decline, challenging the idea of the ground as stable or fixed.

Together, they reveal the contradictions of contemporary society: resources are extracted below ground, protection is concealed beneath the surface, and visible progress is often accompanied by abandonment elsewhere. These conditions do not belong to separate historical moments but coexist in the present, creating a landscape shaped simultaneously by expansion, instability, and anticipation of future uncertainty.

The project centers on the Krystyna Tower, built in 1929 at a mine where coal extraction began in 1873 and ended in 1997. Rather than an isolated structure, the tower is understood as part of a larger vertical field. Above ground, the tower rises 56 meters and can be easily seen, measured, and understood. But beneath it extends an underground void reaching around 840 meters deep, carved through decades of extraction. The visible tower therefore becomes only a small fragment of a much larger and incomprehensible condition below the surface.

During the mine’s active period, the tower functioned as part of the hoisting system that moved miners, materials, and coal vertically through the shaft. Steel cables ran over large pulleys at the top of the structure and down into the mine, allowing continuous movement between surface and underground operations. The tower organized the entire relationship between above and below ground. It marked the exact location of the shaft, coordinated circulation, and connected extraction, processing, transport, ventilation, and safety systems into one vertical infrastructure. 

Therefore, it was never simply an object to look at or inhabit. It was a device that made depth operational. Its purpose was to organize vertical movement and sustain access to the underground.

This also connects to a broader interest in how technologies of movement reshape space and perception. Just as elevators transformed cities by making vertical life possible above ground, mining infrastructures made deep subterranean space something accessible economically. 

Rather than approaching the site as a static post-industrial ruin, the project began to understand it as an active and continuously evolving system. The underground voids, the subsiding ground, the remnants of industrial infrastructure, and the persistence of abandoned material all suggested that extraction does not simply end when production stops. Its consequences continue to reorganize both surface and subterranean conditions long after industrial activity has ceased. What initially appeared as separate observations gradually became legible as overlapping modes through which collapse is inhabited and spatialized.

Following the analysis of the site and the broader vertical condition of extraction, the recurring spatial and existential tendencies began to emerge: decay, accumulation, and anticipation. These were not understood as isolated themes, but as interdependent conditions produced through the long-term consequences of mining, industrialization, abandonment, and collapse. Together, these conditions reveal a territory shaped not by absence, but by ongoing transformation across material, ecological, social, and temporal dimensions.

From this understanding emerged three architectural responses: the subterranean garden, the vertical archive, and the anticipatory structure. Each arises directly from the material, temporal, and psychological conditions revealed within the site. They are not separate proposals, but interconnected conceptual frameworks through which the project understands how architecture might operate within a world shaped by ongoing extraction, instability, and collapse. These frameworks do not represent sequential stages or chronological states. Instead, they coexist simultaneously within the site, intersecting and overlapping to shape the experience of space, time, and matter as inseparable and continuously entangled conditions.

The subterranean garden is an architectural framework that embraces instability and works with processes of growth, contamination, and transformation rather than resisting them. In addition, it demonstrates that abandonment is not an end state but a process of continual change. As industrial infrastructures deteriorate and ecological systems reassert themselves, the landscape becomes a site of regeneration, mutation, and adaptation. 

Accumulation exposes the layered residues left behind by extraction, including material waste, infrastructure, memory, and labor. The inherited strata generates physical and psychological weight, shaping how the landscape can be inhabited. In response, the vertical archive understands architecture as a repository of sedimented histories, negotiating the remains of the past rather than attempting to erase or overcome them.

Anticipation reflects a landscape suspended between uncertain futures: recovery, collapse, redevelopment, or further abandonment. Rather than moving toward a defined outcome, time becomes recursive and unresolved, shaped by memory, projection, and deferred expectations. This condition informs the anticipatory structure, a subterranean architecture of withdrawal that creates space for uncertainty, interruption, and futures that remain unknown.

In response, the project proposes a vertical architectural system that re-establishes a relationship between surface and depth. The model is central to this proposition, as the project can only be fully understood through a vertical reading. Rather than constituting a singular, self-contained building, the architecture establishes a spatial framework positioned between the visible and the concealed, between the measurable conditions of the surface and the more unknowable depths beneath it.

In this sense, the tower shifts from a monument to an instrument. It is no longer conceived merely as an object for preserving industrial memory, but as a hoisting device through which collapse itself can be inhabited and experienced.

This repositioning also transforms the understanding of collapse. With each instance of collapse, the ground does not simply disappear; rather, it is displaced. What was once perceived as a stable foundation becomes another layer within a larger stratification, revealing further depths below. Collapse, therefore, is not a singular descent toward a final bottom, but an ongoing process through which hidden conditions and voids are progressively exposed. Each failure redefines the location of stability, extending the vertical field of instability ever deeper. As a result, collapse is no longer something observed from a distance; instead, we are gradually situated within its consequences.

In this sense, the project does not present itself as a solution. It proposes a position: an architecture that operates within the weight of time and makes that weight spatially perceptible, inhabitable, and collectively shared.