CAUTERIZED TERRAIN
Crown King, Arizona
Harry Murzyn
Architecture Thesis - The Cooper Union
I Ritual Inscriptions II Cyclic Narratives III Core and Buffer
Thesis Statement
Wildfire reveals the transition between death and rebirth: its boundary is a spatial threshold delineating that which has been purified by flame and that which has not. This perimeter scar is a fleeting remnant of the radical atmospheric landscape of fire: a complex environmental interplay of weather, topography, fuels, and human intervention. This thesis questions the permanence of architecture by reconsidering its relationship to fire. The target is to reconcile architecture, formally and programmatically, with the cycles of decay and reinvention that characterize the long passage of time rather than allowing it to become an ignorant obsolete: a ruin. And so here I propose a new city form to facilitate and register the continual rebirth of place. Sprawled settlement patterns have been transplanted into the forest while assuming detachment from its natural processes. And so with each fire, the settlers inscribe a line on the ground. This line marks the singular human trek through the forest connecting the fire’s origin and end, a ritual of containment, but of that which cannot be contained. Inevitably, a sacrificial loss accompanies this ritual: of resources, of environment, and often of life. We have chosen how to live; nature dictates on what terms. The natural fire regime of the forest must be restored, and the new city must coexist with its processes of purification. Around the historical core of Crown King, the community will be rebuilt as a gradation of architectural thresholds, actively engaging the spread of flame. The thresholds take on the program of plateau, house, and passage. At the perimeter, a new ritual is enacted: a periodic burning - the tempering of the city by fire.
Part I
Ritual Inscriptions - The Gladiator Fire
We mark the eternal city in the present moment.
Cut into the ground, only an unbroken line will contain the inferno.
1970-2012
Any single wildfire will define a landscape for decades. Each fire varies in its intensity: sometimes all life is seemingly lost, but this is merely land on which new life can thrive; other times, only the undergrowth is cleared, strengthening the trees that remain. At the moment that a fire occurs, the sequence of natural succession begins anew. But no single wildfire can be observed outside of a continuum: it is one piece of a landscape mosaic, part of a forest whose only constant lies in shifting patterns of renewal. Moments of radical change are not unique. New growth, mature growth, dead growth, and every variation of thereof coexist in any single moment. This is a vibrant forest, one that can support a full ecosystem of flora and fauna. Its complexity allows the forest to adapt to the changing conditions brought by time. Wildfire is the actor that sustains life within the forest, thus the importance of the natural fire regime. Human presence alters the process at every scale. Our settlement patterns necesitate forest management practices that increase the intensity and frequency of fire, and the threat is compounded by the looming effects of climate change in the Southwest. Unchanging and oblivious, we are ill-prepared to adapt. We instead attempt to contain the fury, drawing a line between us and nature.
GLADIATOR FIRE - May 2012 Size - 16,240 acres Cause - Human caused; originated from a structure fire on private property Terrain - Steep, rugged, brushy with very difficult access Structures destroyed - 6 Cost - $14 million Injuries - 8 FIRELINE - approx. 30 miles; began within Crown King and completed at peak of Towers Mountain
The ancient city is born through ritual inscription. It is a precise process: oxen drag a plow, cutting into the ground a perimeter, fully enclosing the city’s divined site; the disturbed earth is carefully placed within the city boudary; the plow is lifted where gates will be. A newly founded city could only become part of this world by delineating a sacred boundary which would set it apart from and within it. Upon this line, the walls of the city are built - a material reminder of the inviolable pact below. As centuries pass, the founding circumscription becomes a mythic origin, remaining essential to the present conception of the city. The construction of a fireline requires a willingness to confront nature with the intent of reigning it in. It is a precise process: a line of firefighters arranged by sequential duties tactically engage with fire, utilizing their knowledge of topography, landcover, temperature, humidity, wind patterns, and fire behavior; the lead sawyers determine the path, felling trees and brush with chainsaws; the following swampers clear the debris, careful to place it outside of the fire boundary; the rest of the crew follows with pulaskis, shovels, and rakes, cutting into the earth to expose mineral soil. If successful, fire will not cross this line to threaten human settlement.
A conquered city is released from its founding pact by plowing the ground in the reverse direction. Nature suppressed, the firefighters return to erase the line, concealing the damage they have wrought on the land.
Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world. Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses
Part II
Cyclic Narratives - The Rebirth of Crown King
We will find it and it will never fade.
One reaches Crown King by a path of gold.
Just before he died he asked for my father and gave him a piece of rich gold quartz which he had not previously mentioned. He said his grandmother had given it to him and that the vein was still there for someone to find. Eros M. Savage Prospecting for Gold and Silver
It is the concrete image, the figurative reduction into a few little discs of human fortune and all the enjoyments which fortune implies. This is the feeling of the miser when he plunges his hands into his coffers and dabbles in the yellow flood. His joy, at which we smile, makes him, in his way, an idealist and a poet, like the gambler when he takes up the cards. It is not the glint of the metal which animates and attracts miser and gambler alike; it is the vision of the fields and the woods, the houses and the furniture, the art treasures, the luxuries and the pleasures which this gold represents, which it would enable them to acquire if they wished, which at once start up and pass in procession before their mind’s eye, and which are, in fact, at any given moment the potentialities contained in gold. L. De Launay, Professor at the École Supérieure des Mines The World’s Gold: Its Geology, Extraction, and Political Economy
There is a certain purity to gold... an ability to detach itself from its origins and become its own archetype: the specificity of its arduous beginnings are forgotten when we see ourselves reflected in its untarnished surface. Perhaps this is true of all elements when they shed their surroundings, yet gold is somehow more perfect. Once human hands facilitate its birth from the ground, it becomes immortal: in the sense that it isn’t materially abandoned, of course, but more deeply in its ability carry the present wishes of humankind through the unknown fog of time, letting us stake a claim in our future. It is an element of infinite and dormant potential, waiting for us to release it. Though it takes many forms, it always looks forward. It is wealth and politics; it is a craft and a profession; a dream and a promise; it is all things to all people. Aurora - the Goddess of Dawn, from which the latin word for gold, aurum, is derived. Her chariot crosses the sky each morning, heralding the reemergence of the Sun. Hers is a myth of rebirth and renewal. She asks Jupiter to grant immortality to her lover Tithonus, the Prince of Troy, but she forgets to ask for eternal youth. Without it, this mortal ages into undying ruin. Crown King, Arizona - a town located in the remote heights of Central Arizona’s Bradshaw Mountains. Gold was its life-blood for five decades. But Crown King is no Tithonus. Aurora has gifted it the immortality of perpetual renewal, so that among fading dreams this town thrives.
The following narratives describe the journey to Crown King, a singular origin of immortal Gold.
1930 I suppose I could go on indefinitely with incidents and anecdotes of people brought in from every walk of life by the lure of gold or forgetfulness, forced into primative democracy by the exigencies of circumstances that at times was disconcerting, but had many compensations and exerted a powerful fascination for many people. Mining is now practically at a standstill and the country has seemed to become what the Indians used it for - a pleasant summer retreat from the heat of the desert. Helen Harrington Sweet Crown King resident
Present Thirty miles of dirt road lay between us and our destination. The Bradshaw Mountain range is in the distance, and somewhere along its ridgeline, deep within Prescott National Forest, is Crown King. Leaving the town of Mayer and State Road 69, we are in relatively flat, Arizona desert shrub-land. This is our first drive to what will be home for the next six weeks, and nothing prepares me for what can only be described as a stunning departure from civilization. I’ve heard that the ascent of two thousand feet can feel precarious at times, expecially when the the single-vehicle road borders sheer drops. The fifteen-passenger cargo van I’m in feels incongruous with the all-terrain-vehicles, four-wheelers, and motor bikes that pass us from the opposite direction. In the rearview mirror I can see the bumper stickers that these adventurers display: I survived the drive to Crown King. Though gold-extraction at an industrial scale had subsided in the late 1920s, the figural and literal tracks had been laid for a future repopulation by refuge-seekers. The gold industry stamped the imprint of a town onto the landscape; for that very reason I was travelling there now. The Crown King Fire Department takes on the responsibility of protecting the new, often ignorant patterns of outdoor-loving settlement. I was with a group of volunteers, heading for the origin of gold. Still on the desert plains we pass the barren ghost town of Cleator, a supply hub for a former industry railroad that once scaled the mountain. When industry left Cleator, so did life. We didn’t stop to see; we just drove on.
Mayer - Cleator - Crown King
1908
Newspaper clipping Crown King Historical Society
The last thirteen miles from Cleator to Crown King can be safely completed in about fifty minutes. In that period of time, we passed from desert valley through fields of saguaro cacti, past colossal cliff-faces, and eventually crossed a bridge, one side of which was dry shrub-land, while the other was dense ponderosa pine forest. We were rising through the finest gradations of atmospheric conditions, to which the landscape had adapted. I couldn’t help but be amused by the miners climbing these layers only to delve into the subterranean ones. Gold does not attain embodiment as the signifier of status, as the proof of accumulated wealth, until it has been removed from the ground. Once it has, it is a stark transformation indeed. Gold touched by human hands tends to be drawn to the same, and so gold never stays where it was found; it must travel long distances, gilding the walls of faraway mansions, becoming an ornament to ornament. In any case, the infusion of symbolic meaning must be facilitated by a tremendous development of infrastructural capital, a fact often eclipsed by the the sheen of the golden object. And here was this infrastructure. We were driving on the former trackbed of Frank Murphy’s ‘Impossible Railroad’ as it was called then. The rail was an engineering marvel that established a link between the gold territories and the ‘civilized’ city of Prescott (northwest of Mayer). Begun in 1899 and completed in 1903, it was financed by and in turn enabled the untold riches produced year after year by the Crowned King and other mines in the district. The energy expended in the creation of this infrastructural network is still apparent, long after the rail ties were torn up in 1926. In truth, the marks cannot be erased. Open cuts at heights up to fifty feet were blasted into the mountainside. The richness of the land can be indicated by the fact that workers were tempted to leave the job, taking instead the gold they uncovered. When gold extraction ceased to be economically feasible in the 1920s, Crown King couldn’t fade away; it was an ideal retreat from the desert, made accessible by remnants of gold’s infrastructure. We followed this remnant of an earlier era across the last bridge, arriving in Crown King.
ascending through strata of landscape
1897 Crowned King is not only a mine, but makes some pretensions as to a mountain burg. It has a post office, company store, several saloons, two Chinese restaurants and a feed yard. From the hoist down for a mile to the mill, the town lines the stage road that comes down over the precipitous mountain. The mill, the mine and the town are lighted by electricity that burns all night long, the plant being run in connection with the mill. The Crowned King is a neat camp; the buildings are all substantial, and an air of prosperity pervades the surroundings. The store is supplied with a big stock of goods and the store rooms contain a large reserve stock. The post office and telephone are located in the store. There are two company eating houses; one a mile above for the miners and one at the mill for the mill boys. The mill is substantially built and is certainly the best equipped 10-stamp mill in the Bradshaw Mountains. Miner Arizona Journal
The town’s center is sited in a shallow basin, at the confluence of three streams. We drove into a town square of sorts: General Store, Fire House, Saloon, and a restaurant or two, From what I understand, the General Store was there from the beginning; I saw old photos with a locamotive stationed in front of it. The Saloon, too, lays claim to a lengthy pedigree, proudly advertising itself as Arizona’s oldest saloon and brothel. These buildings are typical of those who have handled their transition from the gold industry unimpaired. Some exist in a mundane and sorry state, points along a ‘walking tour,’ caught in perpetual stasis. Others no longer exist or are fragmented: the ten-stamp mill for example, was repurposed as a rather dramatic stage piece within one of the restaurants, aptly titled “The Mill.” The basin was a reliable source of power for running the stamp-mill, using water’s energy to crush the ore carted down from the mountain. At this point, the miners were using a cyanidation process to dissolve the gold-containing ore into a slurry, from which a newly formed aurocyanide could be extracted, isolating gold from the surrounding quartz and diorite. The gold then recovered from this process was ideally sited halfway between mountaintop and desert floor, to be carried down by railroad. Water could not fullfull all the energy needs, so the miners took advantage of their forested site, essentially clearing the district of trees. Trees were our problem now. The gold industry used them, but the next generation of Crown King residents wanted to live within them. And so they built a sprawled settlement in a forest which desperately wanted to restore its natural fire regime. The same setting, when occupied by different constituents, requires a newly considered and executed response. The town as it exists now has its own dilemna resolve, not the relationship to its geologic underpinnings, but to the cyclic process of forest fire that surrounds it. Nevertheless, the town still prospers as old paths find new travelers. Looking up to the highest peak - Tower’s Mountain - one glimpses the possibilities of radical reinvention: upon yesterday’s industry is built an industry of tomorrow.
arrival at the basin
1871 Developments every day made, increase the confidence of our people in the richness and permanency of the gold and silver mines in this district, and we only wish our miners had the necessary capital, to erect works to work their ores. But, capital will soon come, and works will be erected. “Rich Strikes, and Fair Sales: Good News from the Surface and Bowels of Old Mother Earth� Weekly Arizona Miner
There is one fire lookout at the peak of Towers Mountain, dwarfed by the forest of radio towers that crowd this point. It must have come in use over the past decades; looking out I see a mosaic patchwork of burned landscape. The human implications of this patchwork have defined the present community. In protection of our human interests, each fire is marked by a hellish ritual of sorts... Without us, fire signifies purification; the forest is reborn with its every return. We have turned it into a beast. Quite a few interests have a stake in the prime location of Crown King’s highest point: cellular and radio wave providers, the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Public Safety, Western Area Power Administration, and the Forest Service, among several others. Millions of dollars have been invested in re-populating this outcropping of quartz diorite, with structures which allow the ubiquitous projection of human thoughts. Towers Mountain and Crown King are connected via a power line that runs along the former bed of the Wildflower Mine tram. It had once carried gold ore, extracted from mineral veins at the peak, to the town’s center where it would be processed. The ridgeline above Crown King is dotted with mines. The ridge is the outward expression of an underground landscape of geological forces and the miners had read it to find the gold below. It was hundreds of millions of years ago that events were set in motion which eventually brought us to this site. This is the origin, where immaterial thoughts and desires are drawn from the ground. I stand here now, merely another witness. Harry Murzyn Volunteer with the Crown King Fire Department
the peak: 7628’
Part III
Core and Buffer - The City Tempered by Wildfire
Our center is perpetuated within an ever-changing periphery.
Thresholds of fire constitute the city form of Crown King.