A fault trench to detect seismic activity.
Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha for the Los Angeles Times.

Natural Disaster National Park

Tectonic plates, San Andreas, redwoods, deserts, paleontology, research

This spring, students in Geoff Manaugh’s class at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation are envisioning how the San Andreas Fault might be commemorated as a national park. The great tectonic scar cuts through 800 miles of California — from the redwood rainforests north of San Francisco to the desert Salton Sea near the U.S.-Mexico border —  shifting and resettling, a landscape in flux.

Paleontologist Richard Fortey calls the fault “one of the least stable parts of the Earth,” but Manaugh sees possibility for redefining what a National Park can achieve, by memorializing the dynamic landscape — mountains and rivers, ranches and suburbs — that the fault encompasses. He writes:

“What does it mean to frame a dangerously unstable landscape as a place of aesthetic reflection, natural refuge, or outdoor recreation, and what are the risks in doing so? Alternatively, might we discover a whole new type of National Park in our designs, one that is neither reflective nor a refuge—perhaps something more like a San Andreas Fault National Laboratory, a managed landscape of sustained scientific research, not personal recreation?”

Find more photos from the fault and the syllabus for the course here.

A fence offset by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

—Erica Berry