A proposal: sunken temple at Fuciao Village

This work models an existing folk temple 80 km west of Shanghai and its relationship to the earth. The stacked newspaper represent the 200 meters of layered soft sedimentary soils beneath the temple. Like the read newspapers, each strata of the modeled earth has expired and is buried by what the next day brings. Only this past year, an additional two meters of earth has been added around the temple for flood proofing. The half buried temple is cut into the stack of newspapers. The sunken artifact registers the abrupt recent extrusion of the earth, the original ground plane shared with the dismantled village it once served, and its place within the greater geologic depth of the site. The sunken temple is the site of the masters thesis.