09/24/2026
Studio Introduction & Pin-Up
LAR 555: "Strange Attraction: Productive Side Effects"
Instructor(s): Andrew Madl
Conceived in the 1980s as the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was designed as an immense underground ring in which protons would collide at unprecedented energies, allowing scientists to investigate the fundamental structure of matter. Before its eventual siting in Texas, where construction began but the project was canceled before completion, Tennessee emerged as a serious contender for the project—placing an extraordinary scientific instrument within the geological, ecological, and infrastructural systems of the region.
Strange Attraction rewrites this unrealized Tennessee proposal through a simple historical substitution: Tennessee was selected, and the SSC was built. From this altered past, the studio asks what landscapes might follow. Specific systems, processes, and material outputs of the collider are isolated and reconfigured as territorial organizers. Water, energy, excavation, spoil, heat, and data become design media through which new ecological, infrastructural, and cultural relationships emerge.
The resulting landscapes operate through infrastructural multiplicity: systems engineered for one purpose are retooled to perform many, generating feedback loops, strange adjacencies, ecological spectacles, and unexpected forms of occupation.
Working between scientific research and speculative design, algorithmic scripting, animation, and simulation will model processes through time and construct alternative scenarios. Digital fabrication will translate these systems into physical artifacts, culminating in an exhibition of models, drawings, simulations, and animations that collectively construct a counter-history of the SSC completed in Tennessee—and the landscapes its side effects might have generated.
