How can architecture engage a damaged landscape — not through erasure or restoration, but through coexistence with decay, memory, and renewal?

My Present Has Been Felt explores ecological and mnemonic repair within the Coastal Park Landfill. Rather than treating the site as inert waste ground, the project understands it as a living metabolism — shaped by methane, groundwater, vegetation, time, and histories laid down in layers.

Through mapping, drawing, field observation, and poetic reflection, the landfill is read as an active system rather than a settled one. Flows of gas, moisture, and growth become traces of both human and nonhuman agency at work. The ground is not silent. It is processing, shifting, surviving.

The central intervention — the Rehabitation Spine — acts as a mediating structure between landfill and wetland. It choreographs ecological flows, supports the terrain’s own recovery, and opens new public access routes that reconnect people to a site they’ve long been asked to look away from.

Rather than sealing waste away, the design makes repair visible. Slow. Material. Ongoing.

Grounded in Southern urbanisms, the project holds Cape Town’s histories of displacement, extraction, and environmental neglect in full view. It proposes an architectural attitude rooted in care, maintenance, and presence — staying with damaged ground, learning to live with what still survives.