Wiszniewski, DorianPattinson, PaulHilley, MarkCunning, NeilXian, LeoDochartaigh, Killian O’Alharbi, Saud2025-11-082025https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14154/76887Life Inside Dirt: Soil as a Living Archive — Restoring Communities and Spaces on “Nailor’s Row” explores how soil in Derry/Londonderry functions as a dynamic archive of memory, ecology, and community identity. Framing the ground as both material and metaphor, the study proposes an architectural and urban design methodology that reads soil as record, medium, and collaborator in the co-creation of new spaces. Through the design of seven proposed colleges for the University of Derry, the research develops a “soil-informed” design practice grounded in four paradigms—colonial, donkey, ecological, and dialectical urbanisms. Excavation, stratigraphy, and micromorphological analysis become generative design gestures that uncover the layered histories of Derry’s contested landscape. Each architectural intervention is envisioned as a living palimpsest—revealing and rewriting temporal and cultural strata through built form, community participation, and ecological restoration. The project demonstrates that architecture can act as both archive and agent of transformation, translating the living narratives of soil into spaces of education, remembrance, and regeneration.Life Inside Dirt: Soil as a Living Archive reimagines the ground beneath Derry as a living storyteller — a layered memory of struggle, growth, and renewal. Each grain of soil holds traces of the city’s past: from siege rubble and industrial ash to the roots of new life. This project transforms excavation into design, turning trenches into classrooms and clay into architecture. Through seven imagined colleges along “Nailor’s Row,” soil becomes both muse and material — revealing forgotten histories while cultivating new communities. Architecture here does not sit upon the land; it grows from it, teaching resilience, continuity, and the quiet power of earth itself.27enSoil as archivepalimpsestDerry/LondonderryNailor’s Rowecological urbanismdecolonial architecturestratigraphycommunity restorationliving archivearchitecture and archaeologylandscape memoryurban designmultispecies justicecircular soil economiesThesis