Once intended to be the state’s next great metropolis, California City was an artificial, constructed utopia. But the people never came. It needed a reason, beyond real estate, to exist. Over 60 years later, the 14,000 people who call California City home are clustered at one end of the massive tract. The project walks a line between tragedy and utopia, addressing the idea of a failed, or even incomplete, paradise and proposes an architectural narrative acting as a parallel and a possible second world fiction.

As a parable, the project alludes to the American West’s situation during the Gold Rush, when the discovery of gold in California set off a frenzy, transforming the state's landscape and population; in effect, people used excavation to ‘strike it rich’. Following the lawsuit seeking a declaration that the fossils are part of one’s surface estate, the Mayor of California City has ordered the digging of rare fossils to rejuvenate the economy. Facilities which arise from fossil mining, including a new ‘prospecting house’ and other infrastructures, materialise in the central core with monumental black cubes that sit above the landscape. Here is an intervention designed to create a culture invigorated by prospect, architectural innovation and political manipulation.