What happens to a gold mine when the gold runs out? Sunrise Dam, Laverton WA: 1.88 square kilometres, open pit begun 1997, 500 metres deep by 2014, underground mining since 2003. The site is a wound in the earth that will outlast its industrial purpose by centuries. This project asks what it becomes next.
The proposal transforms the exhausted mine into a subterranean civic agora: a supermassive sprawling brutalist megacity built into clusters of open mining pits, surrounded by forested hilly landscape. Architectural elements follow the natural topography, creating terraced structures that cascade down the slopes. Eight programme zones descend through the strata, each calibrated to its particular underground condition: light levels, temperature, structural stability, proximity to the surface above. Flowing, organic forms and intricate layering characterize the whole.
AI tools were used not as rendering shortcuts but as design instruments. ChatGPT generated future scenarios and site briefs. Midjourney produced first spatial hypotheses. DALL-E 3 pushed toward architectural specificity. ComfyUI produced the final cinematic outputs, with prompts calibrated to the mine's geological and emotional character. Each tool introduced a different kind of agency into the process.
The Site
Sunrise Dam Gold Mine sits 55 kilometres south of Laverton in Western Australia's arid interior. AngloGold Ashanti began open-pit operations in 1997. By 2014 the main pit had reached 500 metres below surface. Underground mining via long-hole open stoping and sublevel caving began in 2003 and continues alongside the pit operations. A fine-grind and flotation circuit was added in 2018. Mining at the adjacent Golden Delicious pit ran from 2021 to 2023.
The pit is 1.88 square kilometres at the surface — terraced, spiralling, geological strata exposed in concentric bands of ochre, rust and grey. The void is not a ruin. It is a civic proposition waiting for a brief.
AI Workflow
The studio's argument was that AI is not a rendering tool but a design instrument. The workflow was built in four deliberate phases, each using a different tool for a different cognitive task. No phase was skipped. The output of each fed the next.
Phase 1 — Research and Briefing. ChatGPT was given Superflux's "Mitigation of Shock" as a conceptual frame and asked to speculate on future functions for an exhausted mine site. It produced detailed programme briefs for each zone, then generated Midjourney-ready prompts for each one. Text as architecture.
Phase 2 — Site Reading. A photograph of Sunrise Dam was fed to ChatGPT, which described the terrain in precise visual language — terraced levels, winding roads, colour striations, geological scale. That description went to DALL-E, which produced abstract architectural reinterpretations. Simultaneously, Midjourney generated close-up geological texture studies from the same description: 16 variations of rock formation, honeycomb void, lacework stone — building a material vocabulary for the project.
Phase 3 — Spatial Iteration. Midjourney's Brush tool was applied repeatedly to the site imagery, each pass pushing further from raw photograph toward designed architecture. The mine's ochre terracing became building tiers. The pit's spiral access roads became inhabited promenades. The iterations were not random: each Brush step was prompted and steered.
Phase 4 — Production. All outputs — DALL-E renders, Midjourney blends, ChatGPT programme briefs, Pinterest references — were fed into ComfyUI. A custom LoRA trained on open-pit mine imagery grounded the model in the site's specific materiality. ChatGPT then briefed the system on future functions per zone. ComfyUI produced zone-specific cinematic perspectives, each upscaled to final resolution.
Programme
Eight zones distributed across the vertical section of the pit, each responding to the particular condition of its stratum.
Dream Incubation Centres: Near the rim where natural light still penetrates. Smooth curves, reflective glass, lush greenery, and open spaces filled with VR pods, sensory gardens, and communal dreaming areas. A research and rest facility for fostering creativity and imagination.
Symbiotic Living Spaces: Residential communities carved into the upper pit walls. Cozy family apartments with large windows overlooking the sprawling brutalist canyon below, integrated with green spaces, trees, and water bodies following the natural topography.
Hyper-transport Hub: Hyperloop station at pit level. Glass pneumatic tubes, transportation drone platforms, and multimodal logistics nodes. The circulatory system of the agora, with large sweeping forms spiralling across the landscape.
AGRO Farm: Vertical farming towers housed under a supermassive brutalist structure, vegetation growing on the walls. AI-driven hydroponics and aeroponics, automated drones, renewable energy sources. Lush greenery blending seamlessly with the surrounding natural landscape.
AI Data Farm: Underground facility exploiting the mine's natural cooling. Massive server racks rising along raw rock walls beneath a glass roof above. The mine's thermal mass and depth repurposed as computational infrastructure.
Manufacturing: Supermassive underground industrial factories housed in the deepest strata. Numerous machines along cascading terraced structures, integrating industrial architecture with the natural rock environment.
Utilities: Massive underground tunnels with large pipe galleries running beneath the brutalist structures, following the natural topography. The invisible circulatory infrastructure of the entire settlement.
Underground Aquifer: Water collection and storage in the deepest chambers. Subterranean reservoir with massive concrete retaining walls, calm reflective channels, and rock ledges. Infrastructure becoming sacred space.
AI as Design Medium
The studio's proposition was that AI is not a tool for finishing architecture but for beginning it. The workflow moved deliberately through four instruments, each producing a different spatial register.
ChatGPT generated future scenarios and site briefs: text as programme. Midjourney produced the first spatial hypotheses: image as schematic. DALL-E 3 pushed toward architectural specificity, translating the Midjourney aesthetics into resolved spatial language. ComfyUI produced the final cinematic outputs, with prompts calibrated to the mine's geological and emotional character — its ochre terracing, its depth, its silence. A custom LoRA was trained on open-pit mine imagery to ground the model's output in the site's specific materiality.
Each tool introduced a different kind of agency. The question was not which tool to use but how far to trust each one before intervening.
