WELCOME TO THE PLANETARY HOME IMPROVEMENT STORE ︎︎︎ TO FIND A PRODUCT, PLEASE SCROLL DOWN ON THE HOME PAGE ︎︎︎ The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikcrete. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stockpiled, stacked, and sold across global DIY supply-chains, from Bauhaus to OBI and Hornbach. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. The store is the modern quarry. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum. ︎︎ TO FIND A PRODUCT, PLEASE SCROLL DOWN ︎︎︎





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PRODUCT SIZE
75x40x4000 m
75x50x2750mm

GEOLOGICAL PERIOD
Proterozoic & Archean Eons
540 MYA - 4 BYA

COMPOSITION
Steel from iron ore and coal
Coated with zinc
GEOLOGICAL BIO
The making of steel out of iron relies on the presence of oxygen and the use of a type of coal known as coke to melt the ore at 1700°C. While iron has been present within the earth since the planet’s origins, coal began forming only 2 billion years later, after the Great Oxygenation event that occurred in the Neoarchean Era, caused by the photosynthesis-induced saturation of the earth’s atmosphere with dioxygen. By contrast, the hundred-year material lifespan of a steel stud seems like the blink of an eye.


EXTRACTION / MANUFACTURING PROCESS
Pour molten steel into slabs ︎︎︎ reduce to thinner strips ("hot band") ︎︎︎ reduce hot band to "cold rolled steel" ︎︎︎ add protective coating in galvanization process ︎︎︎ final product = coil ︎︎︎ slit coils into widths (on a machine) to desired final dimensions ︎︎︎ form into different shapes through series of dies
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