By the 1970s, the world’s deepest mines were operating two miles below the surface. In South Africa, prospective miners were required to undergo an extensive acclimatization process in order to cope with the intense heat builds up in the ultra deep gold mines. To streamline and increase the efficiency of this process, companies developed a series of experimental chambers that could replicate extreme subterranean conditions above ground. Their design process addressed racial as well as material and physiological concerns, as industry scientists sought to establish a “standardized work rate” through the classification of Black miners’ bodies. In studies concerning the performance of “underweight” “heat adapted Bantu workers,” researchers revealed both distain for and intense interest in the exposed body, as well as the tribal and racial classification schemes deployed by mining companies.Moving between the human body, the climatic room, and larger centers of scientific research, this paper questions the way engineers reconfigured the mine as a laboratory. Examining building practices that seek to reproduce (rather than mitigate) extreme environments, I analyze the way the mine was both modeled as an object and extended as a vast technical apparatus. I argue that as engineers gave new form to the underground environment, they also facilitated a bizarre faith in the ability to manage the productivity of the mine through the conditioning of workers’ bodies rather than their training, tools, or knowledge of mineral deposits.
