When the park service announced a settlement earlier this year to phase out most ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore, Michael Heyn, then a graduate student in architecture at Berkeley, began considering what would become of the hundreds of structures that punctuate the peninsula as remnants of its human use. For his master’s thesis last spring, he proposed turning a pair of the park’s redwood water cisterns into camera obscuras.
The device—Latin for “dark…