Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Site A / Plot M
A tour of Chicago's nuclear fringe definitely wouldn't be complete without a stop at the Palos Forest Preserves located just outside the city to the southwest. Inside and accessible only via hiking trails are the 19-acre area known as Site A and the 150x140-foot area known as Plot M, respectively the site of the world's first nuclear reactors and radioactive waste dumping ground.
Of course, the first nuclear reactor (Chicago Pile-1, or CP-1) was located on the campus of the University of Chicago. But just a few months after its first nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, CP-1 was dismantled and reconstructed on Site A. It was then renamed CP-2.
A second reactor, known as Chicago Pile-3 (CP-3), was also built. In 1950, this reactor was renamed CP-3' (CP-3 prime) when it was rebuilt with a new design. Also built on Site A were about 35 buildings housing laboratories, dormitories, a cafeteria, dog kennels and a lead foundry.
According to the Department of Energy, all research programs at these facilities ended in 1954 and moved 3 miles to the east to a new complex, the Argonne National Laboratory. While the fuel for both reactors and heavy water were taken somewhere else, all buildings were torn down and, along with most of the equipment, buried where they stood on Site A.
An excavation approximately 100 feet across and 40 feet deep was prepared between the two reactors. The reactors themselves were approximately 180 feet apart. The 800-ton, concrete-filled, shell of the CP-3 reactor was buried by excavating around it on three sides and detonating strategically placed explosives in the earthen “pedestal” supporting it. The reactor shell rolled and ended upside down in the excavation. The concrete shield of CP-2 was demolished and pushed into the same excavation. The buildings that housed the reactors were demolished and placed in the excavation. The excavation was then backfilled, leveled, and landscaped. The top of the CP-3 reactor shield is approximately 23 feet below ground surface; rubble and building debris fill the excavation both laterally and vertically to within a few feet of the surface.
Placed at the approximate location of the burial site is a large engraved (head)stone describing the historical significance of Site A.
Located 1,500 feet north of Site A is Plot M. There, radioactive waste and radioactively contaminated laboratory articles generated from research activities at Site A were buried.
The method of disposal sounds rather crude in comparison to today's vast subterranean nuclear sarcophagi but nevertheless underscores the ongoing uncertainties over the safety of more modern burial strategies — or any of them, in fact.
Apparently both solid and liquid waste was buried from 1944 through 1946. Liquid wastes were disposed in intact containers, which may have subsequently been breached. Through 1948, waste was buried in 6-foot deep trenches and covered with soil to minimize radiation release; beginning in May 1948 burial took place in steel bins. The steel bins were removed in 1949 in a search for some missing uranium-235, which was subsequently found. Instead of reburying the bins, they were shipped off site for disposal; the waste buried in trenches was allowed to remain in place. Records of items placed in Plot M are incomplete, but known items include animal carcasses, building debris, clothing, contaminated equipment, air filters, paper, and other radioactive and hazardous materials.
Dumping at Plot M stopped in 1949, and for a few years was covered with soil and grass, which weren't much protection against water infiltration and seepage. Then in 1956:
[A]n inverted concrete box was constructed over the entire burial plot. The concrete walls of the box are 18 inches thick and extend 8 feet into the ground. A 1-foot-thick concrete slab was poured over the entire disposal area. The purpose of the concrete barrier is to prevent excavation of the site and to impede the flow of water through the buried radioactive materials. The concrete slab was covered with about 2 feet of soil [and] grass was planted.
Interestingly, the DOE does not mention how and where contaminated material were buried during the years when Plot M had already been decommissioned but Site A was still in operation.
Just as at Site A, there's a small stone monument briefly describing past top secret activities. Situated as it is atop a gently sloping mound entombing radioactive waste (a malformed Mt. Parnasus, if you will) and surrounded by pastoral landscaping, one half expects finding an additional inscription, which reads: Et in Arcadia ego.
It's interesting to see that where the marker assures visitors that the area poses no danger to them, the word “NO” has been chiseled out by vandals. Perhaps it's a hint that all warning signs are bound to fail, not just the signal they carry but the physical sign itself. No matter how many far-forward scenarios have been taken into count and design for in countless ideas competitions (not to mention those ideas competitions for ideas competitions), potentially dangerous landscapes, even lethal ones, will always be attractive destinations.
The tourists will come in their CLUI buses regardless of the danger. And the “atomic priesthood” will have its schisms and periods of iconoclasm, when delirious, chisel-happy monks will rebel against the text and rampage through their irradiated basilicas.
But in the meantime, you can have a picnic near Plot M.
Onkalo
Here's the trailer to what sounds like a very interesting feature documentary, Into Eternity, about the world's first permanent nuclear waste repository, Onkalo, which means “hiding place.” Located in Finland, the underground facility must last 100,000 years.
Once the waste has been deposited and the repository is full, the facility is to be sealed off and never opened again. Or so we hope, but can we ensure that? And how is it possible to warn our descendants of the deadly waste we left behind? How do we prevent them from thinking they have found the pyramids of our time, mystical burial grounds, hidden treasures? Which languages and signs will they understand? And if they understand, will they respect our instructions? While gigantic monster machines dig deeper and deeper into the dark, experts above ground strive to find solutions to this crucially important radioactive waste issue to secure mankind and all species on planet Earth now and in the near and very distant future.
For the above questions, we have some ideas here and here.
Egg Digesters
We've set up a new Flickr set and stuffed it with photos of egg-shaped sludge digesters culled from the web, simply because they're absolutely beautiful. They're readily photogenic — with or without dramatic lighting.
In the sewage treatment process, these extraordinary womb-like structures break down the organic solid matter in the wastewater into more stable materials. With additional processing, some of these byproducts are turned into fertilizers. These digesters also generate biogas with a high proportion of methane that can used to power the machines. In fact, in large treatment plants, they can produce more electricity than the installations require. The egg shape makes this process more efficient. Compared to their more conventional cylindrical counterparts, they require less energy, maintenance and space. That they are aesthetically pleasing is probably just a happy coincidence.
They're clearly calling out for a book deal, so it's worth asking again if they've ever been the subject of a 1,000-pound coffee table book published, say, by the interior decorator Taschen.
Or have they perhaps been the object of interest in a typological study by a special-interest niche publisher and released as a slim print-on-demand pamphlet?
Are the next Bernd and Hilla Becher out there now documenting these industrial Fabergés?
Grain Elevators
Buttology 2
Buttology 2
Here now is the fantasy table of contents for the fantasy second issue of Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.
Examining The Waste Stream
“Garbage is the effluent of our consumption, and it flows backwards through the landscape of Los Angeles. Unlike liquid wastes, which drain downslope to the sea, the tiny tributaries of trash, from millions of homesteads, collected by a fleet of thousands of trucks circulating in constant motion, hauling to nodes of sorting, distribution, reuse, and, finally disposal, flow up the canyons and crevices to the edge of the basin.”
No Island is an Island
Mining and exporting its rich deposits of phosphates, formed from bird shit deposited over thousands of years, the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru had for a time the highest GDP per capita. But with the depletion of its major natural resource and the mismanagement of the trust fund set up to provide for its post-phosphate future, the country now has one of the lowest. It wasted away its island in return for not much.
To keep its economy afloat, it allowed the creation of secret offshore banks. Some of these banks' headquarters are no more than shacks, but through one of these shacks in 1998, “Russian criminals laundered about $70 billion, draining off precious hard currency and crippling the former superpower.”
In 2001 until 2007, Nauru agreed to settle Afghan and Iraqi refugees fleeing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and seeking asylum from Australia. With the millions of dollars in aid the government received in return, one would have expected decent accommodations for them, but living conditions were not much better than those at Guantanamo.
And then there was that deal it made with the United States to set up safe houses in China for North Korean defectors.
Growing Water
Runner-up in the Pamphlet Architecture #30 competition, and currently on view in the Burnam Plan Centennial exhibition Big. Bold. Visionary. Chicago Considers the Next Century (where it's one of a very, very, very few handful of projects that actually fit those three modifiers) is UrbanLab's proposal for an alternative wastewater treatment system for Chicago.
Frog's Dream
“[T]he Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.”
puRE
“The peri-urban Revitalization Element [puRE] is a catalyst for fostering sustainable development within existing suburban areas, by re-envisioning a classic suburban icon—the swimming pool—and transforming it into a productive, water-treating element within a community.”
Q&A with Rose George
Rose George is the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. Last month in The New York Times, she answered questions sent in by readers about toilets, sewage and other topics about waste disposal in New York City. Here's a sample:
Q: Are there any ways to use the large amount of human waste generated by New York City for the common good, like turning it into drinking water or compost, for example, that would not require a huge financial commitment or a significant change in infrastructure?
A: Human waste is such a misnomer. It is an extremely useful product. As you point out, it can make biogas, for a start. In China, 18 million or so households get their cooking fuel by linking their latrine to a biogas digester (an airtight underground tank), tapping off the methane and cooking with it. It cuts down on deforestation and is cheap and infinite. There is really interesting stuff going on in Europe, too, where Lille in France, Stockholm in Sweden and a few other cities are running buses and taxis on biogas produced from sewage and household garbage.
In fact, the only waste about human waste is that it goes to waste; even in the 19th century, Karl Marx calculated that London was losing a fortune by throwing all that potential fertilizer away into its water system.
But back to biodiesel: Yes, there are companies working on that, including one in Canada which you can find if you search online for “biodiesel” and “human waste.” The trouble with sewage as an energy source is that the technology for now — even though it’s ancient (Marco Polo reported seeing biogas tanks in China in the 13th century) — it’s not yet cost-effective. Some wastewater treatment plants get gas or electricity from the process, but by no means all. It is often seen as prohibitively expensive, especially when the plants are struggling to run and meet all sorts of regulations.
Money is going into the wastewater infrastructure from the federal stimulus bill, which is great, but I would like to see more of it dedicated to exploiting this chronically and acutely undertapped source of energy. It will cost money, but so did putting in the infrastructure in the first place, and it will probably pay its own way eventually. It’s definitely a chronically and acutely underexploited source of energy.
Dying in the Dying-field
“Dying-places are ordinarily in homes or in hospitals, but this poor fellow has neither a home nor a hospital in which to die. We are here in a vacant space near the river—a sort of common littered with refuse and scavenged by starving dogs. It has been named the Dying-place, because poor, starving, miserable outcasts and homeless sick, homeless poor, homeless misery of every form come here to die. The world scarcely can present a more sad and depressing spectacle than this field of suicides; I say suicides, because many that come here come to voluntarily give up the struggle for existence and to die by sheer will force through a slow starvation. They may be enfeebled by lingering disease; they may be unable to find employment; they may be professional vagrants; they come from different parts of the city and sometimes from the country round about. They are friendless; they are passed unnoticed by a poor and inadequate hospital service; they become utterly discouraged and hopeless and choose to die. Their fellow natives pass and repass without noticing them or thought of bestowing aid or alms, and here it is not expected; they have passed beyond the pale of charity; it is the last ditch; they are here to die, not to receive alms.”
Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.
Buttology 1
BUTT: A Proposal for a Zine
Buttology 1
A fantasy table of contents for the fantasy first issue of BUTT, now renamed Buttology, a fantazine for the spatial study of waste.
The Rise of Public Composting Toilet
“Installation of composting toilets in public facilities is catching on. In New York City, The Bronx Zoo and Queens Botanical Garden have been operating restrooms with composting toilets, with no need for sewer lines, for the last few years. The technology in both facilities is made by Clivus Multrum and resembles a conventional toilet, except that it uses only 3-6 ounces of water, in combination with a bio-compostable foam, for flushing.”
Montreal’s Wastewater Treatment: A History of Problems
“While it’s an impressive system in terms of its scope and capacity, the treatment process itself leaves much to be desired. In fact, it’s actually one of the worst in Canada. A national ‘report card’ issued by the Sierra Club in 2004 gave the city’s treatment process a grade of F-. The only other city to receive a grade worse than Montreal was Victoria, a place which doesn’t even have a treatment process in place yet.”
Nomadic Spaces: The Afghan Sewer Kids of Rome
“Italian police have found more than 100 immigrants, including 24 Afghan children, living in the sewer system beneath railway stations in Rome.”
Trash Track
“Trash Track relies on the development of smart tags, which will be attached to different types of garbage in order to track in real time each piece of waste as it traverses the city's sanitation system. The goal of the project is to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects and waste, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today's recycling and sanitation systems. The project will be exhibited at the Architectural League in New York City and in Seattle starting September 2009.”
LooWatt
“Today, 40% of the global population lives without toilets. In most places, scarcity of water renders sewer systems impossible, while ad hoc human waste disposal spreads waterborne illnesses that prey upon millions, and cripple developing economies. It is crucial to address the global sanitation crisis with creative solutions. While many NGOs are hard at work installing composting eco-toilets for those in need, a continual challenge is to motivate communities to look after their new toilets. By turning human waste into a high-value commodity, energy, the Gardiner CH4 offers plenty of incentive to sustain itself.”
The Geopolitics of Space Toilets
“[Veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka] told Novaya Gazeta newspaper that officials had rejected his request to work out on the American exercise bike during their pre-training mission. Worse than that, they had also ruled that American and Russian crew members should use their own ‘national toilets’, with Russian crew banned from using the luxurious American astro-loo.” The situation may have improved since reading this.
Religious Freedom vs. Sanitation Rules
“For the last two and a half years, Mr. Crislip, a planning supervisor for the state’s Environmental Protection Department, and local sewage authorities have had more than 30 meetings in a futile effort to persuade members of the sect here in Cambria County, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh, to upgrade outhouses next to a schoolhouse so they comply with state sanitation codes.”
Fez River Project
“The City of Fez Department of Water and Power (RADEEF) is currently implementing a new system which will channel the city’s water sewage towards two treatment plants. Thereby, the Fez river will soon stop receiving backwater and regain its potential as a public amenity. If rehabilitated, its impact will be inordinately salient to the unique urban context of Fez. Indeed, the medina’s intra-mural population not only lacks public open spaces, but is also experiencing a rapid deterioration of its environment due to over-densification and aging public infrastructure.”
Soft Disaster
“The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm. But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.”
Poo Power to the People
“Lünen, north of Dortmund, will use cow and horse manure as well as other organic material from local farms to provide cheap and sustainable electricity for its 90,000 residents.”
Mapping Urban Drug Use
“A team of researchers has mapped patterns of illicit drug use across the state of Oregon using a method of sampling municipal wastewater before it is treated. Their findings provide a one-day snapshot of drug excretion that can be used to better understand patterns of drug use in multiple municipalities over time. Municipal water treatment facilities across Oregon volunteered for the study to help further the development of this methodology as a proactive tool for health officials.”
Tips for the next issue will be much appreciated. We're especially looking for built works, thesis projects, entries submitted to (ideas) competitions and proposals of a highly speculative nature.
The Wetland Machines of Ayala
Israel is in the midst of a water crisis. Climate change, a rapidly growing population, extensive agriculture and a very developed industry are all putting pressure on the few and extremely contested sources of freshwater.
Desalination creates more problems than it solves, because the process is energy intensive, expensive, and besides freshwater, ironically produces highly toxic byproducts as well. Though not as egregiously unsustainable, wastewater treatment plants function under a similar ecological imbalance. More efficient and creative ways to offset water demand are therefore needed.
This is where Ayala Water and Ecology comes in.
Ayala is an Israeli company which specializes in designing and building artificial wetlands to treat contaminated water from agriculture, industries and urban areas. The treated water will definitely not be potable, but at least it could still be re-entered into the system and be used in some way again, thus reducing the need to extract more from already dwindling supplies. And if it isn't reused and instead gets dumped immediately, at least the effluent will not pollute these precious supplies much.
We have described the principle of these eco-machines before in numerous posts, but to repeat, they take advantage of the ability of certain water plants not only to extract pollutants from the soil and water but also to render them inert. With the help of microorganisms, such as microbes, bacteria and fungi, they can take in toxins, heavy metals, greasy substances and pathogen agents. They can even phytoaccumulate and phytoremediate, to use the technical terms, substances that more technologically advanced systems cannot.
Of course, no single species can neutralize all contaminants. There isn't even a master matrix of plants and microorganism that works in every scenario. The trick is in finding the right combination that, in a sustainable manner, most efficiently removes the target pollutant and yields the purity level one is aiming for.
Ayala has been doing just that for nearly two decades and has deployed their wetlands machines all over Israel and in other places further afield. You can find them in domestic settings treating household sewage so that the reclaimed water can be used for irrigating the garden. Higher up on the urban scale, they can be found treating municipal wastewater and also the stronger stuff, the poisonous waste, from industrial sites. The company has also been involved in projects to treat landfill leachates and to rehabilitate degraded rivers.
Of course, Ayala isn't the only company applying ecological solutions to wastewater treatment. There's John Todd Ecological Design, possibly the most popular of them all, or at least the one with the most media coverage; Natural Systems International, who co-designed Sidwell's educational wetland; and Worrell Water Technologies, who holds, to our surprise when we first learned of it, the registered trademark for Living Machine®. It's a crowded field, thankfully.
But who besides Ayala is also working on contested terrain? Who could also say that their artificial wetlands have a geopolitical dimension to them? We're not saying that Ayala's eco-machines are co-conspirators, but who else could possibly say that theirs might be helping to entrench settlement of lands with varying narratives of provenance, with conflicting claims of true ownership? Who else is potentially employing Nature, albeit a Frankenstein version of it, as an instrument of occupation and hegemony, of erasure and amnesia? Who else could be, just maybe, quite possibly, after the deepest parts of our spatialist hearts?
The Wetland Machine of Sidwell
Reading an ASLA interview of Jose Alminana, a principal at Andropogon Associates, we were reminded that Sidwell Friends School, the Quaker school of choice for the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, the Bidens, the Nixons — practically every member of Washington's politocracy, except for the Carters, of course — has in the courtyard of a recently renovated building an artificial wetland.
Not merely an eco-ornament, it's a machine that “manages all the wastewater generated by the building, as well as all the rain water that falls on the site.”
Typically, wastewater is drained away via a complex network of tunnels that requires vast financial resources just for its maintenance, an infrastructure that's undoubtedly deteriorating just as fast as tax revenues get siphoned off away from public works budgets to General Motors and Bank of America. Miles and miles away from its point of origin, the water then gets treated in an energy intensive process. But it still isn't entirely clean afterwards. Thus, when discharged, it still poses a risk to bodies of water, contributing in many instances to elevated bacterial count and eutrophication.
At Sidwell, wastewater is treated on-site, somewhat off-the-grid and using comparatively minimal infrastructure. The treatment cycle begins inside the building in a tank filled with anaerobic bacteria. Among other things, these bacteria help break down solids. The effluent is then pumped outside to a trickle filter before continuing on by gravity to a series of tiered wetlands. To lessen the health risk of contact with students and to mitigate any odor problems, water flows through beneath layers of pea gravel; there's no surface flow, in other words. This planting medium contains phytoremediating plants which, together with the microorganisms attached to their root hairs and to the gravel stones, extract contaminants from the water. After slowly trickling its way outside for about a couple of days or so, the water then re-enters the building and gets collected in storage tanks as greywater ready for reuse, for instance, to flush toilets.
Just as with wastewater, managing urban stormwater typically involves massive infrastructure to dispose runoffs as efficiently and as quickly as possible. In addition to being a drain on municipal coffers, such a method is known to increase the probability and the intensity of a flood event during major storms, endangering human life and property. Moreover, since stormwater isn't allowed to remain where it falls, (1) water doesn't have enough time to infiltrate the soil and seep into waiting, possibly depleted groundwater aquifers, and (2) what may have been clean at first contact with the surface undoubtedly will not remain so as it moves through sidewalks, roads, parking lots and sewers before going on to pollute rivers, lakes and other sources of our drinking water.
At Sidwell, we get a hint of an alternative system for stormwater management: hyperlocal, lo-fi, modular (i.e., implementations at multiple sites would be needed to bring about an appreciable effect on urban hydrology), soft and comparatively cheap.
Runoff is directed to a rain garden and a permanent biology pond located downslope from the tiered wetlands used for wastewater treatment.
Some of the runoff gets in an underground cistern. During dry weather, this storage tank provides water to the pond. During heavy rains, excess water flows from the pond into the rain garden, simulating the hydrological dynamics of a floodplain environment. Water seeps through the soil and gets naturally filtered.
Andropogon describes this project as a “working landscape” but we might prefer calling it an “event landscape,” wherein natural processes are co-opted into a cybernetic amalgam of landscape, architecture, geology, biology and institutional pedagogy. Rather than in the inaccessible subterranean voids and in scientific abstractions, this eco-machine is made to perform out in the open for the edification of the elite who, in their dirty, smelly, real-world engagement with the landscape, will hopefully turn into great stewards of the earth.
On constructed wetlands
BUTT: A Proposal for a Zine
No one wants to think about shit and the act of shitting. When we go, we want it out of sight and out mind as fast as we can quickly flush, for to linger longer than is socially acceptable could be a sign of an atavistic pathology. However, should an alien happen to drop by and see how much energy, time and resources we spend just on our sewers, it might think we are absolutely obsessed with our excrement. It would be right, of course.
We propose, then, a zine about this all too important biological process. Provisionally titled BUTT, it will collect any and all investigations into the myriad ways scatology is spatialized. Many will keep on regurgitating promotional materials like those automatically archived on dezeen but not BUTT. Everyone will talk about Daniel Libeskind but not BUTT. It's the contrarian preposition.
Coverage, then, will likely include ancient Roman sewers, Victorian public loos, modern pay toilets, the zero gravity toilet of the International Space Station, boutique pissoirs, big event porta-potties, battlefield latrines, methane farms, Appalachian heritage outhouses, Mexican sewer divers, and public transportation powered by poo.
Any proposal that sets out to rethink urban sewer systems, regardless of quality, will always be a featured content, and realized projects that address the sanitation needs of the other 90% will be automatically accepted for publication.
Published as well would be field reports from guided tours of municipal wastewater treatment plants, for instance, the world's largest located right on the periphery of Chicago, and also from illegal urban explorations of subterranean drainscapes.
A lucky freelancer would be sent off to Dubai to see if the beaches around the fourty-three-star Burj Al Arab hotel are still noxious with illegally dumped human waste. He'll probably write that it's actually clean but only because there aren't much sewage around to be spilt, as everyone has left. If the miniscule budget allows, another freelancer would be assigned to get an update on Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic and the Gaza Sewage Flood of 2007.
Interspersed throughout each issue would be engineering illustrations of sewer tunnels that immediately call to mind certain anatomical drawings by Jean-Jacques Lequeu.
How about self-portraits, preferably of architecture students, taken inside the bathrooms of post-Bilbao museums?
Shit. From Every Angle.
It'll be the infrastructural porn rag for the hipster design crowd, always mistakenly shelved in the fetish section, along with the German scheiße bestsellers, of your nearest independent bookstore.
Slice
Spatial High Jinks
Last week, Phronesisaical reminded us again of Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension, a piece of performance art, which they describe as “a brilliant commentary on war and the complicity of those for whom distance creates a sense of false reality and moral neutrality.”
From The National:
For 30 days, Bilal lived in a 4.6 by 9.8 metre performance space [at Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery], while people around the world watched – and targeted him – through a webcam attached to a remote-controlled paintball gun, capable of firing over a shot per second at the Iraqi in question.
While it won't be as powerful or even catch the attention of the Department of Homeland Security, how about installing webcams to watch over landscapes as their mineral wealth gets extracted? Next to it would be a garden hose, with which you could target passing miners. Dirt clinging onto them will be washed away; they may even be refreshed by its cool waters. And you, the direct beneficiaries of their labor, will also be cleansed of your consumerist sins. Tele-absolution.
This performance art will be titled It's the least that I could do.
Also last week (and on the same day), Design Under Sky pointed us to TRASH: anycoloryoulike, a public art installation in which “standard piles of trash are replaced with artist-created bags” to decorate the streets of New York. The project simultaneously “beautifies the city and calls attention to waste consumption.”
Next summer, artist Adrian Kondratowicz, with Miuccia Prada's patronage, will cloth the homeless with green ready-to-wear, thus “beautifying urban parks and calling attention to human waste.”
Continuing on with this last week meme, here are two items posted the day before Phronesisaical and Design Under Sky published theirs.
Firstly, BLDGBLOG covered a “bouncy chapel” for the penitent on vacation on the beaches of Sardinia. It “comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.”
It also reminded us of another inflatable church installed this May on a parking lot in Troy, New York. Though not built for traditional worship, it was a 1:1 scale reproduction of the church — “a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery” — that once stood on the same site.
According to Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald:
Spectres of Liberty is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.
Seen through the diaphanous walls of this ghost church, visitors themselves appear ghost-like, ectoplasmic, haunting the same space as the past.
Lots more photos here, via Critical Spatial Practice.
Secondly, Dezeen showed some photos of a stair-like viewing platform, which the Office for Subversive Architecture attached to the 17-kilometer-long, blue fence surrounding London's future Olympic Park. Climb up, and for a moment you can infiltrate “the secrecy surrounding preparations for the 2012 Olympics.”
It recalls to mind Heavy Trash's viewing platforms for gated communities in Los Angeles. Some photos here.
To borrow language from Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, they are framing devices for a staged aesthetic experience and to suit a sociopolitical agenda.
Many have posted Michel de Broin's Superficielle before, and it was Vvork's turn last week. It's a lovely sculpture that renders the landscape into a Cubist puzzle.
Quoting de Broin:
Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency, that led me into the forest to envelop the contour of a large stone with fragments of mirror. The large stone, tucked away deep in the woods, became a reflective surface for its surroundings. In this play of splintered radiance, the rock disappears in its reflections. Because it reflects one cannot be mislead by its presence, yet we cannot seize it, rather it is the rock that reflects us.
A horrible, horrible last sentence, but a marvelous, marvelous installation nonetheless.
A Radioactive River Runs Through It
This image comes from the official website of U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV). It shows the proposed rail route radioactive waste will take if and when the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository becomes operational.
As graphically depicted, it begs easy comparison to the Mississippi-Missouri river system. Rivulets and tributaries and one big fat branch sweeping across the landscape, meandering as they transport their cargo inexorably to their destination, dutifully following the laws of gravity but a lot of the times not, and with and against the will of the people.
Both are considered very important to national security and therefore must be controlled. The river, of course, has its dams and levees and navigational locks, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, but it also has a proto-nervous and proto-immune systems constantly monitoring any abnormal levels of natural activities, which, if detected, will be taken care of by a cadre of engineers. The rails will no doubt have its own security barriers, a surveillance system and a disaster management protocol.
And therein lies our main reason for posting the map: we want to propose a landscape architecture studio in which students are tasked to design the landscape of this radioactive corridor, which must be occupiable public open space, and thus will have to balance (or not) the demands of security and access.
Will they be inspired by Israel's West Bank barrier or North Korea's DMZ or both?
Will they create the country's longest and thinnest national park with an outer layer of well-infrastructured recreational area and an inner layer of restricted wilderness? Or will the whole thing be just a constructed wetland filled with Bird flu-West Nile hybrid superviruses that even terrorists are scared of?
Perhaps in imitation of Gertrude Jekyll, one designs a thick, fury border of native vegetation transcoded with phytoremediating genes. And interspersed along these rows of explosive biodiversity, in equal distance from each others like grain elevators, are sentinel towers housing landscape architects charged with maintaining the greenbelt.
In any case, if and when shipment begins, it would be interesting to travel to all those farming towns and those vast, horizon-filled counties lining the rails just to ask what the people now think of those very evocative sounds of bullhorns rolling across the landscape. Will they still be rendered nostalgic for the heroic past, half-remembering childhood stories of their great-grandmothers tending to their prairie homesteads, marking the passing of the day and the seasons by the passing of trains, sometimes waiting the delivery of their daughters' new Sunday best clothes ordered from Sears Catalog, always lulled to sleep by the distant sounds of metal wheels on metal tracks?
Will the sound still call to mind the glamorous era of American intercontinental railway journey when the dashing Cary Grant and the lovely Eva Marie Saint drank champagne in plush, oak-paneled boxcars while evading cops, spies and double agents against the backdrop of the national landscape?
Or do they now evoke nuclear holocausts, a country heading towards a post-oil crisis and Rob Lowe?
The Romantic and the Pastoral landscape replaced by an anxious terrain in constant threat of a sonic blast.
Programming (In)Security
Yongbyon Happy Family People Complex
The Return of the Sewer Divers
Hazmat diving may be the worst job in science according to MSNBC, but perhaps a form of ultra-niche tourism could be developed out of it.
It will be marketed to extreme adventurers no longer thrilled by skydiving or free solo climbing or locking one's head in the clasp of a crocodile's jaws and, still craving that rush of adrenalin, may be attracted to the possibility of swimming “into clouds of waste, inside nuclear reactors and through toxic spills on America's coasts and inland waterways.” Or how about a lake “full of urine and liquid pig feces” and littered with “needles used to inject the pigs with antibiotics and hormones?” A sublime landscape that must surely terrify your soul, metaphorically and, if your suit gets punctured, literally.
After their adventures, they will be told that an hour or two in these high-risk-environments-turned-diving-parks have given them an understanding of the natural and built environment greater than what they would have gotten from spending a week camping at Yellowstone National Park.
Nodding in agreement, one of them will say, “It felt like Nature was going to digest me alive.”
Speaking of sewers, fantasizing about possible Illinoises was a lot of fun, so we've been imagining quite a few more, including an Illinois in which the Land of Lincoln has been converted into a giant eco-machine treating the nation's entire sewage output.
Gone are the cornfields and the wheatfields and the vegetable fields, and embedded into the Jeffersonian grid in their place are vast constructed wetlands recycling wastewater by natural means.
Moreover, they will double as parklands — the nation's largest national park.
Everyone's shit will be piped in from every state. Even the most toxic effluent from industries will be trucked in, for there are townships specially vegetated with super-bioremediating plants and bacterium to suck up heavy metals and render extremely carcinogenic chemicals inert. Of course, the required infrastructure may be expensive and incredibly carbon intensive, but the financial and environmental costs will be offset multiple folds by this alternative form of waste management.
There will be a lingering smell in the air, but it will never get any worse than a local pig farm during a hot, muggy August day.
Sewer Divers
New Chernobyl
A couple of weeks ago and again last week, Wired featured a nanocrystal that can absorb carbon dioxide. Discovered by scientists at UCLA:
The sponge-like material, called ZIF-69, promises to hold 60 times its volume in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas scientists say is primarily responsible for climate change.
And:
ZIF-69 is like a carbon dioxide trap, allowing only CO2 in, while screening out molecules with different shapes. Under pressure, the compound allows the carbon dioxide in, but not back out. Then, when scientists decompress the material, the gas is released, allowing scientists to dump the captured CO2 into a storage system.
But what is this storage system? Wired, again: “Right now, engineers are planning to inject the CO2 into the ground in a process known as geological sequestration.”
Of course, there are critics to this approach of combatting climate change — “a pie-in-the-sky idea that entrenched fossil fuel companies promote to stave off the implementation of truly renewable technologies like solar and wind power.” It's greenwashing, in other words.
Meanwhile, with this ZIF-69 greenwashing now commingling in our minds with Gross. Max.'s proposal to use nuclear power to help reduce CO2 emissions, we were reminded of a waste treatment reactor built by the Israeli firm Environmental Energy Resources (EER) that can turn “radioactive, hazardous and municipal waste into inert byproducts such as glass and clean energy.”
This technology will not make nuclear power plants any safer; it can only make their waste and collateral damages that much easier to eradicate — i.e., not carted away into distant storage sites where they remain dangerous; they are actually decontaminated — and in a manner that, we are told, “does not harm the environment and leaves no surface water, groundwater, or soil pollution in its wake.”
But the process does leave something in its wake:
The EER reactor combines three processes into one solution: it takes plasma torches to break down the waste; carbon leftovers are gasified and inorganic components are converted to solid waste. The remaining vitrified material is inert and can be cast into molds to produce tiles, blocks or plates for the construction industry.
In other words, you can use these carbon leftovers to build an entire city.
The morning after Russia's presidential election and the vodka-soaked celebration parties at the ruling oligarchy's palatial ballrooms, one of Putin's henchmen and now president-elect Medvedev's vassals — a Russian nouveau riche who made his multi-billion ruble fortune from oil and gas — inexplicably becomes afflicted with the Rockefeller syndrome. After nearly a decade of being a party to the environmental degradation and human rights abuses of post-Yeltsin Russia, he now wishes to make amends. He wants redemption.
He looks into donating a substantial amount of money to charitable organizations and philanthropic works. He meets with museum curators and trustees to see if they want him to buy for them that new expensive Old Master painting that's just entered the market or fund that new gallery wing for which they have been fruitlessly whoring themselves around. He even explores the possibility of creating a world class university from scratch. These may or may not undo his sins, but at least he will look his best in the amnesiac eyes of the future.
But then he reads something about EER's reactor. He immediately realizes that it could provide a way to clean up Chernobyl, where he was born, where he had spent the halcyon days of childhood and from where he was exiled by the 1986 meltdown of its nuclear power plant. He realizes that salvation awaits him there.
To save Chernobyl and his soul, then, he will raze everything down — offices, Soviet apartment blocks, hospitals, roads, pavements, gardens, playgrounds, schools, trees, forests, everything within tens of kilometers around the reactor — and scoop up everything else — soil, roots, bedrock, sewers, etc. An entire landscape surgically excised, as one would a tumor, and then incinerated.
And then using the harvested chunks of “lava-like rocks,” a new Chernobyl will spring forth from the detritus of interrupted lives — radiation free and inhabitable once again.
Twenty years from now, when this new city has been repopulated with former nuclear exiles and new gardens and verdant parks have sprouted — on a morning just like any other when the sun has just appeared in the horizon — the whole city will glow in bright emerald iridescence.
The Vortex of 80,000 Nikes
Contrary to popular beliefs, Fresh Kills in New York City's Staten Island doesn't contain the biggest collection of garbage in the world. What Wikipedia says “could be regarded as the largest man-made structure on Earth, with the site's volume [...] exceeding the Great Wall of China” and was once the temporary dump site for the remains of the WTC Towers isn't the largest landfill at all.
In fact, the largest landfill isn't even on land, but rather it is trapped in an oceanic riverine system known as the North Pacific Gyre.
Wikipedia again: “The centre of the North Pacific Gyre is relatively stationary and the circular rotation around it draws waste material in. This has led to the accumulation of flotsam and other debris in huge floating 'clouds' of waste, leading to the informal name The Great Pacific Garbage Patch or Eastern Garbage Patch. While historically this debris has biodegraded, the gyre is now accumulating vast quantities of plastic and marine debris.”
It is so vast, apparently, that these floating clouds have a total area equal to that of 2 Texas.
Which directly leads me to wonder: can you collect these patches to create a floating solid ground?
It'll be like a new Pacific island nation molded together out of “80,000 Nike sneakers and boots” and “tens of thousands of bathtub toys and hockey equipment” lost overboard from cargo ships.
Or a recycled ocean cruisers from where eco-terrorists hunt down polluting holiday cruise ships in the high synthetic seas.
Or better yet, dump it all on the Polynesian archipelago of Tuvalu, which Der Spiegel says is “currently only 10 centimeters above sea level” and “likely to become the first country to succumb entirely to climate change.”
Paradise Lost it may certainly be, but it may yet still be Arcadia Regained from the bottom of the ocean.
Of course, the islanders have the option of not anchoring this newly accumulated stratum of detritus to their former nation; they could submit it to the whims of the ocean currents and trade winds.
And in their intraoceanic meanderings, they'll meet other climate change refugees on their own island nations made out of Barbie dolls. A new trade group could be formed, with the goal of developing self-sufficient economies and expanding their territorial boundaries by mining the Pacific for consumer goods Made in China.
Is this the future site of the New Central Park of the Pacific, designed by Fresh Kills head designer James Corner?
Open-Ocean Aquaculture
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