EARTHKEEPING NEWS A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY Volume Three, Number Two November/December 1993 Unholy Landscaping EXPERTS DESIGN TOMB FOR NUCLEAR WASTE Abstracted from An Architecture of Peril: Design for a Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad NM, by Michael Brill, Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter, Vol.4, No.3, Fall 1993, College of Architecture and Design, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506-2901. In 1991 the US Department of Energy commissioned a team of experts (architect, anthropologist, materials scientist, linguist and archaeologist) to create a permanent warning sign to last 10,000 years at the mile square tomb of 500,000 barrels of radioactive waste, to be buried a third of a mile beneath New Mexico's shifting sand desert. The team established broad guidelines for marking the site. The architecture must say "this place is a message..pay attention to it! No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. Stay away." Since there is no physical barrier we can devise now that some future technology cannot breach, any barrier to access can only be symbolic. The center of a structure is often a highly valued place, or a focus of group life. We invert this symbolic meaning to suggest that this is a devalued place to be shunned; a void, a non-place with no center, no position of privilege. Forms must avoid perfection. Craftsmanship should be of low quality. Seven alternative test designs The team designed seven test schemes that incorporate archetypal images related to the theme of "perils-in-place." Each design, covering the entire interment area (the Keep), becomes a direct, visceral form of communication: Landscape of Thorns — Claws randomly rising up from below and reaching out like some uncontrolled mutating growth. Menacing Earthworks — Immense, 70 foot lightning-shaped earthworks, radiating from an open centered Keep, cutting off the horizon. Black Hole — A dark masonry slab Spikes Bursting through Grid — The grid's reliable and human imposed order is destroyed by a more powerful force, chaos. Rubble Landscape — The square outer rim of the rock is dynamited into boulders and bulldozed into a crude pile over the Keep, a place that feels destroyed.. Forbidding Blocks — House sized concrete and stone blocks set in narrow streets that go nowhere; a massive effort to deny use. Spike Field — Stone spikes pierce the sand, projecting from the Keep. For more, write David Seamon, Editor, EAP Newsletter, Box 1345, Hudson NY 12534, (518) 828-6706. Home     Table of Contents