Hot Dirt

Washington University in St. Louis | Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design

Degree Project / Thesis Project with professor Valerie Greer

St. Louis sits as a quiet contributor to the making of the atomic bomb. Along the banks of the Mississippi River, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium used in the Manhattan Project and for development of nuclear technology through the Cold … — St. Louis sits as a quiet contributor to the making of the atomic bomb. Along the banks of the Mississippi River, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium used in the Manhattan Project and for development of nuclear technology through the Cold War. The radioactive by-product of this process has since been dispersed though a series of migrations, but now sits on the outskirts of the city in West Lake Landfill where it was used as a capping material for daily refuse. The landfill has since been closed but has been on the EPA Superfund site list since 1990.

Movement of radioactive waste in St. Louis Metropolitan Area

Concentration of radioactive waste by West Lake Landfill

Simultaneously, directly adjacent to West Lake landfill, is another landfill, where buried material is decaying at an accelerated pace, known as an anaerobic fire. As a result, there is a heightened sensitivity towards the radioactive remains at West Lake Landfill. Concerns relate to the threat of further destruction on human health and environmental health if the fire were to reach and cause expedited decay of the radioactive material.

This project sits next to these landfills in a detention basin that collects water runoff diverted from Bridgeton Landfill and flows into the Missouri river.

Spectacle The practices of monumentalization and memorialization, the transformation of nuclear landscapes to cultural landscapes create landscapes for consumption and concealment. Instead, these landscapes should be considered landscapes of complex socio-political histories that need to be further tested and explored by designers. These methods of spectacularization reduce environmental memory by concealing their pasts.

Building Half-Life Through design, we can create architecture that incorporates the inevitable decay of buildings by exploring the relationship between the rate of programmatic decay and building decay.

Unbuilding To unbuild: the practice of strategic assemblage, movement, and disassemblage of material, such that it can can be reused and re-assembled in different combinations. A strategy that acknowledges changing human needs, and non-static conditions.

Call to Action Human exposure to radioactive material destroys the body on a molecular level, damaging DNA and causing mutation. Activists seek to find solutions for removing this nuclear material from our environments to reduce human exposure and suffering. Nuclear material is boundless. Nuclear material is homeless. Scientists and activists must come together to help rectify this reality.

Cycles of Distrubance

This project explores how designers can engage with inevitable disturbance in environments. This project does not address the challenges of nuclear waste disposal, nor the distillation of radioactive materials. Instead, this project is an effort to understand and interpret the post-conflict landscape of nuclear war in St. Louis. The creation of an open pavilion allows the landfill and controversies surrounding the remains of nuclear investigation to be accessed both physically and metaphorically by the existing publics, scientists, and governments that surround this condition. It is an open pavilion host to civilian space for discussion, activism as well as laboratory space for continued research on radioactive environments in the wake of human settlement and environmental destruction.

People and Program

In its initial state, this building is a citizen centre for information and aid. The US Army Corps will have a resource library staffed with a Buyout Officer available to help community members interested in leaving the vicinity of West Lake Landfill to find new homes. During this time, the site will also act as a portal into participatory citizen science for those inclined to gather urban radiation levels. With the help of active citizens, the US Army Corps can begin to map out radiation levels across the city, and across time.

Eventually, the smoldering fire at Bridgeton Landfill could reach the radioactive material at West Lake Landfill. At this point, the area must be evacuated, and the surrounding air filtered. In time, the fallout will dissipate, and radiation will be diluted.

Perhaps, this area can be recolonized as a site of commemoration. In time, when the environmental memory of the site is forgotten, it may be prudent to mark the land as dangerous for future populations.

Architectural Strategy

This is an investigation into how we might remember and interact with a paradoxical past; a past of conflict intertwined between awe and fear, triumph and tragedy, discovery and destructiveness. Instead of working against the nature of the site, the building works to re-choreograph existing site elements, dirt and water to offer a way of thinking about making architecture that is not immediate. Hot Dirt, acknowledges that everything is always changing and therefore offers architecture as a strategy of investigation instead of as a solution. The strategy begins simply by digging out a part of the basin to provide extra capacity for the basin; this will offset the capacity of the enclosure. Next, the cut material is mounded to the north of the basin where it will sit exposed to wind, water, vegetation, and gravity, which will ultimately shape the eventual cast enclosure. In time, these mounds will be cast in a thin shelled reinforced concrete with added formwork for openings to allow in light, air and water. After concrete has been cast and cured, dirt material will be removed slowly to expose enclosure.

The site scale strategy is complemented by an architecture of occupation in the space between ground and sky; four varying strategies to experience, showcase, and perform environment. At every oculi within the caste concrete shell, it will be occupied by one of these four methods.

Pile

The first is merely a leftover pile of dirt, mounded underneath the opening. With time, inflicted by water and wind, these mounds will erode, its material migrating elsewhere underneath the pavilion, practically erased as if it has never existed there in the first place. It is possible that these mounds will become vegetated - with exposure to sun and rain, they could pull dormant seeds up from out of hibernation, creating small islands of sprouting ground. They have no formal foundation or grounding to the earth - only the possibility that the roots of pioneer species will hold them in place.

Platform

In the second occupation between earth and sky, a platform of limestone and concrete will be made to act as a stage - a place of gathering, and performance

Silo

As water streams into the oculus above, the limestone edges will weather and act as a metric to measure change and time. This platform will be constructed on grade. As such, it will possibly move slightly leaning this way, slipping that way. In the third strategy, the space between earth and sky will be plugged with a giant concrete silo rushing upward from ground to above the pavilion. Inside will be a spiral staircase. When the concrete crumbles, stairs will still be hanging from the rebar of the construct to provide access upwards above the shelter.

Stratum

Finally, in the fourth mechanism for occupation, the space will be occupied in stratum - levels where conversation and research can take place. This is built on a foundation of piles - around which air, water, and earth can move freely.

Material Exploration

How can material in situ be used as concrete formwork? How does this mode of working offer an opportunity to find form instead of dictating form? Through the repositioning of materials found on a site, I disrupt typical concrete construction methods. Cast concrete is usually valued for its ability to achieve perfection and control of final form. Instead this is a material exploration of potentials instead of expectations

Hot Dirt is a making of form to reflect context with the potential to physically reference site conditions or capture a moment in time. Rockite is a fast-setting, self-leveling, water based structural anchoring compound. It was chosen over concrete due to its ability to set quickly and in cold temperatures. When mixed with minimal water, it is elastic, like a yeast dough. This work is an effort to set initial conditions, then allow the properties of each material to generate form. Although the forms are somewhat predictable, the outcome of each piece is totally unique and impossible to predetermine. Through this method of making I discovered spatial and material relations that I would have otherwise overlooked, or not have had the sensibility to design without trial. This is a generative way of making that requires testing, open-mindedness, and the audacity to be willing to let go of control of an otherwise very controlled method of making form; casting concrete.

This work was made in the ground, using various materials including ice, leaves, bark, soil, gravel, and fire.

Further, this project works to bring the individual into a tuned interaction between one’s self and the always changing environment around them. This is a project and site of becoming, a project that reveals itself in stages and welcomes the possibility of unknown futures contingent on the interaction of publics, elements, and other biota that interact in the space.