Trinity Site, New Mexico First Nuclear Explosion Site

The Trinity Site is the location of the first ever nuclear bomb detonation on July 16, 1945. Its location is within the White Sands Missile range, an Army Base for testing weapons for the DOD. The site is open to visitors two times per year. By restricting the sites availability to civilians, it further heightens this landscape as spectacle. It does this by increasing the disassociation of humanity with the gravity of the site by distracting visitors with the speciality of the visit. A small obelisk sits in isolation surrounded by desert with little indication of the destructed and destructive landscape it once was. This case study helps to understand an approach to nuclear landscapes where their significance is heightened through restriction of access, yet as a result, the gravity of the site is also disguised by the spectacle of exclusiveness.


The approach utilized by Trinity Site in response to environmental memory is similar to the point of view of American photographer Peter Goin, who in his photographic book “Nuclear Landscapes” explores the nuclear context as a landscape of desolation and expansiveness, one where the human is a foreign object. In doing so, he describes these landscapes through pictorial symbolism, evoking the fear inherent in these terrains. Through his archive of images, the use of photographic techniques helps to symbolize the destruction that occurred on the land, but objectifies them as no longer attainable to the human civilian. Instead they are archived through imagery only, accessible only through the pages of a book. This form of documentation is one way in which the memory of nuclear landscape remains, perhaps due to the inherent danger of radioactive exposure, it is the only way these sites can remain in the consciousness of memory.

Left Top: www.wsmr.army.mil/fn/Pages/TrinityOpenHouse.aspx
Left Bottom: Google Earth Aerial, Trinity Site
Right Top: Randy Siner, The Salt lake Tribune
Right Bottom: US Dept of Energy/ National Atomic Museum

The Question

Given the complexities of addressing radioactive remediation, how can knowledge surrounding nuclear processes inform a method of making architecture through interrogation, exposure, and anticipation of a future state within the context of the nuclear landscapes?

The History

In 1942 the Manhattan Engineering District created the first self-contained nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. The uranium oxide used in this critical reaction was produced by the Destrehan Street Refinery and Metal Works - this later became Mallinckrodt Chemical Works. Afterwards the Manhattan Project contracted Mallinckrodt Chemical Works to continue to produce its enriched uranium. St. Louis was only one location in this assembly line of atomic production, but its position has had lasting effects in the St. Louis Region and the world at large.

Between 1947 and the mid 1960s, waste from the Manhattan Project was under the care of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This waste consisted primarily of leached barium sulphate cake residue and was stored in North West St. Louis, now known as the St. Louis Airport Sites (SLAPS). In 1962 a private company bought the uranium and radium processing wastes stored at SLAPS by the AEC, and moved it in 1966 to the Hazelwood Interim Storage Site (HISS) at 9200 Latty Avenue. Due to change of ownership of this private company, much of the radioactive waste was sold and shipped to Canon City, Colorado. The rest, mostly leached barium sulphate cake residue, was diluted with soil and taken to West Lake Landfill, not as a waste product, but as a capping material between daily doses of home waste.

Based On:
St. Louis Uranium Plant’s (SLUP)
Role in the Production of the
Atomic Bomb, 1942-45, from St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, Feb. 12,
1989, page 4.

The Project

The complex socio-political context of nuclear extraction, processing, and disposal has informed built spaces, environments, and greatly impacted the people living in its wake. This project proposal is an effort not only to reveal the radioactive environment in the region, but also investigate scars of an emotional and cultural nature. This is not an effort to solve the social, political, or environmental conditions that revolve around sites of nuclear waste. Instead, it is a promise to engage in an alternative dialogue, one of respect, and curiosity with the fallout of nuclear armament.


This is a local condition with a global reach, of which the consequences are likely too large to fully understand in the moment, affecting the conditions of soil, water, and air, creating unfit conditions of habitation for biota.

Photo by David Carson at the St. Louis Post Dispatch

Hot Dirt in STL

St. Louis sits as a quiet contributer to 20th century warfare. Along the banks of the Mississippi River, the Mallinckrodt Chemical Corporation processed uranium used in the Manhattan Project and for development of nuclear technology through the Cold War. The by-product of this process can emit radioactive energy for thousands of years.


This project is an effort to understand and interpret the post-conflict landscape of nuclear war in St. Louis. It is an investigation into how we might remember and interact with a paradoxical past; a past of conflict between awe and fear, triumph and tragedy, discovery and destructiveness, through modes that both reveal and conceal environmental, social, and econimic conditions.

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