Volume #27 Preview by Archis Foundation

An Age-old P roblem Timothy Moore 2050

2010

youth bulge

aids influenced age structure

youth bulge

youth bulge 10

temporary migrant-influenced structure

western baby boomers

migration to western europe

increased longevity

shrinking nations

percent

lower fertility

percent

lower life expectancy

increased life expectancy

male

life expectancy

life expectancy 5

age

median world age

age 10

female

100+

median world age 5

100+

female

lower life expectancy

increased life expectancy

lower fertility

shrinking nations

migration to western europe

temporary migrant-influenced structure youth bulge

youth bulge aids influenced age structure

More-developed Less-developed

youth bulge

World More developed Less developed North Africa SubSaharan Africa Middle East Asia Oceania North America South America and the Carribean Western Europe Eastern Europe

youth bulge

North America Middle East

World More developed Less developed North Africa SubSaharan Africa Middle East Asia Oceania North America South America and the Carribean Western Europe Eastern Europe

Average life expectancy

Median age

Sub-Saharan Africa Western Europe

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After a century of celebrating the young, fresh and new, the twenty-first century will be evermore mature. Over the last fifty years, the global life expectancy at birth has increased by over twenty years. This dramatic increase in longevity, paired with a declining fertility rate, will continue in the next thirty years to see the world’s elderly population (people over 60) doubling to two billion (an increase from one-in-nine to one-in-five people). The median will reach a middle-age of 37.8 years. With the form of the population pyramid morphing from a stepped terrace to a sky scraper-like shape between 2010 and 2050, it emphasizes that not only are we living longer, but our society is getting older. A decline in youth presents a series of societal changes: an extension in labor participation over time, a mutation in multi-generational family forms, and the increasing compet itiveness of global migration (due to tight domestic labor markets). While many countries are currently prepar ing for the challenge of aging, Europe has already aged: the number of dependents over 65 was larger than the number of de pendents under 5 in the mid-70s. Following in their footsteps, the booming economies of Brazil, China, India and the Gulf states will undergo a demographic transition to match the European trend of mortality and fertility rates in the near future. While they should have the economies to provide for it, in other less developed countries where many of the two billion gerontocrats will live, poverty and the lack of basic health care provisions is a key challenge to a happy, long life. The aging of society provides a new capacity to capture wisdom and experience despite the drain it may inflict on resources. The irony to the policy-makers facing these chal lenges is that they will be around in thirty years time to face the long-term decisions that they have created. With the flattening of the population pyramid in the impending future, the diagram is clear: the time is now to wrinkle out the issue.

More-developed Less-developed

North America Middle East

Sub-Saharan Africa Western Europe

An Arch itect in the Gr ay Zone

A Manifesto for New Aging Matthias Hollwich

1 Confront yourself with your age early. When you reach 50 percent of your life expectancy, declare yourself old. 2 Build on your history. Imagine your future. Rejoice in your past. 3 Extend your family.

Matthias Hollwich interviewed by Arjen Oosterman and Timothy Moore

Make new friends and relationships. (You might need them.)

Architectural attention to the retire ment home is often reduced to issues of efficiency and medical care. Architect Matthias Hollwich, however, proposes a different type of approach to old age through envisioning the retiring place and person as a site of urban generation. Hollwich organ ized the New Aging conference in Philadelphia during October, 2010, in order to call on architects to render old age as a period full of potential by imagining aging as a normal extension of life. He demonstrates this portrayal to Volume by presenting the retire ment project Boom in Palm Springs and the pressing need to reinvent the nursing home.

4 Stay fit and eat well. They are the only two proven health and life extenders. 5 Do it now, not later. Avoid surprise; adjust your life before you are forced to do so. 6 Plan for upcoming changes. Add services, conveniences and technologies to your life. 7 Never enter a nursing home …

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know how to New Age.

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except when visiting friends who did not

Arjen Oosterman The idea of a nursing home is a comfort to many but can we really call it a ‘home’?

Matthias Hollwich Nursing homes act as extensions of the home, but in the end they are depressing because they unsuccessfully simulate a home. The goal of the nursing home is to extend a life comfortably for as long as possible. However most of the things that a nursing home can do you can also do at home. The reinvention of this typology should be about an interim stage between life and death, where you put your history in order and celebrate the end of a life. Consequently for the architect, there are two options. First, we can make the nursing home more radical, where we move away from the idea of home and celebrate the life we once had. We can rethink how we socialize with the people in the nursing home, our family members and friends. On the other hand, we can do the reverse by transferring some of its elements into the environment that you choose to live in, so that you can adjust your life at a much earlier stage. Timothy Moore How does the issue of aging play out in the second scenario, particularly in relation to your project Boom in Palm Springs, which specifically targets an aging gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community? MH We have been working on Boom with various

architects: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, LOT-EK, Juergen Mayer H., and so on. We are now taking a break after the initial sketch design phase. One reason is that we really want to engage with the people who are going to buy into the development in a more sustainable way; that is, we want to build a community before we actually commence construction. You cannot just jumpstart a community saying: here’s your architecture, here’s your product, here are the keys – now move in and live in a collective fashion. There are a lot of tools being gen erated to facilitate this through social media outreach where users can become co-designers, react to the design, have critiques, aspirations and ideas, influence activities, and feed back into the design process. Learn ing from social network websites is so interesting because they are user-generated news channels where people contribute and share news with their peers. When I think of people who are older, they have generated an extraordinary amount of knowledge and capacity. We need to find ways to share that again. AO In the context of the US, I always think of a community as a segregated, ghetto-like enclave. MH In Palm Springs, the dominating typology is the

gated community, even if the place does not have a gate. You pull off the road and enter a different environment. The way the streets are set up and the way one has to channel the traffic into the private property makes Boom also dependent upon this model. To circumvent this issue, we are injecting programs to introduce urban life into each neighborhood, and scaling accordingly so that it invites the broader community to participate, so that it’s not exclusive. We are looking into outreach programs, such as to schools, so that people within the community can contribute. On top of this, there will be a sharing system so that when people are not in their houses, they can rent them out so you don’t feel enclosed by 900 core people. A forerunner is the Pines on Fire Island, which is a gay community close to New York. Fifty percent of the houses are rented to people per week or month.

General Idea, One Day of AZT / One Year of AZT, 1991.

Bio-technical Arrangemen ts of the Age d Body

The contemporary ‘aged’ body marks a largely uncelebrated transformation of the limits of the human organism – employing an expanded set of techniques at the intersection of the biological and the technological. While the emblem of the technologically augmented body in the mid- to late-twentieth century resided largely within the realm of science fiction and, to a lesser extent, the military-industrial complex, the early twenty-first century by contrast sees its emblematic bio-technical arrangement firmly grounded in social reality. In the historical model of the former, the body was augmented through protective layers and systems located predominantly outside the surface of the body – enabling the colonization of the outer limits of terrestrial space – whereas the contemporary model of the latter is constructed by interventions positioned largely within and upon the body’s exterior surface – extending the outer temporal limits of human longevity. While the former

was young and male, the latter may be characterized as old, and, in statistical terms, female. The components presented here constitute a selection of the most familiar formats of this subject’s integration with bio-technical systems. They span from the bio-mechanical and bio-electronic, to the bio-chemical; from those extending longevity (or life quantity) to those that improve life quality in the later years; and from re storative adjustments and repairs, to technologies in various stages of development directed toward the elimination of the effects of aging altogether. Evident is the extent to which such a body is formed as an assem blage of products available to those individuals (or national health care systems) with the necessary resources to access them. It is perhaps no coincidence then that Frederic Jameson’s description of the ‘longevity’ sub-genre of science fiction in Archaeologies of the Future hinges around the theme of ‘longevity as class struggle’.

Deane Simpson BME: Bio-mechanical/ BME: Bio-mechanical/ bio-electronic bio-electronic prostheses prostheses BME-1 contact BME-1 lenses contact lenses BME-2 electronic BME-2 electronic hearing aid hearing aid BME-3 dental BME-3 implant dentaldentures implant dentures BME-4 electronic BME-4 electronic heart pacemaker heart pacemaker BME-5 artificial BME-5 heart artificial heart BME-6 orthotic BME-6 back orthotic brace back brace BME-7 wrist BME-7 brace wrist brace BME-8 compression BME-8 compression stockingsstockings BME-9 artificial BME-9 hip, artificial elbow, hip, knee elbow, knee and ankleand joints ankle joints

BME-1 BME-1

BCP-1 BCP-1

BME-2 BME-2 BCP-2 BCP-2

BME-3 BME-3

BME-4 BME-4

BME-5 BME-5

BCP: Bio-chemical BCP: Bio-chemical prostheses prostheses BCP-1 arthritis BCP-1 medication arthritis medication BCP-2 acid BCP-2 reflexacid medication reflex medication BCP-3 hypertension BCP-3 hypertension medication medication BCP-4 insulin BCP-4medication insulin medication BCP-5 influenza BCP-5 influenza virus vaccine virus vaccine BCP-6 chronic BCP-6 obstructive chronic obstructive pulmonary pulmonary disease medication disease medication

CST-1 CST-1

CST-2 CST-2

BCP-3 BCP-3

CST-3 CST-3

BCP-4 BCP-4

CST-4 CST-4

BCP-5 BCP-5

CST-5 CST-5

CST: Cellular/molecular CST: Cellular/molecular senescence senescence treatments treatments CST-1 cell CST-1 loss, tissue cell loss, atrophy tissue atrophy treatmenttreatment (stem cell(stem treatment) cell treatment) CST-2 nuclear CST-2 mutations nuclear mutations treatmenttreatment CST-3 mutant CST-3 mitochondria mutant mitochondria treatmenttreatment CST-4 death-resistant CST-4 death-resistant cells treatment cells treatment CST-5 tissue CST-5stiffening tissue stiffening treatmenttreatment CST-6 extracellular CST-6 extracellular aggregates aggregates treatmenttreatment CST-7 intracellular CST-7 intracellular aggregates aggregates treatmenttreatment

BME-6 BME-6 BCP-6 BCP-6

CST-6 CST-6

BME-7 BME-7 CST-7 CST-7 BME-8 BME-8 BCE-1 BCE-1

BCE-2 BCE-2 BME-9 BME-9

BCE-3 BCE-3 OGT: Organ OGT: transplants Organ transplants OGT-1 liver OGT-1 transplant liver transplant OGT-2 kidney OGT-2transplant kidney transplant

BCE: Bio-chemical BCE: Bio-chemical enhancers enhancers BCE-1 sleeping BCE-1 pills sleeping pills BCE-2 botox BCE-2 botox BCE-3 anti-depressant BCE-3 anti-depressant BCE-4 anti-inflammatory BCE-4 anti-inflammatory BCE-5 canned BCE-5 oxygen canned oxygen BCE-6 libido BCE-6 enhancer libido enhancer

MLE-1 MLE-1

MLE-2 MLE-2

MLE-3 MLE-3

OGT-1 OGT-1 BCE-4 BCE-4

MLE-4 MLE-4

BCE-5 BCE-5

MLE-5 MLE-5

BCI-1

BCI-2 BCI-2

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BCI: Bio-cosmetic BCI: Bio-cosmetic implants implants BCI-1 saline BCI-1breast saline implants breast implants BCI-2 silicon BCI-2 buttock siliconimplants buttock implants

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OGT-2 OGT-2

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BCE-6 BCE-6

MLE-6 MLE-6

MLE: Miscellaneous MLE: Miscellaneous lifelifeextensionextension treatments treatments MLE-1 hormonal MLE-1 hormonal anti-aginganti-aging treatmenttreatment MLE-2 free MLE-2 radical free treatment/ radical treatment/ anti-oxidant anti-oxidant MLE-3 nanorobotics MLE-3 nanorobotics MLE-4 gene MLE-4 modification gene modification therapy therapy MLE-5 cryogenic MLE-5 cryogenic storage for storage for future revival future revival MLE-6 nootropic MLE-6 nootropic cognitive cognitive enhancersenhancers

Hibern ation Sander van Wettum

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For such a young Spanish town, the seaside highrises of Benidorm are buzzing with the aged. In fact, this coastal town has boomed in the last fifty years: its population has risen ten times over, and it is said to have accumulated the most skyscrapers per capita in the world â&#x20AC;&#x201C; so that everyone can share in the sunset and seaviews. Northern Europeans flock to Benidorm in Winter due to the mountain mircoclimate that provides mild temperaÂ tures all-year round. With a cast of various nationalities, temporary tourÂ ists and elderly winter-nesters that this brings, Benidorm is a town with a case of slight amnesia: part-disco, part-sunbath, partly in Spain. No one really knows what it was once like. And no one knows who is old or new to the place. Just smile and face the sun.

Photo Miguel de Guzmán

Santa Rita Geriatric Cen ter, Ciutade lla, Menorca, Spain Architecture Manuel Ocaña

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Though the Santa Rita Geriatric Center (2009) appears like an industrial building stripped threadbare (perhaps as a result of the architect producing double the amount of space than the competition brief asked for), the design places the creation of public space at the core of its concept. Devoid of corridors – a typical nursing home motif – it consists of internal and outdoor ‘squares’. All rooms are arranged around (and have direct access to) these patios. Around its perimeter is a series of fluidly intercon nected spaces for different uses. The result provides opportunity for endless wandering, that comes with the mental condition of the inhabitants, but also for casual meeting, retreat and privacy.

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Photo US Department of Energy

2: Half-Life

The time frame within which nuclear waste will remain a threat to living organisms is mind-boggling. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 25,000 years, for instance, and the half-life of Uranium-238 is a staggering 4.4 billion years. If this does not sound like a long time, consider the fact that the Earth itself is estimated to be a mere 4.5 billion years old. Plans for the long-term storage of nuclear waste are thus extraordinarily ambitious, but also nearly im possible to verify. The currently accepted minimum time required for the effective containment of nuclear waste, during which dangerous materials will need to be entirely isolated from the biosphere, is 10,000 years – but 1 million years is widely seen as a safer option. This seemingly ageless condition of nuclear waste has some fascinating and very specific design implica tions. The facilities in which this waste will be stored have to outlast everything we now know as human civilization – indeed, they will have to outlast the very continents they are built upon. To understate the case, this requires careful consideration. For at least the past decade, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has been investigating what would be required for the safe – and, effectively, eternal – disposal of radioactive waste. This has included a wideranging search for the appropriate materials; to date, these include lead-aggregate concretes; a special borosilicate glass; and something known as Synroc, a highly artificial mixture of the minerals hollandite, zirconolite, and perovskite. Synroc, according to the World Nuclear Association, is ‘an advanced ceramic comprising geochemically stable natural titanate minerals which have immobilised uranium and thorium for billions of years’. These sorts of materials – Synroc, in particular – are what geologist Jan Zalasiewicz would single out as particularly likely not only to fossilize, but to remain intact for tens of millions of years into the future. Put another way, if only we could build our cities with Synroc, then the ruins of human civilization would remain detectable perhaps ‘for billions of years’. This outdoes Albert Speer’s notion of ‘ruin value’ by several orders of magnitude. Of course, working within these constraints – that is, designing a tomb for nuclear waste – entails

extraordinary architectural considerations. On August 19, 2004, the DOE released a paper called the ‘Permanent Markers Implementation Plan’. This plan called for the development of durable signs that would allow future generations – 10,000 years from now or longer – to know where nuclear waste has been stored. The signs would thus protect future human generations from harm. According to John D’Agata, in his 2010 book About A Mountain – an extended look at now-cancelled plans to entomb nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain, in the US state of Nevada – the DOE delivered its report to ‘seventy-seven linguists, sixty-eight geologists, fifty anthropologists, forty-one astronomers, thirty-nine historians, twenty-nine biologists, twenty-eight psychol ogists, twenty-seven ethicists, fourteen graphic artists, thirteen science writers, ten archival specialists, seven print librarians, four sculptors, two painters, a mayor, and MENSA’.

View of the first curve in the main drift of the Exploratory Studies Facility, Yucca mountain.

In the design of an architecture that outlives humans, the nuclear industry is thinking far ahead.

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Geoff Manaugh

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One Bill ion AD

And Zalasiewicz, for the most part, agreed. There is, in fact, he explained, no real way to know what will happen to plastic, glass, and cloth; even the long-term effects of terrestrial exposure on industrial materials such as copper, iron, steel, and precious metals – lithium, platinum, gold – can only be estimated. We literally do not – and cannot – know what will happen to the materials we now use in things such as architecture and industrial design, aged 100 million years, like a rare cheese, until someone discovers how to build a functioning artificial fossilization lab. We would need precisely controlled conditions capable of compressing 100 million years into an experimentally useful time. Here, Zalasiewicz suggested that the one group today who is, in fact, investigating these very questions is not architects, of course, and not even artists or de signers, but scientists employed by the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry – engaged in the design and man agement of nuclear power and atomic bombs – is quite consciously focused on the design and implementation of materials that are so robust they are, in effect, ageless.

1: Fossil Cities

In his 2008 book The World After Us, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz from the University of Leicester speculates as to how architecture – and cities themselves, more broadly, from New York City to Moscow – might age over extra ordinarily long periods of time. In this case, Zalasiewicz looks ahead to an era 100 million years in the future. Zalasiewicz writes that 100 million years is, in fact, a ‘modest goal’ for anyone who hopes to see how architec ture and cities will age. After all, 100 million years is ‘a long time’, he writes – it is ‘roughly the time span that sepa rates us from the heyday of the dinosaur’s’. On the other hand, it is a mere ‘two per cent of the Earth’s current age’. After reviewing the various geological processes that operate on the planet, from earthquakes to tectonic subduction, Zalasiewicz comes to an astonishing conclu sion: 100 million years from now, physical traces of human civilization will be all but undetectable. Indeed, as if channeling the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zalasiewicz writes that ‘skyscrapers and semi-detached houses alike, roads and railway lines, will be reduced to sand and pebbles, and strewn as glistening and barely recognizable relics along the shoreline of the future’. However, it is inside the Earth – laid down as mas sive industrial fossils, similar to the bones of dinosaurs – that clear traces of human architecture might still be uncovered. As Zalasiewicz elaborates, it is specifically cities built on or near river deltas – such as London, New Orleans, Hanoi, and Shanghai – that are most likely to fossilize: ‘Our drowned cities and farms, highways and towns, would begin to be covered with sand, silt, and mud, and take the first steps towards becoming geol ogy’, he writes. ‘The process of fossilization will begin.’ Of course, different materials will react to these enormous spans of time in different ways. In a 1998 article for New Scientist, co-written with Kim Freedman, Zalasiewicz suggests that plastics, for instance, ‘might behave like some of the long-chain organic molecules in fossil plant twigs and branches, or the collagen in the fossilized skeletons of some marine invertebrates’. Like the Jurassic fossils of ancient fern leaves, in other words, the plastic cups, mobile phones, car bodies, eye glass frames, furniture, toys, and so much more that we take for granted might also become pieces of geology: strangely beautiful after-effects of human industry, perhaps suitable for mounting on the walls of future museums, 101 million years in the future. Indeed, Zalasiewicz and Freedman write, these fossil cities will be ‘a lot more robust than [fossils] of the dinosaurs’ and they will also ‘be hard to obliterate’: ‘They will be altered, to be sure, and it is fascinating to speculate about what will happen to our very own ad dition to nature’s store of rocks and minerals, given a hundred million years, a little heat, some pressure (the weight of a kilometer or two of overlying sediment) and the catalytic, corrosive effect of the underground fluids in which all of these structures will be bathed.’ But will any of this actually happen? Is it not all just poetic speculation? I spoke with Zalasiewicz about his work. Curious as to how he had come to these conclusions, I asked how this was not mere guess work – Romantic extrapolations and sheer wonder, a kind of archaeological daydream, like something out of the novels of J.G. Ballard, in which we fantasize that everything now human will slowly transform into solid rock.

The idea was that a multidisciplinary group, such as this, could devise a way to communicate to future human beings that a life-threatening deposit of radio active waste has been buried or otherwise stored in a certain location. After all, current regulations from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) require that radioactive waste-disposal sites must be designated by what the DOE calls ‘awareness triggers’. These ‘awareness triggers’ would constitute a series of permanent sign-systems, where ‘permanent’ refers to ‘extreme time requirements’ – in this case, a minimum of 10,000 years. (It is worth remembering here that the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.4 billion years.) The DOE’s specific design requirements are uniquely interesting from the perspective of designers and archi tects; as such, these requirements should be treated as a design brief and are worth quoting word for word. The DOE’s ‘permanent markers’ will be required to perform the following duties for tens of thousands of years: T o alert the intruder to the existence of the site, permanent markers must be: a readily detected from all directions and means of intrusion, b detectable directly by human senses and by indirect remote sensing methods, and c obviously anomalous with respect to the natural features of the site. 1

2 T o convey a warning of the danger to an intruder, permanent markers must be: a identifiable as conveying a warning, and b able to convey danger independent of the language of the intruder.

Photos US Department of Energy

T o inform an intruder about the degree and nature of the danger, permanent markers must be: a able to be inscribed with symbols and letters, b contain sufficient information about the site and its dangers to dissuade intrusion and should be identifiable within the first four levels of understanding, c state the information in enough different languages that at least one of them will likely be familiar to the intruder, and d display the information so that it is readily discovered without the need for more than surficial [sic] intrusion into the site. T o endure in form and function for the longest time possible, permanent markers must be: a as resistant as possible to chemical and physical weathering, dissolution, and erosion, b able to withstand all foreseeable extreme natural conditions including earthquake, wind, flood, and fire, able to remain stable in form, location and position, c able to resist vandalism, d able to minimize risk of casual removal, e lacking in economic value to be of no interest for scavenging and salvage, and f sufficiently redundant to meet performance criteria despite some loss in numbers or form. 4

Intriguingly, the DOE’s own proposed disposal site, depicted in plan, resembles a Greek temple.

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Aerial view over the crest of Yucca Mountain.

3: Anti-Archaeology and the Atomic Priesthood

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The Department of Energy has also invested a great deal of conceptual energy into how the site’s architects could most effectively deter future vandals, excavators, saboteurs, mineral profiteers, terrorists, and inadvertent discoverers. These methods would include the deliberate burial of misleading ‘radar reflectors’ in the earth; these ‘trihedral’ objects would produce ‘distinctive anomalous magnetic and radar-reflective signatures’ – that is, false clues – leading potential excavators to believe that they are digging in the wrong place. Scattered randomly across the site, these radar reflectors would also never form a consistent pattern, thus making it all but impos sible to find and locate the site they are meant to cam ouflage. Think of it as stealth anti-archaeology. Protective efforts such as these, however, need not always be architectural. In a 1984 report called ‘Commu nication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia’, semiotician Thomas Sebeok suggested that an ‘Atomic Priesthood’ be formed. Like something out of The Da Vinci Code, Sebeok’s ‘Atomic Priesthood’ would be charged with communicating to future generations where nuclear waste has been entombed and how to avoid it. This would not be required for a mere few centuries – or even for the course of millennia – it would have to span all of human future history, until the nuclear waste is safe. In a paper specifically written for the DOE, Sebeok described this ‘Atomic Priesthood’ as a ‘long-term com mission that would remain in service for the next ten millennia’, at minimum. It would be ‘relatively independent of future political currents, [and] self-selective in mem bership, using whatever devices for enforcement are at its disposal, including those of a folkloristic character’.

The result would be a mythologically inflected ‘relay-system’, as Sebeok describes it, communicating to future generations that certain parts of the Earth’s surface are to be avoided at all costs. This would be accomplished through an easily remembered narrative of threat and dissuasion – ‘a method of warning future generations not to mine or drill at that site unless they are aware of the consequences of their actions’. 4: One Billion AD

The fossil cities of Jan Zalasiewicz and the atomic tombs of the nuclear industry – the latter of which will far outlast the former – radically challenge existing standards for architectural weathering and long-term site planning. Indeed, this collision of time frames is so drastic and, in the end, its material realization so difficult to grasp – relying on construction materials, such as Synroc, that could potentially outlast the Earth itself – that it unexpectedly reinvigorates many ideas of the classic architectural avant-garde. Imagine, for instance, rediscovering the ideas of Étienne-Louis Boullée by way of Yucca Mountain. But whether or not this drastic elongation of the architectural lifespan results in anything formally interesting remains to be seen.