PETCOKE

Academic Individual Project Professor: Brittany Utting Houston, TX Spring 2021

An institute for New Ecologies, this is an experimental facility whose charge explores the petrochemical byproduct petcoke. The institute seeks to create a new infrastructure and institution that drives the public education of current energy systems, particularly the petrochemical ecologies that fuel Texas, and incubate a new, forward looking ecology that will host the cultural and physical shift towards more responsible energy procurement practices. It enables proper storage of petcoke and houses its respective machinery for material processing and studying. It is a mediator that facilitates negotiation between the surrounding petrochemical industries and those who advocate for the environment and greener energy alternatives.

The linear petcoke facility houses residential units arranged along the thick storage basin walls, the institute accommodated by a gantry, and processing station nodes. A canal and lock system is cut through the island site, parallel to the facility, where freight barges, tugboats, and ships can deliver, transfer, and pick up the material. For those living and working inside, mountainous landscapes supplied by the heaps of animated petcoke float by day to day, moved by conveyors, barges and cranes. The facility provides a new means of living with the dirty aspects of the Anthropocene era; as architectural theorist and philosopher Helene Frichot would say, its imperative that we cope with our dusty, dirty, defiled world.

A cleaning threshold in the form of

Highly efficient HVAC and dust collection devices enable living with manmade toxicity. Collective isolation require new methods of living.

Living with our toxicity, ruminations on a superficial rinsing of inhumane practices.