POWER STACK / GRADUATE THESIS

Graduate Thesis Rice University Advisor: Nathan Friedman Pasadena, TX Spring 2023

Power Stack is an urban project that redesigns the value of energy infrastructure. The thesis integrates sustenance, with utility. In the future of energy production, consider not having one that supplies many, but nodes of power storage and supply that serve the local context. The thesis proposes a distributable architecture with an encoded ethical ideology within an urban scheme. A store of value for energy, but contrary to current industrial zones, also serving as a value to its proximity. Gravity-based energy storage, Power Stacks, store surplus energy, which is made available in times of supply fluctuations. Unusable material from previous industrial landscapes are recycled into dense blocks that exist at the top of the Power Stack as potential energy (storage), then slowly descend,

GENERATING

FOCUS: POWER STACK

Architect As Policy Maker

PASADENA, TEXAS

1149 ELLSWORTH DRIVE PASADENA, TEXAS 77506 spinning a turbine and generating energy in the process. The energy infrastructure is bolstered by floodable landscapes that also mitigate toxicity, remediating the ground upon which the energy infrastructure stands. The design uses three main strategies: water as amenity, the mitigation of toxicity, and energy; it is a coupling of landscape and infrastructure. It is not a final solution, but sets up a hybrid system to reclaim landscapes, a spatial and biological recovery over time. In designing beyond the human, the reclamation of the industrial ground itself will, over time, be acted out through the reinhabitation of native flora and fauna. The grasslands and ponding mimic the Coastal Prairie habitat of the Texas Gulf Coast, 3000 acres artificially regained in which only 1% presently remains.

Equality

JAN

GENERATING EQUALITY

GENERATING EQUALITY

PASADENA, TEXAS

1149 ELLSWORTH DRIVE PASADENA, TEXAS 77506

PASADENA, TEXAS

1149 ELLSWORTH DRIVE PASADENA, TEXAS 77506

ABSTRACT: The obsolescence of oil and gas in Pasadena, Texas provides an opportunity to critically examine how infrastructure might be used as a net-positive urban agitator. How might we use infrastructure as a medium for progress? By considering not only what the infrastructure does as a precise utility, but what it means in urban space.

FOCUS: POWER STACK

JAN 1 3 2023

JAN 1 3 2023

FOCUS: POWER STACK

1- WHAT IS AT STAKE?

ARCHITECT AS POLICY MAKER

ARCHITECT AS POLICY MAKER

ABSTRACT: The obsolescence of oil and gas in Pasadena, Texas provides an opportunity to critically examine how infrastructure might be used as a net-positive urban agitator. How might we use infrastructure as a medium for progress? By considering not only what the infrastructure does as a precise utility, but what it means in urban space.

ABSTRACT: The obsolescence of oil and gas in Pasadena, Texas provides an opportunity to critically examine how infrastructure might be used as a net-positive urban agitator. How might we use infrastructure as a medium for progress? By considering not only what the infrastructure does as a precise utility, but what it means in urban space.

1- WHAT IS AT STAKE?

Texas is an Energy Island, a state whose electrical grid is independent from the rest of the United States; a politically-boasted isolation that allows for a deregulated market. These ‘boasts’ are liabilities, allowing for outdated infrastructure and no national-backup in emergencies. The grid needs to be reliable and equitable. This thesis proposes embedding nodes of energy storage in the grid to ensure backup, a structural redundancy in the present, and a preparation for the energy storage that will be vital for the success of impending renewable energy technologies.

1- WHAT IS AT STAKE?

At stake is Texas’s Energy Giant title, new energy generation methods must compensate for the slow depletion of oil and gas. At stake is an architectural opportunity to rethink the lines drawn between architecture, infrastructure, and landscape, in order to invent progress and advance the ‘green energy’ landscapes we currently envision. At stake are Houstonians, some more than others, who are continually jeopardized by failing infrastructure during city-wide disasters.

Texas is an Energy Island, a state whose electrical grid is independent from the rest of the United States; a politically-boasted isolation that allows for a deregulated market. These ‘boasts’ are liabilities, allowing for outdated infrastructure and no national-backup in emergencies. The grid needs to be reliable and equitable. This thesis proposes embedding nodes of energy storage in the grid to ensure backup, a structural redundancy in the present, and a preparation for the energy storage that will be vital for the success of impending renewable energy technologies.

2- INTRODUCTION ON SITE

Texas is an Energy Island, a state whose electrical grid is independent from the rest of the United States; a politically-boasted isolation that allows for a deregulated market. These ‘boasts’ are liabilities, allowing for outdated infrastructure and no national-backup in emergencies. The grid needs to be reliable and equitable. This thesis proposes embedding nodes of energy storage in the grid to ensure backup, a structural redundancy in the present, and a preparation for the energy storage that will be vital for the success of impending renewable energy technologies.

At stake is Texas’s Energy Giant title, new energy generation methods must compensate for the slow depletion of oil and gas. At stake is an architectural opportunity to rethink the lines drawn between architecture, infrastructure, and landscape, in order to invent

At stake is Texas’s Energy Giant title, new energy generation methods must compensate for the slow depletion of oil and gas. At stake is an architectural opportunity to rethink

1 _ INEVITABLE BIDIRECTIONAL ELECTRICITY GRID

2 _ NORTHWEST PASADENA, TEXAS: SPECULATIVE CONDITIONS

The project site of this unfolding speculation is on 3,000 acres of North-West Pasadena, Texas, largely occupied by oil and gas, adjacent to commercial and residential. The area has some of the least tree coverage in Houston and possesses the slowest population growth of all of Greater Houston. Its residents are victims to many pollutive events with high exposure to cancer-causing agents. This thesis is a speculation on how three layers remediate the area: new energy infrastructure, mitigation of toxicity, and water as an amenity.

Power Stacks and Recyling _ 30 Years

Phytoremedation of Unbuildable _ 5 Years

Canals _ 10 Years

Renewable Energy Landscapes _ 35 Years

Whole Site Remedation _ 75 Years

Floodable Landscape _ 15 Years

Soil Washing _ 5 Years

Capping _ 10 Years

Buffalo Bayou Extension _ 12 Years

1 _ SITE PLAN AND SECTION

The drawing illustrates a moment in time, an estimated 50 years from now, when the total remediation process is well underway. Central notations show the novel elements to the site, but the structures and conditions that are likely to remain on the site.

This thesis turns on its head the practice of divorcing industrial production from the zone in which it serves - it collapses the site of production into the store of value - through the architectural focal point, the Power Stack - and makes one’s proximity to that store a built in side-constraint against the capital incentives of the status quo that seek to imperialize and export them away. The design remediates the material site, but also remediates the narratives of living within the industrial zone itself for the living and for the landscape, and in doing so, encodes an ethics for dignified, self-sufficient, urban life - a heritable quality it can then pass to future projects, attitudes, and communities.