Year 3: Inheritance and Memory
Critic: Michael Bell
Semester: FA2017
Site: Concord Naval Weapons Station, Concord, CA
Size: 5,000 acres
Program: military park and memorial
“How is the housing question to be settled, then? In present-day society, just as any other social question is settled: by the gradual economic leveling of demand and supply, a settlement which reproduces the question itself again and again and therefore is no settlement....”
Fredrick“Broad internalization of such discursive regimes as taming the frontier, advancing civilization, leading the free world, or ridding the world of terror creates spontaneous consent, the prerequisite for hegemony, thus enabling imperial conduct abroad while reinforcing domestic hierarchies.”
Walter“According to Maxwell’s second law of thermodynamics, the entropy in a system will increase...unless new energy is put in.... The city, the polis, is struggling to grow, and to change, perhaps even toward the day when the idea of the human is recognized in the energy, the life impulse and actions of each human being.”
- Lebbeus Woods“Identities and memories are not things we think about, but things we think with.”
- John GillisIn the vast folded landscape is a eld of carbon husks. Some are tall and rigid like soldiers, in long lines describing perimeters through the yellow hills; below, others spread out like a dark pool, like a black lake spotted with trees. Between them, green lines of avenues reveal an irregular and curving grid: the husks occupy plots of what was a city on the plane below the hills, where now only a few skeletal towers rise from a thick forest that stretches to the distant line of mountains, which fall into the misty coast.
You begin cutting down the steep ridges toward the husks. The only sounds are the wind in the long grass, mice and other small creatures, birds, a hawk overhead, and your footsteps on the soft, dry ground.
The rst line of carbon vigils stand every twenty feet and are each the size of a young tree, maybe ten feet tall and top-heavy. Near them you can hear a soft noise like radio static coming from them. Their far side is concave and porous like a sponge.
Looking down the line of tall, silent husks you notice some unusual mounds in the grass: repetitive, and too regular to be natural. As the sun has moved into afternoon, shadows indicating more mounds visibly dot the hills – hundreds around you, concentrated on the at lowlands. You approach the closest mound. It is forty feet long and half as wide, taller than you, and thickly overgrown. Some digging reveals stained but intact concrete.
Morning fog through the hills sits in the valleys and drifts across the backs of ridges, leaving trails of dew. The carbon sentinels crackle softly in the electolytic air. Fog rises into their hoods, soaks into structural wood members, and excites the proton exchange membrane sitting across them. The humidity pulls bicarbonate crystals of carbon dioxide from the hood’s resin and into the membrane, shuttling them across its span until they decouple into carbon and oxygen. Oxygen bubbles into the headspace of the membrane’s elecrolyser cells, and carbon molecules rise into bundles of honeycomb nanotubes and loose carbon strands that drift and self-assemble in the current exchanging bicarbonate and water.
The husks are left by an early experiment in carbon nanober technology: carbon sponges grown on longdecayed wooden scaffolding. Their intertwined layer wind up like clockwork under solar radiation, and the lightest electric contact instigates an electric cascade. Carbon nanober sponges are up to 1,000 times more conductive than copper, and have 300 times the strength to weight ratio of steel. They are 90% air.
As carbon syphoned from atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulates, the roofs of Concord darken and thicken. Family after family begins to meet their energy needs with carbon nanotube solar collectors, and nds economic independence from their homes by selling the excess. First local businesses and then nearby steel mills and processing factories switch from grid electricity to cheaper home-generated energy. Power plants gradually shrink into obsolescence, replaced by the aggregate power harvested by millions of homeowners. Subtly, economic and political power shifts into the hands of detached single-family homeowners, whose collective sprawl commands huge tracts of sky.
Single-family homes grow and diversify economically, facilitating new households and in-home businesses. Concord transitions from a bedroom community to the cultural center of Contra Costa County. In Pittsburg to the north, single-family terracotta-roofed blue-pooled villas spread across the crest of hills overlooking the Concord Naval Weapons Station Regional Park, and their trucks of grading dirt –37,000 tons – permanently ll 171 weapons storage magazines, ensuring their longevity.
Carbon shells in the elds of the Naval Weapons Station trace old lines of barbed wire fences; carbon on the houses provide solar energy
Down the hill, past more buried magazines, through more lines of dark crackling husks, you cross a low stream grown around with willows, cottonwoods, oaks, and ashes. The sound of a woodpecker nearby, and startled lizards running across the rocky creekbed.
As you approach the edge of the grid of low-lying husks they are much larger than their sentinel counterparts. They are squat and arched, and very dark, like caves turned inside-out. They reect almost none of the orange light that casts long blue shadows. They are maybe twelve feet tall, forty feet wide. They touch the ground with irregular arms that reach down from their domed tops. Grass, low bushes, and intermittent trees grow between them, up to their edges, and under them. They sit like discarded insect skins, dark and inert, in curving rows back as far as you can see.
You touch a carbon wall. A shower of sparks expands from your nger like a ripple, cascading around the dome and down the legs.
UniveXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXX XX XX X XX XXXX
XXX XXX sanctioned by XXXX XXXX X XXXational [redacted], which work has potential significance for the country’s future in XXX XXXXX X.
This article is part of an ongoing series about recent work of prominent thinkers in contemporary American architecture.
practice of communication whose detailed to a exterior
CARBON NANOTUBE TECHNOLOGY, THE CHEAP
upcoming XXXX architect’s drawings from [redacted], chronicling culturally technology of cultural as part XXXXX at the XXXX XXXational significance series thinkers in CHEAP carbon widespread technologies, of concept of adaptable (CNTs), we ecosystems — grew on a holy practice, building resilient efficient. offset the copper capture quantity impacts. organicism harmony must be has had arguably well. unpredictable practice of communication whose detailed to a exterior Likewise designated building — instance — However, provided a environment itself accommodate that a scaffolding months, tree only be months of harden, on the depending on faster pollutants. occupancy until the and the process that architects inspecting caretakers, personality stretched and architecture, certain
Likewise designated building — instance — However, provided a environment interior itself accommodate that a scaffolding months, carbon tree only be months of harden, on the depending on faster pollutants. occupancy until the and the process that architects inspecting caretakers, personality stretched and architecture, certain favored benefits earthquakes, comparable west coast housing and eerie entire towns months with silent settling technology capture siphon releasing other uses. and are to their composed bonds circulation sequestered exchange carbon electrolysis. The carbon closed carbon developed by University’s form of resin-coated conditioners. removed washed laborinclude Much terminology is technology, such “carbon referring to collection), “hive (usually) consist of nanotubes that
incorporation in building technologies, of course, fundamentally changed our concept of architecture. With nanotechnology as adaptable and forgiving as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), we were able to design buildings as ecosystems — buildings that, rather than being raised, grew on their own. At least this was the rhetoric, a holy grail of architecture: true organicism. In practice, the technology hybridized traditional building systems, making them more robust and resilient — stronger, longer-lasting, lighter, more efficient. While ambiently-harvested carbon offset the demand for such intensive materials as copper and steel, producing the resin used to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide in the quantity demanded had its own environmental impacts. The carbon ecosystem’s promise of organicism and purity, the myth of humans in harmony with nature through architecture, then, must be moderated.
demand for such intensive materials as copper and steel, producing the resin used to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide in the quantity demanded had its own environmental impacts. The carbon ecosystem’s promise of organicism and purity, the myth of humans in harmony with nature through architecture, then, must be moderated.
Carbon ecosystems bred new and unpredictable relationships with buildings.
its interior performance, within designated parameters. Certain areas within a building — bathrooms and storage spaces, for instance — were still fully designed and contained. However, once seeded, the carbon ecology provided a reasonably stable and comfortable environment for working or living. The building’s interior itself needed to be flexible enough to accommodate unpredictable growth patterns as well.
synthesis of CNTs from atmospheric carbon dioxide and their subsequent widespread incorporation in building technologies, of course, fundamentally changed our concept of architecture. With nanotechnology as adaptable and forgiving as carbon nanotubes (CNTs), we were able to design buildings as ecosystems — buildings that, rather than being raised, grew on their own. At least this was the rhetoric, a holy grail of architecture: true organicism. In practice, the technology hybridized traditional building systems, making them more robust and resilient — stronger, longer-lasting, lighter, more efficient. While ambiently-harvested carbon offset the demand for such intensive materials as copper and steel, producing the resin used to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide in the quantity demanded had its own environmental impacts. The carbon ecosystem’s promise of organicism and purity, the myth of humans in harmony with nature through architecture, then, must be moderated.
With that disclaimer, CNT architecture has had deep cultural and social impacts — arguably political, economic, and psychological as well. Carbon ecosystems bred new and unpredictable relationships with buildings.
When it first appeared within the practice of architecture, drawing and communication standards had to adapt to buildings whose appearance couldn’t be predicted or detailed to a fine degree. Fundamentally, a building’s exterior form became a matter of chance. Likewise its interior performance, within designated parameters. Certain areas within a building — bathrooms and storage spaces, for instance — were still fully designed and contained. However, once seeded, the carbon ecology provided a reasonably stable and comfortable environment for working or living. The building’s interior itself needed to be flexible enough to accommodate unpredictable growth patterns as well.
>
With that disclaimer, CNT architecture has had deep cultural and social impacts — arguably political, economic, and psychological as well. Carbon ecosystems bred new and unpredictable relationships with buildings.
New carbon architecture, one projection: structure grows organically on built scaffolding. Above, close-up vignettes.
With that disclaimer, CNT architecture has had deep cultural and social impacts — arguably political, economic, and psychological as well. Carbon ecosystems bred new and unpredictable relationships with buildings.
When it first appeared within the practice of architecture, drawing and communication standards had to adapt to buildings whose appearance couldn’t be predicted or detailed to a fine degree. Fundamentally, a building’s exterior form became a matter of chance. Likewise its interior performance, within designated parameters. Certain areas within a building — bathrooms and storage spaces, for instance — were still fully designed and contained. However, once seeded, the carbon ecology provided a reasonably stable and comfortable environment for working or living. The building’s interior itself needed to be flexible enough to accommodate unpredictable growth patterns as well.
When it first appeared within the practice of architecture, drawing and communication standards had to adapt to buildings whose appearance couldn’t be predicted or detailed to a fine degree. Fundamentally, a building’s exterior form became a matter of chance. Likewise its interior performance, within designated parameters. Certain areas within a building — bathrooms and storage spaces, for instance — were still fully designed and contained. However, once seeded, the carbon ecology provided a reasonably stable and comfortable environment for working or living. The building’s interior itself needed to be flexible enough to accommodate unpredictable growth patterns as well.
When it first appeared within the practice of architecture, drawing and communication standards had to adapt to buildings whose appearance couldn’t be predicted or detailed to a fine degree. Fundamentally, a building’s exterior form became a matter of chance. Likewise its interior performance, within designated parameters. Certain areas within a building — bathrooms and storage spaces, for instance — were still fully designed and contained. However, once seeded, the carbon ecology provided a reasonably stable and comfortable environment for working or living. The building’s interior itself needed to be flexible enough to accommodate unpredictable growth patterns as well.
Timescales of construction shifted, so that a building’s foundation and seeding scaffolding could be put together within a couple months, and the assembly draped in a carbon tree membrane, but the building itself would only be ready for occupancy after three to six months of allowing the carbon shell to grow and harden, and of cultivating the carbon circuits on the scaffolding — occupancy time depending on environment, the urban buildings growing faster with greater exposure to carbon pollutants. However, some owners chose to delay occupancy until the building had fully ripened, until the carbon shell had densified and petrified, and the carbon circuitry fully stabilized, a process that could take years. Owners and their architects would visit the buildings as they grew, inspecting their conditions and speaking with the caretakers, watching as the interior took on the personality of its shell, as the shell dipped and stretched and punctured, finding its own preferred form.
Timescales of construction shifted, so that a building’s foundation and seeding scaffolding could be put together within a couple months, and the assembly draped in a carbon tree membrane, but the building itself would only be ready for occupancy after three to six months of allowing the carbon shell to grow and harden, and of cultivating the carbon circuits on the scaffolding — occupancy time depending on environment, the urban buildings growing faster with greater exposure to carbon pollutants. However, some owners chose to delay occupancy until the building had fully ripened, until the carbon shell had densified and petrified, and the carbon circuitry fully stabilized, a process that could take years. Owners and their architects would visit the buildings as they grew, inspecting their conditions and speaking with the caretakers, watching as the interior took on the personality of its shell, as the shell dipped and stretched and punctured, finding its own preferred form.
Timescales of construction shifted, so that a building’s foundation and seeding scaffolding could be put together within a couple months, and the assembly draped in a carbon tree membrane, but the building itself would only be ready for occupancy after three to six months of allowing the carbon shell to grow and harden, and of cultivating the carbon circuits on the scaffolding — occupancy time depending on environment, the urban buildings growing faster with greater exposure to carbon pollutants. However, some owners chose to delay occupancy until the building had fully ripened, until the carbon shell had densified and petrified, and the carbon circuitry fully stabilized, a process that could take years. Owners and their architects would visit the buildings as they grew, inspecting their conditions and speaking with the caretakers, watching as the interior took on the personality of its shell, as the shell dipped and stretched and punctured, finding its own preferred form.
Schematic section to diagram new carbon-ecosystem construction technologies. Dashed lines indicate unpredictable growth patterns of carbon shell.
Timescales of construction shifted, so that a building’s foundation and seeding scaffolding could be put together within a couple months, and the assembly draped in a carbon tree membrane, but the building itself would only be ready for occupancy after three to six months of allowing the carbon shell to grow and harden, and of cultivating the carbon circuits on the scaffolding — occupancy time depending on environment, the urban buildings growing faster with greater exposure to carbon pollutants.
However, some owners chose to delay occupancy until the building had fully ripened, until the carbon shell had densified and petrified, and the carbon circuitry fully stabilized, a process that could take years. Owners and their architects would visit the buildings as they grew, inspecting their conditions and speaking with the caretakers, watching as the interior took on the personality of its shell, as the shell dipped and stretched and punctured, finding its own preferred form.
Though still a niche branch of architecture, carbon-based construction grafted well to certain cultures. In the US, California in particular favored this kind of architecture for its ecological benefits and high performance in fire and earthquakes, which came much cheaper than comparable alternative building technologies. The west coast landscape of spontaneous and frequent housing developments experienced a sudden and eerie phenomenon of seeded communities, entire neighborhoods or even small developer towns standing, skeletal and empty, for months with hardly any human activity, fenced-off and silent except the creaking and crackling of settling carbon.
Schematic
Timescales of construction shifted, so that a building’s foundation and seeding scaffolding could be put together within a couple months, and the assembly draped in a carbon tree membrane, but the building itself would only be ready for occupancy after three to six months of allowing the carbon shell to grow and harden, and of cultivating the carbon circuits on the scaffolding — occupancy time depending on environment, the urban buildings growing faster with greater exposure to carbon pollutants. However, some owners chose to delay occupancy until the building had fully ripened, until the carbon shell had densified and petrified, and the carbon circuitry fully stabilized, a process that could take years. Owners and their architects would visit the buildings as they grew, inspecting their conditions and speaking with the caretakers, watching as the interior took on the personality of its shell, as the shell dipped and stretched and punctured, finding its own preferred form.
Though still a niche branch of architecture, carbon-based construction grafted well to certain cultures. In the US, California in particular favored this kind of architecture for its ecological benefits and high performance in fire and earthquakes, which came much cheaper than comparable alternative building technologies. The west coast landscape of spontaneous and frequent housing developments experienced a sudden and eerie phenomenon of seeded communities, entire neighborhoods or even small developer towns standing, skeletal and empty, for months with hardly any human activity, fenced-off and silent except the creaking and crackling of settling carbon.
Though still a niche branch of architecture, carbon-based construction grafted well to certain cultures. In the US, California in particular favored this kind of architecture for its ecological benefits and high performance in fire and earthquakes, which came much cheaper than comparable alternative building technologies. The west coast landscape of spontaneous and frequent housing developments experienced a sudden and eerie phenomenon of seeded communities, entire neighborhoods or even small developer towns standing, skeletal and empty, for months with hardly any human activity, fenced-off and silent except the creaking and crackling of settling carbon.
Though still a niche branch of architecture, carbon-based construction grafted well to certain cultures. In the US, California in particular favored this kind of architecture for its ecological benefits and high performance in fire and earthquakes, which came much cheaper than comparable alternative building technologies. The west coast landscape of spontaneous and frequent housing developments experienced a sudden and eerie phenomenon of seeded communities, entire neighborhoods or even small developer towns standing, skeletal and empty, for months with hardly any human activity, fenced-off and silent except the creaking and crackling of settling carbon.
The primary categories of CNT building technology are as follows:
Though still a niche branch of architecture, carbon-based construction grafted well to certain cultures. In the US, California in particular favored this kind of architecture for its ecological benefits and high performance in fire and earthquakes, which came much cheaper than comparable alternative building technologies. The west coast landscape of spontaneous and frequent housing developments experienced a sudden and eerie phenomenon of seeded communities, entire neighborhoods or even small developer towns standing, skeletal and empty, for months with hardly any human activity, fenced-off and silent except the creaking and crackling of settling carbon.
The primary categories of CNT building technology are as follows:
1. Carbon trees which capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and siphon it into carbon nanotubes, either releasing the oxygen or storing it for other uses.
< Carbon architecture retrofits, on multi-story office building and midcentury suburban home, on roofs and facade. >
The primary categories of CNT building technology are as follows:
The primary categories of CNT building technology are as follows:
1. Carbon trees, which capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and siphon it into carbon nanotubes, either releasing the oxygen or storing it for other uses.
The primary categories of CNT building technology are as follows:
1. Carbon trees which capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and siphon it into carbon nanotubes, either releasing the oxygen or storing it for other uses.
Carbon trees take many forms, and are almost infinitely flexible due to their simplicity. A carbon tree is composed of a fractal resin molecule that bonds to carbon dioxide, a water circulation system that un-bonds the sequestered carbon dioxide, and a proton exchange membrane that separates the carbon and oxygen through electrolysis. The electrolysis is usually powered by carbon circuits, creating an efficient closed
1. Carbon trees which capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and siphon it into carbon nanotubes, either releasing the oxygen or storing it for other uses. Carbon trees take many forms, and are almost infinitely flexible due to their simplicity. A carbon tree is composed of a fractal resin molecule that bonds to carbon dioxide, a water circulation system that un-bonds the sequestered carbon dioxide, and a proton exchange membrane that separates the carbon and oxygen through electrolysis. The electrolysis is usually powered by carbon circuits, creating an efficient closed system (see carbon circuits and carbon husks).
The earliest carbon trees, developed by Klaus Lackner at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in 2009, took the form of rooftop boxes with rows of resin-coated membranes, resembling air conditioners. The membranes would be removed like slices of a beehive and washed (removing the carbon dioxide) in a laborintensive process that did not include separation of carbon and oxygen. Much
1. Carbon trees which capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and siphon it into carbon nanotubes, either releasing the oxygen or storing it for other uses. Carbon trees take many forms, and are almost infinitely flexible due to their simplicity. A carbon tree is composed of a fractal resin molecule that bonds to carbon dioxide, a water circulation system that un-bonds the sequestered carbon dioxide, and a proton exchange membrane that separates the carbon and oxygen through electrolysis. The electrolysis is usually powered by carbon circuits, creating an efficient closed system (see carbon circuits and carbon husks).
The earliest carbon trees, developed by Klaus Lackner at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in 2009, took the form of rooftop boxes with rows of resin-coated membranes, resembling air conditioners. The membranes would be removed like slices of a beehive and washed (removing the carbon dioxide) in a laborintensive process that did not include separation of carbon and oxygen. Much of our contemporary terminology is derived from this early technology, such as “carbon tree”, “carbon boxes”, “carbon orchards” (rather than farms, referring to the ex-urban fields of carbon collection), and portable carbon collectors’ “hive boxes”.
2. Carbon shells, which grow on (usually) carbon-based scaffolding, consist of millions of layers of carbon nanotubes that accumulate gradually, typically beneath a
Carbon trees take many forms, and are almost infinitely flexible due to their simplicity. A carbon tree is composed of a fractal resin molecule that bonds to carbon dioxide, a water circulation system that un-bonds the sequestered carbon dioxide, and a proton exchange membrane that separates the carbon and oxygen through electrolysis. The electrolysis is usually powered by carbon circuits, creating an efficient closed system (see carbon circuits and carbon husks).
The earliest carbon trees, developed by Klaus Lackner at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in 2009, took the form of rooftop boxes with rows of resin-coated membranes, resembling air conditioners. The membranes would be removed like slices of a beehive and washed (removing the carbon dioxide) in a laborintensive process that did not include separation of carbon and oxygen. Much of our contemporary terminology is derived from this early technology, such as “carbon tree”, “carbon boxes”, “carbon orchards” (rather than farms, referring to the ex-urban fields of carbon collection), and portable carbon collectors’ “hive boxes”.
2. Carbon shells, which grow on (usually) carbon-based scaffolding, consist of millions of layers of carbon nanotubes that accumulate gradually, typically beneath a modified carbon tree membrane. Though some variation exists in the technology, the most common membrane tree systems release sequestered carbon dioxide in the presence of evaporated water, and then use a modified STEP (solar thermal electrochemical process) to electrolyze and assemble the carbon into CNTs. Because of their molecular properties of attraction, CNTs layered in this manner will self-assemble into
Schematic section to diagram retrofitting strategies of carbon
carbon
Chapte
< Schematic diagram of successive layers of carbon nanotubes, mechanically storing energy through stocastic resonance.
Section: retrofitted suburban roof with sketched lines showing progressive build-up of carbon. >
< Detail: nanoscale of semi-permeable membrane collecting carbondioxide on trees and creating carbon nanotubes through a passive electrolysis, which separates carbon from oxygen.
Detail: below membrane, glass tubes run water which evaporates, disengaging carbon from nanotrees above. >
Solar energy collection materials – silicon in solar cells, lithium or cobalt or silver in batteries – and luminescent materials – phosphorus, zinc, strontium – are mined or collected in salt ats of Argentina, in pit mines of the Congo, Chile, and China. Their production is hazardous and their supply limited. They are articially cheap because they are more valuable than their producers. They sit on your roof and run through your walls.
The house rises around you: wood from trees processed by gas-powered machines, plastic pipes and linoleum oors and asphalt shingles from petroleum by-products, nickel from Indonesian mines, copper wires, berglass insulation produced in industrial smelting plants from sand and limestone. Materials collected, disassembled, and re-combined in ordered bers, each step dissociating the product from its origin. Your house feels safe, contained, and human because the ecology has been stripped from every element. The world of your house is clean – you dust and vacuum to remove the debris of passing days, the material deterioration of walls and carpets.
Your environment is carefully organized to reinforce your centrality. Lines of production coming from around the world, across time and space, tapping ancient veins of energy and minerals, carried on the backs of countless disposable workers, coordinated by numerous global economic supply chains to deliver raw materials to inhuman-scale factories, all conspiring to bring you the screws in your walls, laminate on your counters, expanse of your carpets, vinyl baseboards, and pristine length of your glass windows. You are presented with the house as an object, divorced from its erection. Your house on its street, in its quiet neighborhood, in its city, with its transit lines and highways, with its glass skyscrapers and green parks and expansive parking lots, plays its role in a vast social mechanism designed to deny its origin, to efface its nature. It’s designed to say: you are safe, you are an individual, you are important.
Meanwhile, the hills rise behind your house. You see them in postcards advertising your bucolic city. The hills are wrapped in the military’s barbed wire. The hills are ancient. In nearby cities, without naval bases controlling the territory, you’ve heard of mountain lions coming down from the hills and mauling people in their backyards.
In the 1960s during the Vietnam War and again in the 1980s during the Central American Crisis protesters frequently picketed outside the gates of the Naval Weapons Station. They protested the magazines of weapons – white phosphorus that reduced human bodies to messy liquids, nuclear missiles that, like magnets, exerted inert pressure, guns and ammunition – being shipped to American soldiers abroad, or to anti-communist dictators and insurgent groups in Nicaragua and Ecuador. They
protested the moral war fought by the United States in the increasingly gray decades after the end of World War II, between competing economic-political systems, capitalism and communism: a war staged on the moral grounds of evil Axis powers and, earlier, of noble races verses savage foreigners. The grounds of Manifest Destiny and continental expansion – the grounds of god-given hegemony, sanctifying global crusades against less enlightened nations.
> Upper site section: public facilities with performance plaza above, ceiling plates staggered for light and air, and plantings beneath cobblestones to conduct storm and waste water to lower site.
