Works That Work Issue 3

WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 3 , 2014 €16, $20, £13, ₹1100

The Impact of Design

John Cage, As Slow as Possible.

In 1985 John Cage wrote ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) without specifying exactly how slowly it should be played. Performances have ranged from 8 to 24 hours, and a 639-year performance is currently taking place in St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. What is surely the world’s slowest and longest concert

began in 2001. A special organ designed to last until the end of the performance in 2640 is currently playing the chord d♯′– a♯′– e″ (Helmholtz notation) / D♯4 – A♯4 – E5 (Scientific notation) and the next scheduled chord will begin in September 2020.

Photo courtesy of John-Cage-Orgel-Stiftung Halberstadt.

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Design is often perceived as being dictated by the whims of style and fashion, changing constantly as products and trends come and go. While this is certainly true, and many objects are designed to be short-lived, Works That Work is interested in the aspect of design that is the opposite of the ephemeral. What creations do we want to leave for our successors? What creations will we leave them, whether we want to or not? Many of the decisions we make today will outlive us, giving us tremendous responsibility for everything we do.

One challenge in designing for perpetuity is the issue of decay, but perhaps a more significant problem is the difficulty of ensuring that the project itself will continue to be relevant to future generations. This issue of WTW explores how design is affected by time, the articles responding to questions such as: What kind of design can last for centuries? What is the oldest company in the world, and why has it survived so long? How can you design a solution to a design—one whose success was so great as to cause problems that its creator had never considered?

How can you design a message to reach people 10,000 years from now? What do you do with structures that persist while the world around them changes?

Everything we are creating right now will shape the future of our children. Awareness of this fact should shape the ways we approach not only our projects, but also our whole lives. Incidentally, did you know that the titanium in your laptop will start corroding 100,000 years from now?

— Peter Biľak

Works That Work, Issue 3, Spring 2014 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity Published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Artefacts section: Anne Miltenburg Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Spanish translation: Cristóbal Edwards Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Printing: Ando Den Haag Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in Lava and Neutral from Typotheque Thanks to Johanna Biľak Printed on certified, environmentally friendly papers from Igepa Netherlands: Fluweel 1.5 80 g/m2, Magno Star 115 g/m2 and Lessebo Design White 200 g/m2 (cover).

Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online on worksthatwork.com/subscriptions Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself.

Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it.

Contributors this issue: Carl Alviani, writer, Portland; Rob Boffard, journalist, Johannesburg; Miguel Caballero, entrepreneur, Bogotá; Barbara Eldredge, writer, New York; David Galjaard, photographer, Den Haag; John Habraken, architect, Apeldoorn; Mai Hasebe, researcher, Tokyo; Irene Herrera, journalist, Tokyo; Valerie Hopkins, journalist, Pristina; Tim Maly, writer, Toronto; Martin Parr, photographer, Bristol; Maria Plotnikova, photographer, Moscow; Shagun Singh, writer, New York; Marleen Sleeuwits, photographer, Den Haag; Mark Smithgall, engineer, Houston; Bran Symondson, photographer, London; Mari Tefre, producer, Spitsbergen; Peter Thum, social entrepreneur, New York; Harsha Vadlamani, photographer, Hyderabad; Tae Whang, translator, Rochester

Patronage: Help us to make WTW magazine.

Become a patron, and in return receive copies of the magazine, a small magazine-related present, your name printed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductible. Together we can make a great magazine.

In this issue:

Artefacts

by Anne Miltenburg

From Bunkers to Businesses

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by Valerie Hopkins, photography by David Galjaard

The following people helped to make Issue 3: AKIMOTO ontwerpers Jo De Baerdemaeker Peter Erik Fuchs & Sumie Kawakami Geir Goosen Martin Jenca Benjamin Listwon Jason Prowd & Michelle Mortimer Jay Rutherford Brian Scott/Boon Astrid Stavro (Design by Atlas) Clodagh Twomey Typefounding Jang Wooseok

Albania’s ubiquitous bunkers, built to repel an invasion that never happened, present a unique opportunity for artists and entrepreneurs.

Ultimate Backup

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by Peter Biľak

worksthatwork.com/patrons Front cover: Disassembled AK-47, photographed in Moscow. Neither the photographer nor the owner of the rifle wishes to be credited.

Advertising: We opt for more content and less distraction, partnering with relevant companies whose missions align with the ideas of the magazine. The previous editions of WTW contained less than 5% advertising. This way the advert is not lost in the crowd, and the readers enjoy both the magazine and the partner message. If you are interested in partnership write to ads@worksthatwork.com Errata: In the previous issue WTW #2, page 12, we incorrectly stated that there is a flight landing at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol every 1.2 seconds. The correct figure is one flight every 1.2 minutes.

Pads for Potatoes

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by Shagun Singh, photography by Harsha Vadlamani

One man’s trial-and-error battle against enormous technical, cultural and personal obstacles to improve the lives of women in India.

Paradise Repurposed Photography by Marleen Sleeuwits, text by Anne Miltenburg

Finally: Congratulations on getting all the way to the end of the colophon, and thank you for being as interested in the details as we are. We hope you enjoy the rest of the issue even more than the fine print.

Made and printed in the Netherlands Copyright © Typotheque 2014 All rights reserved A former tropical water park finds an entirely new purpose.

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The Men Who Build Mountains

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Flight 300 to Mumbai

by Rob Boffard

Photography and text by Martin Parr

Designing a world-class ski slope takes skill, experience, technology, significant capital and a gift for working with nature.

Captain Gupta takes Indian schoolchildren and other curious passengers on a unique educational trip.

A Message to the Future

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by Tim Maly

The Art of Peace

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by Barbara Eldredge

Artists who transform weapons into opportunities to reflect on the violence in our world and even to take action against it.

Portable Boundaries

by Carl Alviani

Safely storing nuclear waste requires systems that will last at least 20 times longer than any recorded civilisation.

Building on Tradition – 1,400 Years of a Family Business

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by Irene Herrera, Mai Hasebe and Tae Whang.

Remarkably simple and amazingly effective: a portable barricade for directing traffic and containing crowds.

A corporate creed enabled Kongō Gumi, once the oldest company in the world, to survive over 1,400 years of cultural and economic upheavals.

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Artefacts

INFLATABLE MUSEUM Chile

Ideas given shape in ingenious ways by people across the world in order to solve problems big and small.

In a country that stretches over 4,300 km (2,670 mi.) from north to south, not everyone has a fine art museum within convenient travelling distance. Chilean artist Antonio Balcells Aguirre has devised a unique solution for visitors who cannot travel to museums: an inflatable museum that travels to visitors. With the help of government funding, Balcells Aguirre created a portable museum that can be set up in less than an hour. It carries a collection of national sculptural treasures to extremely remote locations of the country and is often used by schools.

Collected by Anne Miltenburg

Photos: Peter Biľak

Artefacts

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GRACE UNDER PRESSURE Bogota, Colombia

FLUSHING POWER Mississauga, Canada

Crime rates in Colombia have soared over the past decades, leading to a flourishing market in protective clothing. While traditional bulletproof vests are heavy and bulky, designed more for safety than for comfort or fashion, entrepreneur Miguel Caballero has taken the market by storm with his brand of secure, yet light and stylish protective garments that are difficult to distinguish from normal jackets and shirts.

The clothing can withstand shots from close range, which Caballero and his staff regularly demonstrate to clients by shooting at each other.

With moms and dads now stylishly protected in armoured cars and garments, Caballero is expanding his reach to a new audience. His new line, MC Kids, includes backpacks with attached thermal vests, promising 360° protection for the tiny tots of concerned parents.

Older North American toilets, with their large tanks and forceful suction, are notorious water wasters. Newer models use less water and promise the same powerful flush, but consumers are not always convinced. To make the flushing power of water-saving toilets quantifiable, the industry has come up with an independent performance test. As a stand-in for human faeces, which are not only unhygienic, but also difficult to obtain in large quantities from a reliable source, miso soup paste is used by laboratories that test the models by extruding the paste into 100 g (3.5 oz), sausage-shaped chunks, reportedly an extremely realistic test medium. Fixtures are tested with up to 1 kg (2.2 lb) of waste (more than four times the average load of an adult American male).

Photo courtesy of Miguel Caballero.

Photo courtesy of MaP Testing.

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WORLD BOTTLES Amsterdam, the Netherlands

HOME-GROWN POLYSTYRENE Green Island, USA

In 1957 on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, brewery executive Alfred Henry ‘Freddy’ Heineken observed how imported beer bottles were going to waste. He also noted the absence of affordable construction materials, and put two and two together. Upon his return to the Netherlands, he asked architect John Habraken to design a beer bottle that would double as a translucent, modular brick. Sixty thousand Heineken World Bottles (Wobos) were produced, and Habraken tested the concept by building a shed in Freddy Heineken’s backyard.

In the end, however, the project proved incompatible with the brewery’s marketing culture and was not implemented.

The world is drowning in discarded polystyrene, a notoriously polluting substance that can last an estimated million years in landfills and oceans.

By accident, two students of a polytechnic university discovered that they could grow a strong but light substance from agricultural waste and mushroom mycelium, and realised its potential to replace polystyrene. Through years of product development and testing, their company Ecovative now grows 100% natural packaging material that is extremely light and completely compostable. With seemingly endless application possibilities, this invention will touch all our lives, and the sooner the better.

Images courtesy of John Habraken and The Heineken Company.

Photo courtesy of Ecovative.

Artefacts

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EVACUATION NEW ORLEANS New Orleans, USA

POTEMKIN LIVES Belcoo, Northern Ireland

When hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, many people without access to a motor vehicle were not able to evacuate, with devastating consequences. The city has since organised evacuation assistance, designating pickup locations across the town. These, however, are marked by small signs filled with long instructional text, hardly the type of site that is easily remembered or readily identifiable in the chaos of an evacuation. To solve this problem, Evacuteer, a volunteer organisation, asked artist Douglas Kornfeld to create a series of sculptures, 3.7 m (12 ft) metal figures that stand at the pickup locations. Regardless of whether people think they are beautiful or ugly, they are certainly memorable.

With world leaders like Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in town for the G8 summit, authorities in the Enniskillen area made a bold creative move to spruce up their parish, hard hit by the economic crisis. To give the impression of economic activity, boarded-up shops were plastered with large stickers depicting thriving, fully stocked stores, such as this butcher’s shop in Belcoo. Locals were outraged at the operation.

Whether it fooled the visitors is not recorded.

Photo: James Shaw, Evacuteer

Photo: Brian O’Brien, The Irish Times Limited

Empty painted bunkers near the seaside village of Qeparo on the Albanian Riviera.

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Valerie Hopkins is a Pristina-based freelance journalist who reports on Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. Dutch photographer David Galjaard’s images explore Albania’s bunkers as a reflection of a country transitioning from its isolationist past.

FROM BUNKERS TO BUSINESSES

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From Bunkers to Businesses

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Between 1973 and 1982 Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha built hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers intended to shelter his people in the event of an invasion. Thirty years after his death the bunkers still wait on the hilltops, along the beaches, in the fields and scattered throughout the cities of Albania.

Some of them are being put to new uses.

Petrol station on the outskirts of Tirana. The bunker was painted to look like an orange by

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985), the isolationist dictator who ruled Albania from 1944 until his death, was convinced that his country faced imminent invasion from its neighbours, from NATO or from the USSR. For Haki Isufi, this meant that from the age of 12 he underwent an hour of military training every day at school. By the time he was 14 he had already been given a Kalashnikov and been told to practise firing it from the embrasure of an eight-ton, steel-reinforced concrete bunker— easy to do, since there were two in his yard.

These two-person shelters belonged to an estimated 750,000 bunkers built by Hoxha’s regime. Construction began in 1967 and escalated dramatically in the late 1960s after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact

the prolific German graffiti artist Daniel Gjoka (aka ‘Orange’).

countries that had once been Albania’s allies.

The ubiquity of the bunkers meant that Isufi could defend against invaders from wherever he happened to be when disaster struck, from his school, backyard, or workplace. ‘It made me feel very safe at the time,’ he says.

No one knows exactly how many of these concrete pillboxes were constructed, but estimates range from 500,000 to 1,000,000. Most of them are small qendër zjarri, bunkers like Isufi’s. They stand 2.1 m (6.9 ft) high and consist of a cylindrical base 1.8 m (5.9 ft) in diameter with a domed roof featuring a narrow, horizontal embrasure.

Their 0.3 m (11.8 in) walls are further reinforced on the front-facing side by a semicircular outer wall and 0.6 m (23.6 in) of packed dirt. There are

The austere concrete structures represented Albania’s tradition of tough self-reliance: in the Second World War, it was the only country to liberate itself without direct foreign assistance.

From Bunkers to Businesses

Left: A two-person bunker nestled among the graves in this cemetery between Tirana and Mount Dajt in Central Albania.

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Top: Father and son on the road between the city of Fier and Seman beach, demolishing a bunker to sell its iron. ‘When I passed by a week later, they were still working’, says photographer David Galjaard. The smaller bunkers contain

also larger pikë zjarri bunkers, concrete domes 8 m (26.2 ft) wide and 5 m (16.4 ft) high, designed to protect up to ten occupants, whose 1 m (3.3 ft) walls were capable of defying continuous, close-range artillery fire. The general consensus, based on sparse military records, personal recollections and contemporary research, is that there were 24 to 27 qendër zjarri bunkers and one pikë zjarri bunker per square kilometre (0.4 mi.²), an expensive insurance policy against the foreign ‘imperialism and revisionism’ Hoxha feared. The bunkers dotted urban centres and bucolic hilltops, playgrounds and cemeteries, and of course schools and apartment complexes.

Ironically, although they were built to withstand intense bombardment in a ground

about 400 kg of iron that can be sold on the market for €0.15/kg (US$0.09/lb.) or about €60 (US$80) per bunker. Destroying bunkers is illegal but tolerated by authorities as long as explosives aren’t used.

invasion that never came, they are succumbing to the peacetime forces of economics, public safety and abhorrence of the past. Isufi says he sold the steel from one of his bunkers, which took a whole weekend to destroy, for €300 (US$400), more than the €260 (US$350) average monthly salary of an Albanian. Still, he kept the other bunker in his backyard as a house for his guard dog, and across the country others like him have repurposed them as chicken coops, hay storage, workshops and more, converting these relics of isolationism into a functional manifestation of the country’s embrace of capitalism.

In Golem, Kujtim Roci turned a beachside bunker into the core of a restaurant and hotel complex. In 1991, as communism collapsed, he

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A number of bigger beachside bunkers serve as restaurants and cafés, but it’s more common to find them used to house toilets, changing rooms and storage for small enterprises that rent beach umbrellas and chaises longues to tourists.

left his job as a plumber and began distilling raki, Albania’s national alcoholic beverage, in a pikë zjarri near his home. He requested permission from the Ministry of Defence to convert the bunker into a restaurant, the Elesio Grill, named for his son.

The bunker first served as a café and bar, with tables inside and outside. Now, Roci has built three storeys over the bunker, which continues to function as a wine cellar and storage area since its temperature remains consistently cool year-round. The top of its dome protrudes into the centre of the first-floor dining room, and Roci took a break from frying fish to show it off.

‘Tourists from all over Europe come to see this bunker,’ says Roci. ‘It has given me a good living.’

A few kilometres down the coast, Fatmir Kadziju is serving soft drinks to a group of high schoolers from neighbouring Kosovo. The concrete shape of his bunker/refreshment stand looms over their volleyball game, providing some shade. Unfortunately, he says, not all of his neighbours wanted to save these hulking vestiges of totalitarianism.

‘Seven bunkers just like this one were destroyed in this area,’ says Kadziju. ‘That is a real shame; we need to keep these for history.’

In Hoxha’s birthplace Gjirokastër, one of two ‘historical cities’ the dictator sought to preserve in their pre-First World War Ottoman style, a bunker at the base of a cliff has been converted into Pub Elnis, complete with black pleather sofas and the requisite dim lighting.

A younger generation sees them as a boon for boosting tourism. Conceptual design artists Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti have created Concrete Mushrooms, an open-source manual for re-purposing bunkers into businesses that was launched at the 2012 Venice Biennale.

‘Bunkers are an essential part of Albanian identity,’ says Stefa, who was born in the resort town of Vlore, and played in its beachside bunkers as a child before moving to Italy after the Albanian economy collapsed in the mid-nineties.

‘They represent 45 years of communism that changed this country in so many ways. They might be a scar, but a scar is just a good story to tell.’ He worries that the country is not

From Bunkers to Businesses

While the majority of the bunkers continue to stand empty, some have been repurposed.

This one at picturesque Seman beach is now a fast-food restaurant. Other bunkers have

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been creatively converted into cafĂŠs, kiosks, ice cream stands, mushroom and flower farms, hostels and beach huts.

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undertaking a comprehensive plan to preserve at least some bunkers, and suggests that some areas preserve the original area density of bunkers for posterity.

Stefa and Mydyti, an ethnic Albanian from Prizren, Kosovo, say their goal is to convert a symbol of burdensome xenophobia into a resource for hospitality, while promoting sustainable eco-tourism. Their handbook provides detailed instructions in English and Albanian for converting bunkers into campsites, kiosks or cafés depending on their size and location and then provides guidance on working with the local authorities to realise the plan.

One suggested alteration would turn a bunker into a sleeping pod with an investment of just

WTW #3

€150 (US$200). The pair also provide blueprints for the transformation of entire stretches of beach. They have even identified a number of potentially lucrative, bunker-rich sites, based on location, proximity to tourist attractions, beaches and hiking trails.

Stefa is part of a generation of Albanians educated abroad who are just now returning to a changed Tirana—and who don’t see the bunkers as negative. ‘For me as a child it was just a bunker,’ he says. ‘It was like any other big rock.

Why would I be curious about what a rock was doing in a given place?’ He only grew interested when hosting non-Albanian friends who were awed by the bunkers’ novelty. He is among a group of young urbanites striving to save the

All of the bunkers are technically property of the Albanian Ministry of Defence, and technically businesspeople must apply for ownership, but in the freewheeling 1990s, monitoring bunker use —or enforcing laws against their destruction— was not a top government priority.

Metal mould of a qendër zjarri (‘firing position’) bunker, the smaller, more common model, in a former bunker factory in Gjirokastër. The small, concrete, igloo-shaped domes with a firing slit

were prefabricated and transported to their final positions, where they were assembled. Military engineer Josif Zagali is credited as the designer of the qendër zjarri model.

Along the country’s northern border with the former Yugoslav country of Montenegro, tattoo artist Keq Marku Djetroshan uses a pikÍ zjarri as his tattoo parlour.

From Bunkers to Businesses

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Hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers dot the Albanian countryside and adorn its city streets. Never used for civil defence, today they are being repurposed in surprising ways.

bunkers, not only as an object of memory, but to foster a nuanced sense of humour about the tortured past.

Though Albanians are divided on the question of whether such a potent symbol of totalitarianism can be converted into something good, at least some among the trendsetting post-Hoxha generation want to celebrate the bunkers—literally.

Zhujeta Cima founded Bunkerfest in 2010 to ‘spread the love’ for bunkers and turn a spotlight on them for a weekend of camping, music and fun. Bunkerfest 2011 and 2012 featured dance parties inside actual bunkers, but those bunkers were destroyed, so Bunkerfest 2013 was held amidst the bunkers on Mount Dajt, 26 km (16.2 mi.) east of Tirana, drawing bands, DJs and festivalgoers even from former Yugoslavia, one of Hoxha’s chief enemies.

‘The bunkers were built for military protection; they were supposed to be used for making war,’ says Cima, smiling as she remembers that she and many of her friends had their first kisses in bunkers. ‘Now we are trying to use them to spread love through art. Instead of destroying them or leaving them behind to disappear, why not convert the shabby side of the story into something positive?’

Bunkers served as both inspiration and material for artist Niku Alex Mucaj’s ‘Converscene’, a permanent, functional open-air stage he built on three inverted qendër zjarri roofs as part

of his postgraduate work in post-industrial design. Turning the bunkers upside down, says Mucaj, is a physical symbol of transformation, one that he says his society must go through as well. ‘I wanted to transform the bunkers, one of the most prevalent symbols of isolation, into something that would play a role in Albania’s slow process of democratisation, something that would function like a Greek agora.’

Mucaj added a small detail to his stage that symbolises Albania’s as yet unresolved postbunker future: four slim pieces of rebar installed in each corner of the stage. He explains that it looks familiar to anyone who has driven around Albania and seen that many homes remain unfinished, with rebar poking out of the top.

‘When they build homes, lots of Albanians make space for a third and fourth floor, a plan for when their children have families of their own,’ he explains. ‘The beams here represent my hope for the country’s future, its continued (re)construction, just as a family plans for extra space.’

At present it is impossible to say how many of these relics of the former regime will find new uses and how many will be destroyed. Isufi says that his remaining bunker will remain for as long as he lives in his home. He is content that his dog can sleep inside it and guard his property from its roof during the day.

‘You never know what could happen,’ he says.

‘I’ve seen a lot of changes in my lifetime.’ ☐

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ULTIMATE BACKUP

Deep in the Arctic, some 1,300 km (ca. 800 mi.) from the North Pole, lies the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Built by the Norwegian government and operated by the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre and the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the vault is part of

an ongoing project to protect vital crop seeds from all over the world in the face of increasing threats to the earth’s biodiversity. Svalbard provides its services free of charge, backing up collections stored in national and institutional seed banks all over the world. Photo: Cary Fowler

The tectonically stable sandstone of Spitsbergen provides an ideal location for the vault, high enough above sea level to escape flooding, deep enough in the mountain permafrost to provide natural refrigeration in the event of

a power failure. Here, seeds from most major food crops can be preserved for hundreds of years, while some seeds, including those of critical grains, could possibly survive millennia. Photo: Mark Smithgall

Half a world away in Peru, the original source of all the world’s potatoes, indigenous farmers are collecting varieties that have been cultivated as food crops for 8,000 years. Although the Andes are home to nearly 3,800 potato varieties—the vast majority of them unknown outside of the region—today that diversity is threatened by shifting market forces,

changing climate conditions and increasing risk of pests and disease.

To ensure their biocultural heritage, the Andean communities have stored samples of their richly diverse potato lines in the International Potato Centre’s genebank, which is backed up at Svalbard. Photo: Asociación ANDES

Top: One hundred and twenty metres deep in the heart of an icy mountain, the ‘doomsday vault’ is one of the safest structures in the world, designed to withstand a wide range of disasters including asteroid strikes, dramatic climate change, or even nuclear war, offering humanity a chance to restart the growth of food crops that might otherwise be lost. The facility has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples, three times the number of distinct seed types thought to exist. Each sample consists of about 500 seeds, making the total capacity of the vault approximately 2.25 billion seeds. There is no permanent staff at the seed bank, but it is continuously monitored using electronic surveillance.

Bottom: Inside these containers, the seeds are stored in sealed four-ply envelopes. The storage rooms are kept at −18°C (0°F). The low temperature and oxygen-poor environment slow seed ageing dramatically, preserving the seeds’ viability for extended periods. Even so, the seeds have a finite shelf life, so seeds are periodically planted to produce a crop which yields a new batch of seeds for storage. With luck, this cycle will make it possible to re-establish crops obliterated by major disasters or man-made catastrophes, should the need arise. Photos: Mari Tefre/GCDT

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Shagun Singh is a New York-based activist and writer who examines alternate trajectories of growth and development beyond those accepted in the developed world, especially in her native India. Harsha Vadlamani is an Indian documentary photographer who travelled to Tamil Nadu to photograph women entrepreneurs for WTW.

PADS FOR POTATOES Only a small percentage of menstruating women in India can afford to use sanitary pads.

Arunachalam Muruganantham was determined

to find an affordable, hygienic solution to this problem. These extra-large maternity pads (above), produced by a small, woman-operated

business using Muruganantham’s manufacturing process, are bigger and cheaper than commercially marketed products.

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Like the majority of rural Indian women, Arunachalam Muruganantham’s wife could not afford to buy sanitary napkins. Her husband’s attempt to make them at home grew into a quest that would consume more than six years of his life, bringing him into conflict with his culture, his community and his own family. Persistence, ingenuity and trial-and-error paid off in the end.

Arunachalam Muruganantham, the son of a weaver in a small village in Tamil Nadu, is probably the first man ever to wear a sanitary napkin.

When he discovered that his wife Shanti had been using rags instead of sanitary pads during her menses so that she could save money to buy milk, he decided to buy her a box of pads as a gift.

Little did he suspect that he was setting off on a complicated and arduous journey. On the way, he would sell everything he owned, be rejected and abandoned by his wife and mother, and face exile from his village. In the end, however, he would also revolutionise the sanitary pad market in India, making improved feminine hygiene a reality for countless rural women and even giving some of them a chance at financial independence.

According to a 2010 survey conducted by AC Nielsen and NGO Plan India, only 12% of the 355 million menstruating women in India use sanitary napkins. Usage is even lower, around 5%, among rural women, who use tree leaves, sawdust, newspaper, ashes and even sand, leading to increases in urinary tract infections,

pregnancy-related complications, congenital infections and cervical cancer. During menstruation women are traditionally forbidden to enter kitchens and temples, and menstruation is also part of the reason that 23% of India’s girls drop out of school upon reaching adolescence.

Taboos concerning menstruation are so strong that women hardly speak of it even among themselves, much less with men. A 2012 survey by the Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council found that 90% of Indian girls are caught unprepared for their first menses, never having been told about it even by their mothers.

This is the cultural environment in which Muruganantham unwrapped a sanitary pad one day, curious to see what it was made of. Finding an absorbent pad wrapped in cloth, he decided to try to make one himself using materials from the local textile mills: cotton and the non-woven interfacing used to stiffen shirt collars and cuffs.

He gave it to Shanti to try. She didn’t like it. She went back to her rags.

Undaunted, Muruganantham continued to experiment with cotton from Mumbai and even

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Just 12% of all menstruating women in India use sanitary napkins, a statistic that is the result of deep-rooted social and economic factors. Menstruation taboos impact not only on women’s health, but also on their opportunities for education and employment.

Switzerland, searching for the right materials, the right construction. But product testing, which could only be carried out a few days per month, was frustratingly slow. He recruited his sisters to help with the project, but perhaps because of the social stigma, their feedback lacked detail and was of limited value.

One of his acquaintances had a daughter who was studying medicine, which inspired him to ask medical students to participate in his project. Even these future doctors, however, were hesitant to discuss menstrual issues with a stranger. He tried using a written questionnaire so that they could provide feedback without the awkwardness of face-to-face interaction, but soon discovered that although the women were sympathetic to his cause and his efforts, so many of them were uncomfortable with the topic that a few women were filling out the questionnaire for all the others, rendering the data unusable.

At this point Muruganantham came to a momentous decision: he would try the sanitary pads himself. He took the inside of an old

football, filled it with animal blood and wore it throughout the day to see how effectively his pads absorbed the blood. Although he developed a new respect for the discomfort women endure every month, this new development upset his wife so much that she filed for divorce and fled to her parents’ home, convinced that his research was only a pretext to get close to the medical school girls.

One day Muruganantham saw a stray dog pulling a used sanitary pad out of the community rubbish bin. Suddenly he realised that he could collect used pads and perform his own analyses instead of relying on potentially falsified questionnaires. Returning to the medical school, he gave the students a bin where they could dispose of the napkins. Encouraged by the anonymity of the process, the women agreed.

Muruganantham, however, secretly colourcoded the pads, which enabled him to sort the data by participant. Still, the procedure was not easy. He would collect the napkins and spread them on a table to dry overnight, giving the odour time to dissipate. In the morning he would

Pads for Potatoes

Women working for Sumathi (like many Tamils, Sumathi has only one name) process raw cotton

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fibre and divide it into 12 g (0.4 oz) pieces. A press compacts and shapes the cotton, which

inspect them, comparing his products to the commercially manufactured ones.

Unfortunately, Muruganantham’s mother found the objects of his research spread out on the table. Although she had stayed by his side when his wife left him, now she too moved out, convinced that he had gone mad. Other villagers believed that he had been possessed by an evil spirit. The village elders gave him a choice: either he would be tied to the holy tree of the village for a week so that it could absorb his bad energy, or else he would be banished. Muruganantham decided to move out, finding lodging with five other people in a small room. At this point, he had been working on his sanitary pad project for nearly two and a half years. It would be another four and a half years before he finally succeeded.

The problem, as he had realised, was that his pads contained cotton, whereas the name-brand pads used pine cellulose, a material far more absorbent as well as far more expensive to manufacture. International corporations like Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson could afford multimillion-dollar plants to manufacture their

is then glued to a paper backing, rolled up, and sealed in a layer of fine, cloth-like material.

cellulose padding, but Muruganantham needed to be able to produce an effective absorbent at an affordable price. Years of experimentation finally yielded a high-quality cotton product, but that was only the first part of his project.

The original idea, after all, was not only to develop an effective sanitary pad, but to make it accessible to women like Shanti, women living in rural areas where lower incomes and powerful taboos prevailed. He remembered his mother, a farm worker and a single woman who had raised him and his sisters on her own. He understood that his invention could make it possible for women to manufacture and distribute sanitary napkins themselves, a business model with enormous potential, since women would be far more comfortable hearing about and buying sanitary pads from other women.

Sumathi, a resident of Namakkal, was working in a library when she saw an advertisement for Muruganantham’s machine. She took out a bank loan for ₹400,000 (around €4,800 or US$6,500) to start her business in an abandoned house. Now, two years later, she and her

Muruganantham revels in the fact that companies like Procter & Gamble cannot barter their pads for potatoes.

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full-time staff of seven women can produce about 500 of her Breeze Napkins on an average day (when the electricity works for about five hours), nearly twice that number if the electricity works all day. Including overheads, each pad costs ₹1.0–1.5 (around €0.01) to manufacture and can be sold for ₹1.5–2.0 (around €0.02), a considerable profit even at prices markedly lower than those of the name-brand competition. Sumathi says that running her own business has increased her self-confidence and that it gives her great satisfaction to be able to offer steady work to her employees and a useful, highquality product to other women.

The pricing strategy is as superbly adapted to local conditions as the production and distribution model. Unlike name-brand sanitary pads, which generally have to be bought in packages of at least eight, Breeze Napkins can be purchased individually. They can also be paid for in instalments or bartered for vegetables, Sumathi (left) started her business after seeing an advertisement for Muruganantham’s machine. Now she employs a full-time staff of

giving entrepreneurs like Sumathi a tremendous advantage over the multinationals in rural markets.

Sumathi reports that a lot of women are manufacturing pads in every district of Tamil Nadu, and Muruganantham himself states that he has provided over 700 machines to women in more than 23 villages. His vision has expanded to include creating one million jobs for rural Indian women, as well as breaking into similar markets in Bangladesh, Nepal and Africa.

One way to summarise this whole project might be to cite the 2009 President’s Award that Muruganantham received for Best Product Innovation for a Social Cause. Muruganantham himself sums up his experience with the words: ‘I see a problem in society, I address it with my knowledge, I make a solution, and I convert it into a small business model. Then my life becomes purposeful, and that makes me happy.’ ☐

seven women, producing 500 to 1,000 sanitary napkins a day. Muruganantham's company Jayashree Industries markets and sells the

napkin machines to Indian women in areas where employment opportunities for women like Amuda Nataraj (top) are otherwise rare.

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PARADISE REPURPOSED

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Rotterdam’s Tropicana water park, once full of lush vegetation, heated whirlpools and happy families, now stands empty and abandoned. Humans deemed it too difficult to repurpose, but nature is not so easily frustrated.

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Marleen Sleeuwits is a photographer based in The Hague who researches what she calls ‘sick buildings’. Anne Miltenburg tells the story of their visit to Tropicana.

‘It kind of looks like a giant greenhouse,’ thought Siemen Cox one day when he drove past the glass dome of the abandoned Tropicana water park that sits in the centre of Rotterdam on the edge of the River Maas. When he got home, he picked up the phone and called the organisation that was keeping an eye on the place. ‘I have a proposal,’ Cox said.

Meant to be a subtropical swimming paradise, Tropicana was built in the 1980s to accommodate people looking for a one-day spa and swimming experience, but the novelty quickly wore off, and a steady decline turned into bankruptcy in 2012. The building, with its tiled floors, empty

pools, and faux-rock-formation walls, was a difficult if not impossible candidate for re-development. When Cox entered it for the first time, it had stood abandoned for only two years, but already it resembled the stuff of post-apocalyptic movies with weeds growing from the rusty ceiling and dead pigeons at the bottom of the empty Jacuzzis. Cox quickly realised that it was Tropicana’s basement that would best suit his needs. That same week, he got the key to the building and started growing edible mushrooms in the darkness below.

Paradise Repurposed

From the light-filled glass dome, visitors descend through pink-lined hallways that used to house beauticians’ offices, into the bowels of Tropicana, where the machinery that kept the whirlpools churning now sits silent. Cox has repurposed what material was left behind after Tropicana’s demise: clothes racks now serve to dry his work gloves, and hundreds of brown clothes hangers have been cut down to hold something else entirely.

In a former changing room, rows of oyster mushrooms hang suspended from former clothing racks. They grow on oblong sacks filled with a soil of pasteurised straw and coffee collected from local espresso bars.

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Hanging in the warm, dark, moist room, the sacks resemble giant salamis.

Up close, the lightly salmon-coloured oyster mushrooms appear too delicate to touch as they sprout from the soil in stacked clusters. But Cox has developed a knack for harvesting the mushrooms from the rolls delicately but resolutely with one quick twist. ☐

Volunteers prepare the snow for ski slopes at the Sochi Olympic Centre in Rosa Khutor. Sochi lies in the subtropic zone and is one of the few places in Russia that doesn’t have snow in the winter, a factor which helped to make the Sochi Winter Olympics the most expensive ever to

be organised. Higher up in the Caucasus the organisers have been keeping 450,000 m3 of snow in temperature-controlled storage since 2012 to ensure that there will be enough for the 2014 games. Photo: Maria Plotnikova

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Rob Boffard is a South African journalist writing about hip-hop music, new technology and other strange concepts. He considers snowboarding to be second in importance only to breathing.

THE MEN WHO BUILD MOUNTAINS

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Building a ski slope in China involves an additional challenge—how do you build slopes for customers when the majority of them have never skied before? ‘Chinese clients take us to the steepest, ugliest, most brutal mountain they can find and say, “Here, this must be a ski area”,’

says Mathews. The Changbaishan Mountains, on the border of Korea and China, posed just this problem. Ecosign compensated by designing a very large ‘apron’, a smooth, wide gentle slope perfect for anyone still finding their ski legs.

Working Karusel Gornaya in RussiaSki presents Resort in anKrasnaya interesting Polyana, Sochi. Working problem: mapping. in Russia Although presents detailed an interesting inforproblem: mation was mapping. absolutely Although essential detailed to designing informationOlympic the was absolutely slopes, essential Russia’s notoriously to for designing the Olympic secretive government slopes, Russia’s was none notoriously too eager to

share images secretive government and data—particularly was none too eager not with to a share images Canadian company and data like— Ecosign. particularly ‘It’s anot hangover with a Canadian from the Cold company War,’ says like Ecosign.

Mathews.

‘It’s ‘The a hangover military from the the controls Cold maps, War,’and saysit’s Mathews. still a very ‘The sensitive military controls thing.

Wethe can’t maps, get and maps—we it’s stillget a very them sensitive made

using US thing.

Wesatellites, can’t get maps which— have we get perfect them data, made using frankly.’ quite US satellites, Photowhich courtesy have ofperfect Sochi 2014 data, quite frankly.’

Winter Games.

Photo courtesy of Sochi 2014 Winter Games.

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Mountains are often used as a symbol of the unshakeable, immutable and eternal. And yet, creating ideal conditions for winter sports often requires reshaping tonnes of soil, rock and vegetation to achieve the best possible compromise between the needs of resorts, residents and ecosystems that share the mountains.

Paul Mathews needs a lot of machines to do his job. He needs satellites, helicopters, excavators and bulldozers. He needs GPS units and smartphones and huge fleets of trucks. But when he sits down at his desk in Whistler, British Columbia, the most valuable tool he has is a piece of thin, translucent onionskin paper. With it, he can build mountains.

Mathews is the president of Ecosign, one of the few companies that specialise in crafting ski runs as well as the facilities found at their feet. Working by hand, he can lay this paper over mountain maps, sketching out the lines of what will eventually become a complete set of superbly skiable pistes.

‘The design work is still manual; there’s no computer that’ll do it,’ says Mathews, a gruff mountain man and longtime Whistler resident who grew up in a skiing family in Colorado. ‘[The paper] lays over these different maps so we can switch from one to the other. Design is a unique thing; it’s in the head of the person that’s dreaming up something. The computers just give us the background tools.’

The process of designing a ski run takes time, effort and an immense amount of money.

The design of a resort alone can cost well over US$1 million before construction even begins.

Nevertheless, at a time when China and the former Soviet bloc countries are willing to spend millions of dollars on new slopes, it’s a skill which is in high demand. Mathews and his team recently worked on the slopes for the 2014

Winter Olympics in Russia, turning the Western Caucasus mountains surrounding the town of Sochi into a skiable playground, one which will continue to draw crowds long after the games are over.

So how do they take an untouched mountain and make it skiable?

It begins with mapping. Slope designers start from up high, taking satellite photographs of up to 28,000 km² (10,800 mi.²) of mountain range.

‘Highly accurate mapping is a very important tool for us to use,’ says Peter Williams, Senior Mountain Planner at SE Group, a company which is perhaps Ecosign’s biggest competitor and which has pioneered much of the science since its founding in the 1950s. ‘You need to spend the money to get maps with pretty small contour intervals.’ That information enables them to calculate levels of solar radiation for each part of the terrain and find areas with just the right slope and exposure to produce dry, powdery, perfect snow.

Having identified stretches with optimal snow conditions, the designers need to narrow their selection down to the ones that are actually skiable. Some will be too steep or too flat. Others will have streams, rock-piles, heavy vegetation or other obstacles. ‘Pretty soon,’ Mathews says, ‘you have this big area that has a lot of places you can’t go.’

Useable slopes are then colour-coded according to the challenges they’ll present to skiers, and a final selection is made to achieve a

The Men Who Build Mountains

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carefully balanced resort: too many steep, tricky slopes will turn away the novices, but too many beginner-friendly runs will bore the pros. And of course the slopes have to connect, converging on places where ski-lifts can be installed. ‘You figure out the best places to lay in the lifts,’ says Williams. ‘You have to make sure the circulation works so you can get from one part of the mountain to the other easily.’

Of course, not all decisions can be made at the drawing board; slope designers need to get out on the ground. Teams head out on snowmobiles or in helicopters, working in summer as well as winter to get a good feel for the terrain. ‘When I started,’ says Mathews, ‘I took a compass and a chronometer and a measuring chain and had to survey my way through the wilderness! Today, it’s a lot easier—the young guys in the office have it made.’

It’s dangerous work. Designers often have to work in raw terrain where the snowpack is loose and deadly avalanches can cascade down the mountainside. In 1988, Mathews was up on Mount Odlum in the Canadian Rockies, doing work for the Calgary Winter Olympics.

He and a colleague flew up in a French-made AStar helicopter, and as they were circling the mountaintop, it became clear that the chopper was far too heavy. Mathews told the pilot to put Top: In 2000, Paul Mathews was in a private jet above the Caucasus Mountain Range in Russia when he looked out of the window and saw skiing heaven. With bodyguards watching their

them down in the snow and wait for them. The pilot didn’t listen.

‘No sooner were we out of the machine, and it was up in the air about 80 m (260 ft),’ Mathews recalls, ‘I heard the stall horn go off, and it spiralled down like a hammer. It crashed 30 m (100 ft) away from us and broke the fuselage in two. They found later that it was overweight, and the pilot wasn’t good in the mountains at all.’

Still, with a little luck, after six months of collecting data and drawing maps, the onionskin paper is full of skiable lines. Now for the tricky part: building the slopes themselves. It’s a process that can take years.

There’s an almost zen quality to it, because while great snow is the end goal, it’s not the most important factor. Resorts can make snow (and most of them do, festooning their slopes with snow cannons), but they can’t create good terrain. They can only find terrain that works and make it better, and good slope designers need to know as much about botany as they do about navigating a black diamond run.

Grass is good. It has a wide root area and lets the soil moisture tension get high enough to prevent trees from taking root. Where possible, designers will plant grass seed, relying on huge excavators which trundle up the mountain to dig up the soil. Any trees that need clearing

backs in the dangerous region, Mathews and his team went on foot and by helicopter to assess the terrain. Over the next ten years, the slopes around the town of Sochi would grow from a

commercial ski resort into the new home of the 2014 Winter Olympics, with courses for crosscountry and downhill skiing. Photo courtesy of Sochi 2014 Winter Games.

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‘The ecological impact they have varies a lot,’ says environmentalist Gavin Feiger. ‘The biggest factors are the timing of the construction, the type of habitat they’re altering, and the amount.

If they go in and clearcut out some new runs, and they’re doing that in the autumn, it’s not going to be as big an effect because there won’t be as much run-off or erosion. If you do it in the spring, as soon as things thaw out you get your erosion.’

get cut flush, and the wood is lifted away by helicopter or pulled down the mountain on cables. Some obstacles resist even the big earth moving machines, Mathews says, and require more extreme measures: ‘Sometimes we have to blow up some rocky stuff that gives us problems, then put soil down over it and then get the grass re-established on it. If you get all that work done by autumn, then the following spring when the snow melts it puts water in the soil, and you don’t need to touch it. By June beautiful, brightgreen grass is springing up.’

Every so often, perhaps surprisingly seldom, teams will need to go below the surface to modify the terrain itself. Topsoil is stripped with an excavator and stockpiled until the ground below is sloped correctly. The topsoil is replaced, and seed and hay mulch are spread to establish the grass again. ‘We can change the angle of the slope to a relatively minor degree,’ says Williams.

‘You’re not going to go in and make some massive changes to it […] You can grade out ridges

and make them wide enough for skiing. But it gets very expensive very quickly.’

Good ski slopes don’t come cheaply, to be sure. Tens of millions of dollars can be spent on a single resort, and since the number of new resorts being built is dwindling, the competition is fierce. Both SE Group and Ecosign have expanded into Asia and Eastern Europe, helping develop mountains in China as well as in places such as Bulgaria, Kazakhstan and the already mentioned Sochi. There’s no question that some of the biggest challenges in building a new set of slopes come from man, rather than nature, as governments and corporate bureaucracies cover mountains in red tape.

There are ecological questions too. Big ones. Mountains are complex ecosystems, and ski slope designers often come under fire for what they do. When Ecosign went to Almaty in Kazakhstan to work in mountains that shared space with a national park, they faced anger from residents. Increased air pollution and

The Men Who Build Mountains

With over 200 runs and 3,307 ha (8,171 acres) of skiable area, Whistler Blackcomb is the largest ski resort in North America. Mathews, a long-time Whistler resident, took on Blackcomb

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as one of his earliest projects back in the 1970s.

Ecosign also designed the Whistler Olympic Park for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. ‘The site for the Olympic park was pure virgin territory.

the endangerment of wildlife were the main concerns, and some campaigners claimed that the development would harm the habitats of an extremely rare snow leopard.

Mathews is dismissive, claiming that designers rarely use more than 5% of a mountain’s total land area. ‘The Greens are very suspicious of our work,’ he says. ‘We’ve been criticised in Kazakhstan and Switzerland and Canada for even wanting to go into the mountains. Some people would like to lock the mountains up.’

Of course the less the mountain is altered, the better it is for everyone: the environmental groups, the slope builders and the people footing the bill. Says Williams, ‘We try not to change the physical character of the mountain too much.

It creates a much better ski product if you have something natural, with open bowls and open tree stands, and which you don’t have to do too much grading on. It creates a much more interesting ski experience.’ Both Mathews and Williams stress the need for variety and natural

There was nothing there. We personally went out and flagged all the trees that we wanted to save,’ said Mathews about reducing the footprint of the park. Photo: Randy Lincks

features on their runs, and skiers and snowboarders praise the final results. David Benedek, a former professional snowboarder and author of the gigantic book Current State: Snowboarding, says that diverse terrain is key. ‘You need to have pitches and turns to keep it interesting. It has to change constantly. You need a run that […] can work in things like jumps where necessary.’

Eventually, when the earth movers are back in their garages, and the onionskin paper is stowed away, the designers actually get a chance to ski their creations. ‘I get two things out of that,’ says Mathews. ‘One is my own enjoyment of skiing the slopes and, really, checking the work of all my guys. Two is riding the lift and skiing beside the new customers there and seeing their enjoyment. That’s the real payback. Seeing people flocking to the area with smiles on their faces was very rewarding.’ ☐

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Tim Maly, a writer in Toronto, writes about cyborgs, architecture, and our weird distant future.

A MESSAGE TO THE FUTURE

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In the roughly 70 years since humans first split the atom, we have accumulated between 250,000 and 300,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste that will remain radioactive for at least 100,000 years. Designing a stable, secure repository for these materials is only half the battle: the other half is to design a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign that will remain intelligible for a period several times longer than the lifespan of any recorded civilisation.

This is a design brief for the ages.

Every year, tons of lethally radioactive material are added to the world’s nuclear waste storage facilities, mostly surface-level installations where waste is stored in cooled water tanks that shield the environment from the deadly radiation. This is clearly not a long-term solution, as any resident of Fukushima can attest. These installations are vulnerable to any number of threats such as earthquakes, fires, power outages and terrorist acts, but most importantly, the lifetime of these facilities is measurable in decades, whereas the lifetime of the radiation hazard is measurable in millennia.

Left: A commercial low-level waste site in operation since 1965 in Hanford, Washington, which uses conventional shallow-land burial of pack-

At present, burying the waste in the most geologically stable locations available seems to be the only viable long-term solution. All over the world, projects of this type are in various stages of planning and preparation as the first generation of storage facilities is starting to fail. These new sites are intended to hold spent nuclear fuel and other castoffs of the atomic age indefinitely (regulations vary by country, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000 years), requiring no maintenance or supervision once they are completed and sealed. The biggest threat to their integrity will be future human interference.

This, then, is the brief: prevent the inadvertent intrusion by humans into these deadly tombs for at least ten millennia.

aged waste in unlined trenches. This site, which stores waste such as refuse, clothing, tools, hardware and equipment that have been

contaminated by radioactive substances, is scheduled to close by 2056. Photo courtesy of US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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Dry cask steel cylinders at Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California. This is a storage method for high-level radioactive waste, usually spent nuclear fuel that has already been cooled in a

During the relatively brief existence of our nuclear power industry we have generated tens of thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that will remain lethal for hundreds of generations to come.

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fuel pool for at least one year. Dry cask cylinders are stored in a concrete vault that provides radiation shielding, a thirty to one-hundred-year interim solution intended to give the US time to

develop and build a long-term storage facility.

Photo courtesy of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

To consider this problem is to come face to face with the frailty of human civilisation.

Ten thousand years is approximately twice the length of recorded human history. No human structure has ever lasted that long, and no civilisation stretches back even half that length.

The Great Pyramid, the last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the World, stands denuded and emptied, a shell of its intended self and not yet 5,000 years old. The countries now engaged in nuclear industry all have lifetimes measured in mere centuries.

It is also to confront the question of how human history will unfold over the next ten millennia, how to communicate with the essentially foreign civilisations of the distant future. In Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a 1984 report prepared by Sandia Laboratories for the American Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, researchers proposed three broad scenarios for the future development of technology: 1) a steady increase from today’s level, 2) a steady

A Message to the Future

The Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, currently under construction 5 km (3.1 mi.) from Finland’s Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant, will be the world’s first facility for the final disposal of

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spent nuclear fuel, storing radioactive waste at depths of 400–450 m (1,312–1,476 ft). It is scheduled to begin operations in 2020, and should reach capacity by 2120, at which point

decline from today’s level, and 3) a fluctuating ‘seesaw’ pattern of advancement and collapse.

The third scenario is the most troublesome, since a steady increase in technology would presumably imply a steadily increasing ability to detect and handle the dangers of radioactivity, and a steady decline would mean a loss of the ability to locate and release the waste at all. A seesaw pattern, however, would mean a periodic return to the technical competency required to find and excavate the site, with the high probability of a cultural discontinuity severe enough to leave future diggers ignorant of the dangers involved.

Radioactivity is problematic in that humans have no natural ability to detect it; it cannot be seen, heard or touched. In large doses it kills immediately. In smaller doses it still kills, but over time, making it difficult to recognise the link between the illness and its source. Hence the necessity of a system to communicate the danger to future generations. This warning system must be durable enough to reach future civilisations,

the storage chambers will be encapsulated, and the access tunnel backfilled and sealed. The repository is designed to keep the waste secure for 100,000 years. Image courtesy of Posiva Oy.

intelligible enough to be understood by them, and credible enough to be taken seriously. After all, the danger that the system must communicate (a deadly, invisible power of tremendous longevity) sounds much like an ancient curse put on a tomb, and contemporary humans have a history of disregarding ancient curses. The Indiana Jones franchise, to name just one example, celebrates adventurers who blithely ignore the warnings of their forebears, defeat all of their security measures and thus unearth deadly weapons of mass destruction.

Would it not be better simply to leave the sites entirely unmarked? After all, the ancient tombs that have survived intact the longest are the ones that have remained hidden the longest.

But isolation and secrecy only work to a point, and when they fail, they fail completely. In 2011, satellite imagery of Egypt revealed 17 lost pyramids and thousands of tombs. They are now, of course, targets for excavation. Furthermore, many sites like New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) are in regions where active

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Proposed in 1987, the Yucca Mountain (Nevada), nuclear waste repository was to be a deep geological repository storage facility for spent reactor fuel and other high-level radioactive

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waste. It never went into operation, and President Obama cancelled the project in 2011, fulfilling an election promise to Nevadans.

There is currently no permanent home for the

drilling for oil or other resources is ongoing and likely to continue for at least a few more centuries. In any case, such installations are too massive to conceal permanently. Secrecy is not an option, so a message to the future must be prepared.

The late linguist and semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok and other researchers, observing that many of the longest living human institutions are religions, proposed creating an atomic priesthood. An artificially constructed folklore of rituals and legends would discourage ‘lay people’ from disturbing the repositories, while an elite council would be charged with guarding the true knowledge and history of the sites in much the same way that the Catholic Church has preserved and transmitted its message over millennia.

Religions, however, change over time. Far more religions have perished than exist today, and the ones that do exist would be unrecognisable to their founders, having gone through countless heresies, schisms and reformations.

spent nuclear fuel stored at 121 different sites around the US. Photo courtesy of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Will future archaeologists look at the warning systems at nuclear waste repositories in much the same way as present archaeologists look at the curses inscribed on tombs full of artefacts?

A Message to the Future

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) 42 km (26 mi.) east of Carlsbad, New Mexico is currently the only active deep geological repository for permanent disposal of radioactive waste.

The WIPP facility stores only transuranic waste generated by nuclear weapons research and

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production. Even so, these materials are expected to remain lethally radioactive for approximately 24,000 years. The facility contains a total of 56 storage rooms located approximately 650 m (2,133 ft) underground in thick salt formations. The plant is projected to

Also, few remaining religions are still centred on the geographic location of their founding, which is a serious problem since the intent of this endeavour is to protect a particular place.

And even if the stability of the religion could be ensured, there are ethical questions raised by intentionally setting up such an institution and committing future generations to living with the potential of political and social repression, or even holy war.

More decentralised mechanisms that would avoid these sensitive issues have been proposed by semioticians Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri. Rather than seeking to mark the sites themselves, they suggest establishing a cultural understanding that the sites exist and are dangerous, and then breeding artificial warning plants and animals. These animals (Bastide and Fabbri recommend cats for their long history of coexistence with human civilisation) would carry information about the sites encoded in their DNA, or change colour in the presence of radioactivity, thus acting as living Geiger

continue accepting waste for 25 to 35 years, after which it will be permanently sealed. Over time, geological pressure will force salt into the empty spaces in and around the repository, completely isolating it from the surrounding earth. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

counters. Furthermore, these ‘radiation cats’ would be self-propagating, carrying their message into the future. Leaving aside the question of whether breeding such warning animals is possible, however, such attempts to shape future behaviour through myth may fare no better than the ancient curses on the tombs. Just as many people today do not believe that a black cat signifies bad luck, the people of the future may not believe that a cat that changes colour signifies an invisible danger.

Still others have proposed artefacts that operate from beyond the range of human interference. German physicist and author Philipp Sonntag has suggested constructing an artificial moon engraved with messages or equipped with some other means of communication. It could hang in the sky, plainly visible to scientists and codebreakers while out of the reach of vandals and treasure hunters.

Creating an artificial moon that will last 10,000 years, however, presents a whole new set of problems. At present, satellites rely on

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The methods proposed by the Human Interference Task Force ranged from the starkly physical to the utterly fantastical, including pieces that would not look out of place in a contemporary art installation and ideas seemingly pulled from the realms of science fiction and fairy tales.

fuel to keep themselves in orbit; when the fuel runs out they fall to earth or become wandering hazards in the space lanes. Vanguard 1, the oldest artificial satellite still in orbit, is only 56 years old, and though it was originally expected to remain in space for up to 2,000 years, current projections estimate its total lifespan to be a mere 240 years. Furthermore, this approach compounds the problem of designing a message that will be sufficiently intelligible to distant generations, adding the necessity of making it sufficiently intelligible from space.

Thus far, the best solution that researchers have arrived at is a system of durable, redundant markers that communicate the location of nuclear waste as unambiguously as possible. In effect this means building a monument designed to withstand the forces that have seen every other ancient monument on earth stripped and left to decay.

The authors of the Sandia report suggest that such a monument must communicate four layered messages of increasing complexity:

Level I: Rudimentary Information: ‘Something man-made is here’; Level II: Cautionary Information: ‘Something man-made is here and it is dangerous’; Level III: Basic Information: Tells what, why, when, where, who, and how; and Level IV: Complex Information: Highly detailed written records, tables, figures, graphs, maps and diagrams.

(Source: Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Sandia National Laboratories)

Layer I can be achieved by the survival of any clearly artificial construction. To protect against future vandals and resource hunters, the materials used in construction must be the least valuable possible, and the structures must be unattractive and difficult to dismantle. The Giza pyramids were once clad in gleaming white limestone, but those stones have long since been

The US Department of Energy commissioned a multidisciplinary team to develop proposals for a system to identify radioactive waste hazards to for future cultures. Architect Michael Brill and his colleagues from the fields of anthropology, astronomy, materials engineering, linguistics

and archaeology chose design archetypes that could be used to mark storage facilities for nuclear waste materials that remain lethal for millennia. The system is scheduled to be implemented by 2046. One of the proposals is Spike Field, in which chaotically positioned

stone spikes thrust upwards. Another proposal is Black Hole, a dark masonry slab that absorbs the heat of the desert sun and radiates it back, creating a zone of uncomfortably high temperatures. Concept: Mike Brill, Drawing: Safdar Abidi, Image courtesy of BOSTI.

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In Japan, the main structures of the Ise Grand Shrine have been rebuilt every 20 years in a practice that dates back 1,300 years. Through continual renewal, a line of tradition can be preserved.

carried off for re-use in other building projects.

The WIPP markers are to be earthworks made of common stone or concrete, materials not worth stealing. Their parts should be large, irregular and difficult to work with.

Layer II presents a bigger challenge. The Sandia report explores a variety of architectural constructions designed to give the marker a threatening appearance, many of which involve spikes and other sharp structures that seem to burst from the ground. Because WIPP is located in the desert, the stones may also be dyed black to make the area as hot and uncomfortable as possible.

Layer III functions on the principles of durability and redundancy. The messages should be repeated in many places, and the consensus is that carving them into rock or concrete will offer the best longevity, since even a heavily worn inscription can be revealed with rubbings.

Noting the impossibility of predicting which languages will survive into the future or how they will evolve, the authors of the Sandia report

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recommend using English and Spanish, the dominant languages of the region, as well as Arabic, Chinese, French and Russian, the other languages of the United Nations. This would allow the same or similar texts to be used at other repositories around the world, multiplying the redundancy. This approach also increases the chances that at least one version of the message will remain intelligible, even creating a kind of Rosetta Stone for the future.

Pictographs were also considered, but designing sufficiently universal images is extremely difficult. Despite today’s widespread globalisation, there is still considerable variation in symbolism between regions and cultures.

The nuclear trefoil is a universal symbol now, but there is no guarantee that it will remain so for the next 10,000 years. Even if it does, displaying it at the surface, where there is no evidence of radioactivity, could cause future explorers to conclude that the danger had passed or never existed in the first place, undermining the credibility of the rest of the message.

Level III would also point the way to Level IV content, complete and detailed information sealed in deep storage archives. Here, again, redundancy and translation are key techniques.

Providing as many versions of the same information as practicable raises the odds that at least some of it will be understood.

The recommendations of the Sandia report clearly show that the project is more a matter of experience design than architectural design. If the installation is successful it will guide future explorers through its successive layers until they understand the threat, heed the warning and turn away. It is this fine balance of attraction and subsequent repulsion that must ultimately be found for every nuclear waste repository in the world. As with any good architectural proposal, the details will be determined by local conditions as designers work to adapt fundamental principles to their particular sites.

The result will be a network of terrible monuments to this generation’s nuclear ambitions, many of them perhaps becoming some of the greatest wonders of the contemporary world.

To survive twice the length of recorded history, they will necessarily be impressive and imposing attractions in their own right, a possibility that the Sandia report acknowledges. ☐

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BUILDING ON TRADITION – 1,400 YEARS OF A FAMILY BUSINESS

Hōryū Gakumonji, Nara: Originally commissioned by Prince Shōtoku in the sixth century, Hōryū Gakumonji is a large temple complex serving as both a seminary and monastery in Ikaruga. The temple’s pagoda is widely

acknowledged to be one of the oldest extant wooden buildings in the world, and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Photo: Asanuma, Department of Railways

Before its liquidation, Kongō Gumi was the oldest continuously operating company in the world. Founded in Japan a mere century after the fall of the Roman Empire, it survived extreme changes in Japan’s culture, government and economy, preserving traditional construction techniques and family values for over 1,400 years.

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Irene Herrera is a documentary filmmaker and journalist working in Tokyo. Her work mostly explores social issues in Asia and Latin America. Mai Hasebe contributed on-location research in Japan and Tae Whang provided Japanese language consultation.

In the year 578 AD Germanic tribes were warring over the remains of the Roman Empire, an eightyear-old boy named Muhammad was growing up in Mecca, the Mayan Empire was flourishing in Central America, and the world’s longest continuously operated business was founded in Japan. When Prince Shōtoku Taishi (572–622) commissioned the construction of Japan’s first Buddhist temple, Shitennō-ji, Japan was predominantly Shinto and had no miyadaiku (carpenters trained in the art of building Buddhist temples), so the prince hired three skilled men from Baekje, a Buddhist state in what is now Korea. Among them was Shigetsu Kongō, whose work would become the foundation of the construction firm Kongō Gumi.

In the centuries that followed, the maintenance, repair and reconstruction of Shitennō-ji (ravaged a number of times by wars and natural disasters) provided Kongō Gumi’s main source Right: The castle of Osaka in front of Osaka Business Park skyscrapers. It is one of Japan’s most famous castles and played a significant

of income, but as Buddhism spread throughout Japan the scope of the company’s work also expanded to include contributions to other major temple complexes such as Hōryū-ji (607) and Koyasan (816), as well as Osaka Castle (1583). Kongō Gumi would continue to flourish under the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), a period during which Buddhist temples received substantial financial support. The company weathered the pro-Shinto Meiji Period (1868–1912) and its often violent efforts to eradicate Buddhism from Japan, which included the destruction of tens of thousands of Buddhist temples. Kongō Gumi also survived the Shōwa Financial Crisis of 1927, keeping pace with economic and technological developments until it finally succumbed to financial difficulties and became a subsidiary of Takamatsu Kensetsu in 2006, after more than 1,400 years of independent operation.

role in the unification of Japan during the 16th century. Construction began in 1583, but the castle has been destroyed repeatedly by fire

and lightning. Kongō Gumi prospered because of these major reconstructions, which provided them with plenty of work. Photo: Reporters

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Shitennō-ji, Osaka, built in 593 AD, was the first Buddhist temple in Japan. It has been partially or completely destroyed at least seven times

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over the centuries by wars and major disasters, most recently in the 1960s. The temple was built without nails, so the individual timbers can be

Although Japan boasts six of the world’s oldest companies and an estimated 20,000 firms over 100 years old, Kongō Gumi’s longevity is certainly remarkable and worthy of study.

Fortunately, the principles that guided the company over the centuries have been preserved by the Kongō family itself. The 32nd leader of the company, Yoshisada Kongō, writing during the Meiji Period, left a creed, later titled Shokuke kokoroe no koto, or ‘family knowledge of the trade’, a list of 16 precepts distilled from the company’s successful past and intended to guide and preserve the family’s operations into the future. Western observers might be surprised to discover that while the creed addresses ‘business’ subjects such as quality control and customer satisfaction, it puts equal emphasis on ‘personal’ issues such as how to dress (in keeping with one’s station), how much to drink (in moderation) and how to treat others (with utmost respect). Indeed, the first article of the creed states that minding the precepts of Confucianism, Buddhism and Shinto, and

removed and replaced, allowing the structure to be maintained for centuries. Photo: Masaki Hayashi

training to use the carpenter’s rule are ‘our most important duty’, suggesting that the standards against which a Kongō measures his life are as critical to success as the instrument by which he measures his work.

The extremely high quality of Kongō Gumi’s work was certainly one factor in the company’s longevity. A new worker could expect to undergo ten years of apprenticeship to perfect the techniques demanded by the job (and another ten years of training to become a master carpenter), and Shokuke kokoroe no koto bade him practise those techniques as well as reading and arithmetic, ‘the skills that carpenters need most’, adding any other skills that might be required by his position and disregarding anything not essential. In addition, the craftsmen were organised into kumi, workgroups that often competed among themselves to prove which one produced the best work.

Yoshisada Kongō also emphasised the importance of good customer relations, and Kongō Gumi succeeded in building and maintaining

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As Japan began to adopt elements of Western culture, the company expanded its portfolio to include residential and commercial buildings; it also began to combine new technologies (such as the use of architectural software) with traditional temple construction techniques.

strong relationships with its customers, many of whom (such as their first project Shitennō-ji) remained loyal over centuries. A number of the precepts listed in Shokuke kokoroe no koto reflect this: ‘Listen to what the customer says’, ‘Treat the customers with respect’ and ‘Submit the cheapest and most honest estimate’. The creed goes further, however, to discuss relationships in general: ‘Do not put yourself forward’, ‘Never fight with others’, ‘Do not shame a person or boast’ and ‘Communicate with respect’.

Close, stable, mutually beneficial relationships helped to sustain Kongō Gumi through times of economic hardship, as the company provided expert, reliable service at fair prices to customers who in turn provided dependable long-term income.

One characteristic of Kongō Gumi, which is not specifically described in Yoshisada Kongō’s precepts (but which has been frequently cited by its recent leaders), is its ability to balance respect for tradition with the flexibility to meet changing conditions. The creed states that ‘the

most important thing is to keep and maintain the name of the Kongō family’, and throughout its history the family has broken with tradition when necessary to ensure the survival of the company. For example, when temple construction and repair revenues fell during the Meiji Restoration, the company diversified, starting to build the office and residential projects demanded by an increasingly westernising Japan. The company was the first in Japan to combine traditional wooden constructions with concrete, and the first to use CAD software to design temples.

Kongō Gumi was also flexible in choosing its leadership. Like many family businesses, it generally expected the head of the family to be the head of the company as well, but gave greater consideration to skill, health and competence.

Yoshisada Kongō’s own sons were judged incapable of leading the company, so leadership passed to his younger brother in spite of the fact that he was not the direct heir. By Japanese tradition, the family name could be continued

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Kongō Gumi, like many family businesses, was generally run by the oldest son of each generation. In generations lacking a suitable male heir, leadership could be passed to a more competent relative, or a promising son-in-law could be adopted into the family, thus ensuring the continuation of the Kongō name and traditions.

even through generations that had produced no suitable male heir by adopting a son-in-law who would take on the Kongō name and the responsibility of ensuring that the building techniques and philosophical values of the family would be passed on. (The company’s 39th president, Toshitaka Kongō, was one such son-in-law.)

This flexibility was tested even further during the Shōwa Depression, when the 37th leader Haruichi Kongō committed ritual suicide because of his inability to provide for his family and the families of his craftsmen. In the absence of a suitable male leader, his widow Yoshie stepped up to become the first and only woman to lead Kongō Gumi. She not only challenged the tradition of male leadership, but also expanded the scope of the company, begging the government to allow the firm to survive by taking on the production of wooden coffins. She also initiated a major structural reform that separated managerial positions from carpentry positions, a model that enabled the company to adapt successfully to the post-industrial era (though

Toshitaka Kongō was still officially a carpenter at Shitennō-ji at the age of 86).

The end of Kongō Gumi as an independent, family-owned business was brought about by a number of factors, primarily a long-term decrease in temple revenues combined with heavy property investments that devalued severely when the Japanese real estate bubble burst in the 1990s. In A 1,400-Year-Old Venture: Sixteen Lessons Handed Down From the World’s Oldest Company, a book published one day after his death, Toshitaka Kongō wrote of difficulties with meeting modern-day deadlines (nobody today is willing to wait 15 years for a temple to be built), the challenges of working with other design and planning firms, and the difficulty of navigating the balance between respect for tradition and the demands of the volatile world economy. He also refers to a precept of his ancestor’s creed, ‘When it isn’t possible to decide by yourself, consult a relative and decide things together’, regretting that he had not conferred enough with other family members. Still, he saw

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Seiganto-ji, Mt Nachi, a site of worship since the fourth century, is a Tendai Buddhist temple with a breathtaking view of Nachi Falls. Today it is a

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UNESCO World Heritage Site. Kongō Gumi uses carpentry techniques that have been passed down since the foundation of the company. The

the end of the company’s independence not so much as a failure as a reflection of the fact that popular demand for temple construction was no longer enough to sustain the business. And though the company is under the control of a parent corporation, its spirit lives on. Kongō family members and employees continue to

motto of the company is: ‘Inheritance of techniques from 1,400 years ago to the future’.

Photo: John Kasawa

build and maintain temples and may very well do so for millennia to come. And on the 1st and 15th days of every month over 120 Kongō carpenters and other employees still gather for a small prayer ceremony in remembrance of Prince Shōtoku to thank him for how this all began. ☐

FLIGHT 300 TO MUMBAI

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Captain Gupta takes Indian schoolchildren and other curious passengers on a unique educational trip.

Magnum photographer Martin Parr is known for his intimate and critical observations on modern life from suburban England to the metropolises of India.

I’m boarding an Airbus A-300 in Delhi. The flight’s stated destination is Mumbai, but with one wing and a third of the fuselage missing, I know this plane will never take off. Our pilot, former airline engineer Captain Gupta, bought the Airbus from Indian Airlines in 2003, then spent many years re-assembling it in his garden, about five miles from Delhi International

Airport, in order to share his passion for air travel with as many people as possible. Despite the fact that India’s domestic airline industry has boomed in the last few years, the vast majority, 96%, of Indians have never flown.

Captain Gupta’s mission is to give Indians a chance to experience the interior of a plane and to learn a little about how aircraft operate.

The staff issue boarding passes to all travellers and explain how to find the right seat in the right plane. Once today’s passengers, a lively group of schoolchildren, are all onboard, and the door is shut and sealed, the chief flight attendant, Mrs Gupta (also a professor of international studies at Delhi University), welcomes everybody and begins the safety presentation by explaining how to fasten the seat belts.

Mrs Gupta and the cabin crew cover all of the aircraft’s safety features, including the oxygen masks and the emergency lifejackets. This is perhaps the only airline whose safety presentation concludes with a quiz, but the children have been paying attention and shout out the answers with great enthusiasm. Refreshments follow as the flight attendants go up and down the aisles with their trolleys, serving biscuits and toffees.

Then some music is played over the intercom, and some of the kids are encouraged to get up and dance in the aisle. Quite what this has to do with flying is beyond me, but everyone is having a splendid time. The children are invited to visit the cockpit in small groups, and Mrs Gupta explains that although trains and buses have one driver, a plane has three: the pilot, the co-pilot and the auto-pilot.

The flight apparently concludes in disaster, as the passengers all leave via an emergency slide, but the children are delighted nonetheless. Snacks and drinks are then served, and videos are shown. I imagine that these students will never forget this outing, and that Captain Gupta has converted 50 more future passengers on his mission to educate the public and to demystify the business of air travel.

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Barbara Eldredge is a writer and researcher working out of New York. She has written for both previous issues of WTW on the US army’s visual translation guides and on smuggling chefs.

THE ART OF PEACE

The name AK-47 consists of the initials of the words Avtomat Kalashnikova (Russian for Kalashnikov Automatic Rifle), and the year when the prototypes were completed (1947). Required to be simple, reliable and lethal, it is an exceptionally well-designed weapon which can be

disassembled and reassembled by an untrained person in less than 30 seconds. In the more than six decades since its creation, the Kalashnikov has become not only the most recognisable, but also the most abundant weapon ever created. It is manufactured in over 30 countries,

and although nobody knows exactly how many there are, some estimates range as high as 100 million, or one for every 70 people in the world.

Its numbers and its durability continue to pose a tremendous challenge all over the globe.

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In February of 2003, César López picked up his guitar and headed for a war zone. A car bomb had devastated a social club in his home town of Bogota, Colombia, killing 36 and wounding more than 200. Not knowing what else to do, a number of musicians brought their instruments to the site, playing music for the survivors and mourners who gathered there. López noticed that the soldiers responding to the incident held their rifles in the same way he held his guitar.

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Suddenly the idea struck him: he could turn a rifle into a guitar, transform an instrument of death into an instrument of music and a symbol of change.

López, working with Colombian luthier Alberto Paredes, covered the rifle barrel of an AK-47 with a smooth wooden guitar neck, running strings past the trigger to a bridge on the back of the receiver just above the pistol grip and placing the volume and tone knobs along the

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graceful curve of the rifle’s magazine. In López’s hands, the distinctive rat-tat-tat of fired rounds has been replaced by sounds of an altogether different sort.

There are estimated to be as many as 875 million firearms worldwide. They are sometimes likened to viruses, agents of a deadly plague of violence. But just as virologists create vaccines using weakened pathogens, a number of intrepid artists and designers are transforming

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decommissioned firearms into everything from guitars to sculpture to luxury jewellery. They take the potency of an instantly recognisable object and subvert it to powerful effect.

The Hope Throne is an unsettling, strangely ornate construction assembled from the detritus of war. Handguns, assault rifles, grenade launchers, shell casings and the curved magazine and stock of an AK-47, though transformed, are clearly distinguishable within its structure.

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I was once shown a video of a weapons destruction task force uncovering a cache of rifles buried in a hillside in Mozambique. The guns had been hidden for nearly two decades and were coated in a thick layer of reddish-brown mud or rust. To prove a point, one of the men picked up a decrepit AK-47.

He cleaned off a bit of the mud and poured oil from an equally rusty can into the gun’s receiver. Minutes later, the decades-old rifle still fired like a charm.

Created in 2008, it is one of a series of thrones created by Mozambican artist Gonçalo Mabunda.

Even though the image of an AK-47 graces its flag, Mozambique is home to many artists who address the issue of violence by using reclaimed weapons in their work. In the wake of a civil war that ended in 1992, the Christian Council of Mozambique started Transforming Arms into Tools, an initiative encouraging citizens to exchange their firearms for items such as sewing machines, hoes, bicycles and construction materials. The more-than-600,000 firearms thus collected were then given to artists like Mabunda to symbolically manifest the transformation of violence into creation.

‘The purpose of the project is to disarm the minds of people, and to disarm the hands of people,’ Bishop Dinis Sengulane, the organiser of Transforming Arms into Tools, told the BBC. ‘I felt I should be part of shaping that peace.

And, of course, we find in the book of Micah, in the Bible, and in the book of Isaiah, in the Bible, where it says they will turn their swords into ploughshares, and people will sit under their own trees and nothing will frighten them.’

On my first visit to the British Museum, I wandered into a gallery that featured two of the most famous works to come out of Transforming Arms into Tools: Throne of Weapons by artist Cristóvão Canhavato (who works under the Previous spread: Familiar with the AK-47 from his service with the British Army in Afghanistan, photographer Bran Symondson conceived the exhibition AKA Peace, asking leading artists to

name Kester) and Tree of Life, a collective work

by Kester, Hilario Nhatugueja, Fiel dos Santos and Adelino Serafim Maté. Like Mabunda, Kester works with the throne, a favourite subject of Mozambican artists, as a symbol of authority.

The Tree of Life extends nearly 3.5 m (12 ft) tall, its rust-coloured trunk, branches and leaves made of the geometric forms of gun handles and ammunition magazines. The tree dominates its gallery, its power overwhelming the other items on exhibit.

To American artist Lin Evola, the guns she melts down to use in her sculptures aren’t active agents in violence but pure symbols of it. Her art is not about getting guns off the streets, per se. ‘If I could use ill will instead of weapons, I would,’ she told me. However, it was clear from the inception of her Peace Angels Project that her material of choice would be firearms.

Evola conceived of the Peace Angels in the autumn of 1992 when her son was eight years old and she was overcome with emotion because of the thousands of gun-related deaths each year near her home in Los Angeles County. She felt paralysed. ‘I just couldn’t move,’ she said of the time. ‘I knew I had to do something as an artist, and it had to be with real weapons from real people.’ Two years of searching for an adequate response to this problem resulted in the manifesto that became the Peace Angels project.

turn decommissioned AK-47s from war-torn regions into works of art. The pieces were then auctioned off to raise funds for Peace One Day’s Global Truce campaign. This customised

AK-47 with silver-painted thorns is the work of Nancy Fouts. Photo: Bran Symondson

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Peter Thum, founder of luxury brand Fonderie47, inspects confiscated AK-47s. There are an estimated 20 million assault weapons in Africa, most of them AK-47 variants. The AK-47 costs 70% less in Africa than elsewhere in the world

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because of its abundance. Fonderie47 is a hybrid business model consisting of a for-profit corporation and a non-profit social venture that removes AK-47s from war zones and transforms them into upscale jewellery and accessories. To

‘What I’m doing is taking something ugly and destructive, something we invented to kill each other, and transforming it to lift people up and show them our greatness and our potential to overcome that which destroys us.’

She combines metal from reclaimed guns, nuclear shell casings and land mines to cast metal sculptures of winged figures called Peace Angels. Her most famous sculpture, the Renaissance Peace Angel, was placed near the site of the attack on the World Trade Center, outside a canteen used by recovery workers. Over the many days and nights that it looked down on the restaurant, hundreds of people inscribed their names and messages of thanks on its base. The sculpture is now in the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.

Evola is currently working with the sheriff of Los Angeles to transform more than 100,000 weapons into a 9.8 m (32 ft) Peace Angel. Using metal from shell casings ensures that the work will not rust and degrade, something Evola

date Fonderie47 has funded the destruction of over 30,000 assault rifles in war zones in Africa.

Photo courtesy of Fonderie47.

believes would undermine the significance of the sculptures. ‘What I want is to create art that makes a difference to humanity and lives on past me, past all of us.’

In 2012, a group of 23 artists including Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sarah Temple and Antony Gormley were each given an AK-47 to use in sculptures commissioned by the Peace One Day initiative, a non-profit organisation that promotes a global day of non-violence each September. The works created by these artists ranged from a rifle coated in a burst of bright paints (Hirst) to a rifle ground into dust (Gavin Turk). There was the bedazzled and butterfly-covered gun of Laila Shawa, and Bran Symondson’s politically motivated rifle découpaged with US dollar bills.

While most of the artists used the gun’s instantly recognisable shape to comment on society or create unexpected juxtapositions, artist Nancy Fouts took her piece in another direction. Covering the AK-47 in short, sharp spines,

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Fouts compellingly subverts the gun’s otherwise inviting physicality. Titled Don’t Touch, the work warns that in this case it is the wielder of the weapon who will suffer, not the wielder’s intended target, thus not only discouraging use of the gun, but also creating the potential for empathy.

Peter Thum’s signet ring, by contrast, builds on existing empathy that has already manifested itself in activism. It bears no design engraved on its surface. Rather, the material itself is a kind of seal, binding its wearer to the assault rifle from which it was made. Thum is the co-founder and CEO of Fonderie47, a company that creates luxury jewellery using metal from decommissioned AK-47s destroyed in Africa.

As we sipped coffee in a café near his office, Thum explained that the idea came to him when he was working in Africa for his previous venture, Ethos Water, a socially spirited company that funds the digging of wells in Africa through the sale of bottled water in the US. He travelled through Kenya and was struck by the number Mozambican artist Cristóvão Canhavato (Kester) created the Throne of Weapons out of decommissioned weapons from the Mozambique civil war (1977–1992) as part of the Transforming

of firearms carried by the men and boys he met along the way. After selling his company in 2005, Thum decided that ‘the unique thing I can do is create an ecosystem of interaction between a problem and a group of people who, if they take ownership or partial ownership of a problem, can do something serious about it.’

He decided to apply Ethos’ social-business model to funding the destruction of guns. There are an estimated 40 million guns on the continent of Africa, perhaps half of which are assault rifles. Thum decided to focus on removing AK-47s because, he said, they are ‘the QWERTY keyboard of firearms. It’s one of the most recognisable “brands” on the planet. Even if someone doesn’t know the name AK-47, show them a picture, and odds are they’ll know that gun.’

The idea of ‘taking ownership of the problem’ is made literal through the purchase of Fonderie47 jewellery. Every US$16,000 (€11,850) signet ring or US$50,000 (€37,000) pair of earrings bears the serial number of the

Arms into Tools project, in which some 600,000 weapons were voluntarily exchanged for useful tools and hardware. Photo: Mike Peel

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Whenever humanity feels sufficiently powerless, it resorts to the use of symbols: the voodoo doll with a human lock of hair, animal sacrifices to appease life-controlling gods, wedding rings to dictate who is loved and how. It is no wonder, then, that the desire to end violence should be enacted through manipulation of the objects that we use to kill, control and defend.

rifle that was incorporated into the piece. By buying the jewellery, you buy a connection to a specific gun, a connection to the problem. And that connection is more personal because of the nature of jewellery and the economic connections that Thum’s company builds.

‘Jewellery is something that you have to make a choice to wear on your body,’ he explained.

The pieces, designed by craftsmen such as Philip Crangi and James de Givenchy, provide a way of effecting the symbolic and physical transformation of an object of violence into an object of beauty. ‘Then, in the retelling of that story to other people, that person becomes an evangelist for that idea. So if they’re particularly affected then ten of their friends want one of these things.’ Rather than simply display the objects in a public space or in a gallery, the owners of Fonderie47 jewellery wear them on their bodies, walking around with an advertisement for the cause. Every time someone compliments them on their jewellery, This limited-edition bracelet made of sustainably sourced 18-karat gold and platinum, conflict-free diamonds and AK-47 steel costs US$70,000 (€51,600). Its purchase provides

they can tell the story of its origin, talk about how many firearms were destroyed because of their purchase.

‘I think that there are millions of people who would like to see gun violence reduced in places around the world,’ Thum continued, ‘and they just need a way of expressing, embodying, and taking action around that.’

As diverse as these artists are, a common thread unites them: in spite of being overwhelmed by the problem of violence, not quite knowing how to address it as an individual, they feel an urgent need to take action against its tools and symbols. Though they do this by reshaping physical objects, their primary goal is to reshape thoughts and world views. The transformation of these weapons is no mere decoration. It is a means to help us think about why there is violence in the world and why we can’t seem to control it. As César López asks, ‘If the weapon, which was designed to kill, if its use can be changed, then why can’t humans change too?’ ☐

funds for the destruction of 300 assault rifles in Africa. Other pieces by Fonderie47 can finance the destruction of up to 800 weapons.

Fonderie47 provides grants to UK-based NGO

Mines Advisory, which carries out the physical destruction of the weapons in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Burundi, in conjunction with staff of the local governments.

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Carl Alviani writes on topics of design and innovation and holds a deep personal interest in the built environment and its influence on human behaviour.

PORTABLE BOUNDARIES

They are deceptively simple in design and so commonplace in our cities that we pass by them without giving them a second thought. But once they are deployed, they provide an extraordinarily effective means of crowd control, permitting even small forces to contain and control large masses of people with relatively little effort.

Left: French barriers deployed at Gorky Park in Moscow at a sporting event. The design of the interlocking barriers connects units in such a way that only the last one is easily removable due to a bend in the top hook, which enters the receiver at an angle of about 30 degrees. Thus

the units can only be connected and disconnected when they are at right angles to each other. Photo: Peter BiÄžak Top: On February 15, 2003 a hundred thousand protesters gathered for a demonstration on

First Avenue in New York City to express their opposition to the imminent Iraq War. It was one of hundreds of demonstrations that took place on the same date in cities around the world, forming the largest protest event in human history. Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images

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The Samia barrier was developed and patented during the social upheaval of the 1950s in France.

More effective than wooden sawhorses and requiring far less manpower than police cordons, it has become a popular method of crowd control all over the world.

Although my neighbour Rebecca was nine months pregnant, she went to Manhattan on February 15, 2003 to join the demonstration against the Iraq War. The estimated 300,000 protesters who converged on New York’s East Side that day had been denied a marching permit a week earlier by a federal judge who cited heightened security concerns in the wake of 9/11 and authorised only a stationary assembly on 1st Avenue. En route to the demonstration, Rebecca and thousands of others were gradually herded onto 2nd and 3rd Avenues by New York City police and found themselves confined within a corral of interlocking steel barricades. Rebecca eventually pushed her way to the edge of the crowd to plead for release, but others on the same block found themselves trapped in their impromptu prison for up to six hours in freezing temperatures. Unable to leave, many had no choice but to relieve themselves in the street; some collapsed from exhaustion.

Compared to recent demonstrations in places like Istanbul, Cairo or Damascus, this barely registers as mistreatment. No protesters

were killed that day, and while some sharply criticised the containment tactics of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) afterwards, there were few acts of overt brutality. What set the Iraq War protest of 2003 apart from those that came before it, at least in New York, was its asymmetry: just 5,000 police officers were able to restrain approximately a quarter-of-a-million citizens against their will, mostly without touching them or even talking to them.

The innovation that made this possible dates back to 1951, when a French company called Samia SA began manufacturing a patented steel barricade to address the shortcomings of existing wooden ones. Besides being lighter and faster to deploy, the ‘Samia barrier’ boasted two remarkable features. First, the steel bars that formed the bulk of the barrier were oriented vertically, making it surprisingly difficult to climb. Second, it could lock together with adjoining barriers in a way that defied easy separation. Two downward-facing hooks at one end could be dropped into two slot-like sleeves at the end of another; a 30° kink in the upper

Portable Boundaries

One of the earliest uses of French barriers in the USA was to control the crowds of hysterical teenagers that gathered in New York City for

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the arrival of the Beatles in 1964. In America, wooden sawhorses remained in general use up until the last decade and can still be seen in

hook meant that the two had to be at right angles to each other for this to occur. Once assembled and straightened, the only way to separate two barriers was to rotate them back to a 90° angle and lift—something nearly impossible to do in a dense crowd.

Except for a few small tweaks, the Tamis ‘Blockader’ barricade used by many police departments today, including the NYPD, is identical to the one made by Samia 60 years ago, which makes it something of a modern design classic. Durable, simple and profoundly effective, the ‘French barrier’ (as it’s commonly known in the US) allows a small group of people to exercise authority over a much larger one, directing their flow, denying them access to prohibited areas, or restraining them.

This gives it a powerful emotional impact.

Being barricaded in can be genuinely terrifying, which is exactly the point: a crowd that feels afraid and impotent is easier to control.

Despite this, I can’t help admiring the ingenuity that makes it possible. A 30° bend is such a subtle thing, yet it transforms the barrier from

many cities, but are rapidly being replaced by steel or aluminium crowd-control barricades.

Photo: Getty Images

something that indicates a boundary, like a velvet rope or police line, into something that enforces it.

French barriers were largely a European phenomenon through the 1960s and 1970s, and New York didn’t truly embrace them until after 2001, making Rebecca’s experience a relatively novel one. The NYPD had mostly employed large wooden sawhorses for crowd control until then, explains Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

They can still be found scattered through the city, recognisable by their bright blue colour and stencilled white text, but as Browne points out, ‘They’re fine if people respect that they say “Do Not Cross”, but you can get under them pretty easily.’

All that changed with 9/11. Beyond the immediate physical damage, the World Trade Center attacks also left New York with a weakened economy that translated into a shrinking police force. ‘In 2001, we had 41,000 officers,’ says Browne, ‘But as people moved out, we couldn’t replace them […] By 2002 we were down 5,000 cops, plus we had a new counterterrorism unit

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A French riot policeman faces Franco-Turk protesters during a demonstration in Paris on December 22, 2011 preceding a parliamentary

WTW #3

vote on a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the 1915 mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide. These interlocking bar-

to staff.’ On top of this, dozens of organisations, in an attempt to show solidarity, had elected to bring their major 2002 conventions to the city, giving the NYPD twice the normal number of demonstrations to control. ‘We had groups like the World Economic Forum and the Republican Party deciding to have their conventions here,’ recalls Browne, adding that intelligence was also indicating a growing al-Qaeda presence in the city. ‘So in addition to Seattle-type demonstrators,’ he explains, alluding to the riots connected with the World Trade Organization’s 1999 conference, ‘there was a real concern about terrorist attacks.’

Under these circumstances, French barriers offered a welcome solution. Their construction made them difficult to compromise, and their ability to form interlocking lines reduced the number of officers needed to police a demonstration. Unlike sawhorses, which rely on active enforcement, French barriers control crowds silently and require fewer personnel. ‘We now have about 25,000 of them,’ says Browne, ‘and most of that is since 2002.’ Today the department

riers, patented in 1951 in France, were designed to allow a relatively small force to control large crowds. Photo: Charles Platiau, Reuters/Novum

With the help of these efficient interlocking barriers, a few people can control much larger groups of people.

Portable Boundaries

The NYPD has leased a 10,962 m2 (118,000 sq. ft) storage facility in Long Island City where it stores thousands of crowd control barriers.

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As convenient to store and easy to deploy as they are effective, the Tamis ‘Blockader’ barricades used by the NYPD have been one of the

maintains a vast warehouse in Queens where thousands of barriers wait in tight, orderly rows for deployment via a small fleet of dedicated flatbed trucks.

In the rare cases when a stampeding crowd manages to topple one, a barrier line can turn suddenly hazardous. Its ladder-like bars can easily entangle the ankles of the unwary; its feet, poised around groin level, become dangerous impalement hazards. For this reason, the websites of barrier manufacturers and government agencies are filled with detailed discussions of anti-tipping measures. Some recommend sandbags. Others replace the sharp-ended feet with less dangerous steel plates.

Despite these dangers, French barriers have become a fact of life wherever people gather in high densities. They’re a fixture not only at demonstrations, but also at music festivals, sporting events and parades. Recently, across the street from the building where Rebecca and I lived, an NYPD captain lined a bike lane with French barriers to keep police cruisers from parking in it, giving bike riders a safer alternative to riding

contributing factors to the significant reduction in the number of officers over the last decade.

Photo: Christopher Penler

amongst trucks and cars. The move has been praised by local cycling groups as an example of effective cooperation between police and the communities they serve.

Taken together, these uses demonstrate that despite its capacity to be used for fear and manipulation, there’s nothing inherently evil about a French barrier. Like a hammer, a mobile phone or a knife, it’s a highly functional tool that does exactly what it is designed to do, enforcing the will of its user efficiently and without judgement.

But tools also have practical limits, and their very neutrality means that anyone who understands their workings can potentially thwart or re-appropriate them. In the case of French barriers, being aware of their presence and installation is a good start. Even better is knowing how to remove them should the need arise: rotate, then lift, starting from the end of the line. ☐

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