Terra Incognita: Post-Traumatic Infrastructural Opportunism

Terra Incognita post-traumatic infrastructural opportunism

zachary orig university of tennessee, knoxville self directed project

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ANTHROPOGENIC TRAUMA

sa aking pamilya dito sa US at sa ibang bansa Wala akong magagawa kung wala kayong lahat

University of Tennessee, Knoxville College of Architecture + Design | Fall 2020 - Spring 2021 ARCH 478R (Fall 2020), ARCH 498R (Spring 2021) Diploma Studio: Self-Directed Project Title: Terra Incognita: Post-Traumatic Infrastructural Opportunism Author: Zachary Orig Fall Final Review: December 7, 2020 Spring Final Review: April 22, 2021 Distinguished Design Review: April 28, 2021 Recognitions: 2021 ARCC King Medal, Tau Sigma Delta Bronze Medal, Distinguished Design Award, Faculty Award of Excellence, EUReCA Third Place - Architecture Advisor: Jennifer Akerman Typeface: Garamond Cover: USA Hillshade (Zachary Orig, GIS image, 2020)

Terra Incognita post-traumatic infrastructural opportunism

“ preface june 28, 2017

The past four weeks have flown by quite quickly.”

The architecture building has become my home, the people surrounding me my family. The paper and pencil I use are my most valuable asset, and the desk I spend my day at is my bed.

For many, studying architecture is both a blessing and a curse. I didn’t understand this before I started, but it has been quite an adventure. Each week has been a different challenge, and I’m surprised we’ve made it all the way to the end of June. The pacing has been accelerated and our minds are constantly at work, in studio and out.

Sometimes I lose sleep thinking about the progression of a design, the precision of a section drawing, or perhaps how to botch a rendering in photoshop.

Design to me is an eternal struggle between connecting the built environment to humanity itself through creative, process driven critical thinking.

Problem solving your way through the dimensions of an unlikely masterpiece may take a few hours, but trying to formulate a central idea that is the driving force behind your design is an even larger task.

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I feel like architecture school thus far wouldn’t be anything if the people around me weren’t who they are. The dynamic duos that have formed, the unlikely friendships, and even jubilant reunions; all a product of long hours spent in that concrete brutalist building.

The concrete brutalist building has served as an example throughout this month. Its guts are uncovered, allowing our professor to study it and use it as an example constantly as we learn more and more about how a building functions: as program, as structure, and as a product of design.

I am beginning to see the world around me differently. The dimensions of cabinets, floors, walls. The forces acting on a cantilevered beam.

The perspective view of a large glass facade. Even the most minor encounters everyday, such as sitting and eating lunch with friends, turns into a surprising spatial composition that catches me off guard.

The way we see relationships between objects, between people and their surroundings: that is what we hope to achieve. To bridge the faltered gap between architect and surrounding. To connect what is known to the unknown.

Time to tackle our first final review.

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12:57am June 28, 2017

Inquiry

introduction | urbanism’s problems

I. Terra Incognita

positioning

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II. Anthropogenic Trauma

framing

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III. The Agency of Infrastructure

allies

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IV. Territorial Reoperations

methodology

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V. A New World

locating

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VI. Post-traumatic Infrastructures

proposal

82

VII. Investigating Belridge

intervention

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VIII. Speculative Urbanisms

narrative

postscript | creating ethos notes bibliography acknowledgements

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“ prologue august 27, 2020

Urbanism’s Problems

I am not interested in conventional urbanism. The analysis of a city, the creation of an “urban framework” for a selected site in a selected area, or positioning myself (with an undeserved, autonomous authority) of why or why not cities can do what they do is not what I am truly interested in.

I am interested in the performance of a city; how the cities solve problems big and small. Is it the intricate organization of systems that govern how (and why) people at that scale live, work, and play the way that they do?

What problems exist in current cities? In what other contexts does the organization of a city present itself ? Can an urban framework be applied to an area that lacks one? How are cities good? How are cities bad? What cities are examples of “good urbanism”? What cities are examples of “bad urbanism”? How has urbanism spawned a plethora of literature, from the work of retrofitting suburbia to why sidewalks are as wide as they are (or should be)?

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What connects cities together (small, medium, large scales) within a given territory? How do excess and consumption shape cities? What is the cultural relevance, current event, or issue that cities are able to frame?

How are your thoughts given importance? How are you framing an argument in favor of urban conditions (if any; if so- what are the conditions)?

What are you inspired by? Who are you inspired by? What do you think cities can do in contexts of worldwide issues? What does a landscape of consumption (or excess) look like? Better yet, are its organizations closely related to that of a complex urbanism?

Zach

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“The electrical grid is a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood—to name just some of the actants.”

Jane Bennett The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout

Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita Post-Traumatic Infrastructural Opportunism Zachary Orig

“After all, in a climate crisis, shouldn’t every option be on the table?” incidents of trauma as spectra of infrastructural opportunity for new energy futures in support of confronting the global warming crisis in the South Belridge Oil Field in Kern County, California. Given recent fracking permits passed by the California state legislature in 2020, the area is poised to continue harmful activities of unconventional fossil fuel extraction for years to come.

Janette Kim and Eric Carver The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform

In anticipation of the impending results of a world affected by climate change, architecture is now more than ever positioned to leverage its unique influence, communication, and power to fight problems that the world cannot see. Everyday we turn a lamp on, start a car, or make a pot of coffee, we are engaging into a complex system of interacting with the world’s natural resources: fossil fuels. The United Nations, as of 2019, predicts we have but twelve years at most until climate change is irreversible. As the world runs out of time to cool down, global traumatic incidents such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes expose a brittle system of energy infrastructure all over the world- the resiliency of how we generate the energy we use is being scrutinized. Climate change is the ultimate global problem- so when our national systems of energy are restructured, readapted, and reorganized into new urban frameworks focused on multifunction, what happens to an urban future poised for sustainability instead of waste and excess?

Mason White and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office write that “infrastructures are in fact ecologies, or natural systems artifically supplemented.” Towards an exploration of this idea, Terra Incognita proposes 14

This thesis questions the role of current energy territorialization within Aera Energy LLC’s sphere of influence in Kern County and provokes the 21st century energy transition and utopian playground of infrastructural ecology. The research addresses the environmental traumas related to petroleum and natural gas extraction in Kern County and its dynamic relationship with territory and urbanism through a series of provoking cartographic explorations, urban narratives, and computational speculations for a post carbon future. By questioning the role of systems thinking in large scale problems such as climate change, questions of design autonomy are raised in a world of where we might often neglect to study the systems, the “hidden substrate”, that are right under it. This thesis leverages systems thinking and analysis to posit landscapes of energy as ones that are inherently connected to the growth and development of 21st century cities while also questioning the difference between how energy is currently utilized versus how energy ought to be utilized.

Atmospheric composition - Zachary Orig Data from Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks 1990-2015 (EPA, 2017)

Keywords: energy, territory, urbanism, geography, landscapes, systems, consumption, excess, framework, large-scale, speculative, infrastructure

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Anthropogenic Trauma

Anthropogenic Trauma II. Toward Post-Carbon Futures

“Today, driven by the climate crisis, the world is in the early stages of a new energy transition — from today’s dominant fossil fuel energy regime toward a renewable (or at least carbon-free) energy system.”

Nicholas Pevzner & Stephanie Carlisle Introduction: Power in Scenario Journal 07 (2020)

A Warming Planet A warmer climate is nothing new, yet everyday we fail to see it. Earth is warming at an alarmingly fast rate, even if American politicians argue it as a matter of partisan political opinion. As a result, disastrous natural events have been catalyzed by a lack of climate action. In California, the largest wildfires the state has ever seen are raging across the Sacramento Valley in what is the state’s largest TERRA INCOGNITA

wildfire season recorded in California’s history. In the year of 2020, as of October, twenty-six tropical or subtropical cyclones have made landfall on North American soil.1 In New Orleans, a record-breaking hurricane season threatens thousands as Hurricane Delta has now made landfall.

The climate is trying to tell us something.

The systems of energy we have created to sustain humanity’s habits of consumption are brittle, unreliable, and dangerous.

Traumas such as the nuclear meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima destroy entire regions and render them uninhabitable for years. Electrical blackouts, both human caused and natural caused, have shown the current grid of American centralized electricity to be problematic. The 2003 North American blackout not only exposed the unfortunate circumstance of a systemic failure, but also revealed the failures 18

1

Per The Washington Post, this number increased to thirty as of December 2020.

For comparison, the average is twelve. And for more comparison, estimates of the damage caused on US mainland peaked in the tens of billions of US dollars.

Recent hurricanes (Zachary Orig, digital GIS diagram, 2020) Mapped from ArcGIS recent hurricane dataset (EPA, 2017)

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Territories of Trauma Overlaying acts of trauma over megaregions reveals a complex territory of incidents that are directly or indirectly caused by acts of energy extraction throughout the United States. The traumas, ranging from train derailments to mine explosions to natural disasters, arguably have one thing in common: fossil fuel extraction and refinement as a catalyst.

(Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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of transportation, water, and vital infrastructure to millions of people.2 The recent 2018 Puerto Rican blackout following Hurricane Maria revealed the territory’s energy infrastructure to be incapable of handling future disastrous events.3 As a result of the blackout, millions of Puerto Ricans were left without power for months. Is it possible to speculate that holistic, contextual approaches to energy consumption (and consequently where architecture fits into the conversation) rather than a one-size-fits-all approach could prove to be useful in places where resiliency is of utmost importance?

As the need for a systemic approach to climate action through design pedagogy is becoming increasingly relevant, this thesis will frame systemic infrastructural intervention at the South Belridge Oil Field in Kern County, California using speculative design, urban artifacts, and generative mapping methodologies. This essay will frame the thesis and be divided into three main sections.

This section, Anthropogenic Trauma, introduces trauma as a form of opportunism- that is, opportunism as intervention but more importantly as a way to provoke systems thinking. Energy takes a variety of different forms. Are there architectural ways that energy problems can be proactively solved that not only prove resilient, but also begin to trigger a series of domino effects for stakeholders as TERRA INCOGNITA

a result of it? When we consider acts of trauma solely as isolated environmental disasters, there is missed opportunity in that we fail to look at these problems holistically. What have we learned from the previous systems of energy? The second, The Agency of Infrastructure, will study infrastructure as wholly integrated with the built environment yet its inadvertent failure to be resilient in times of trauma. Infrastructure, as many understand it, can be considered independent of the built, architectural environment: I ask, should it? Various infrastructural projects born from landscape architects and designers alike will be examined to analyze the various ways in which the lifespan of infrastructure is considered on a multitude of scales. The third, Territorial Reoperations, will interrogate the idea of strategic design as a tool of mapping a subset of territorialization, taking cues again from existing works that leverage mapping as reoperation rather than catalogue. The relevance of additional methodologies including speculative narrative, physics simulations, and computational design will also be discussed. The fourth and last, A New World, proposes geographic sites as places –literal locations with sociopolitical spheres of influence beyond its boundaries- for intervention using the aforementioned methodologies.

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2 The blackout is a significant talking point of Jane Bennett’s essay “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.”

3

The effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rica’s fragile energy infrastructure is further discussed and explored in Nicholas Pevzner’s essay “Speculative Designs for Energy Democracy”, published in Scenario Journal 07: Power. Pevzner led a studio at UPenn in the fall of 2019 looking to restore resiliency after evaluating the longterm energy challenges that the island faced.

Good stuff.

understand and provoke in order to insert the role of architectural and systems thinking into infrastructural opportunism.

Natural Trauma

Above: Satellite image of Deepwater Horizon disaster. (NASA satellite image)

4 The Bayou Corne incident was photographed seven years later by Virginia Hanusik with text

by Katy Reckdahl in her essay “When the Ground Gives Way.”

Signs of Trauma To begin, trauma must be defined.

Trauma, as it relates to this thesis, is be framed in three main categories: natural, contested, and induced. For the purposes of the argument, I will introduce natural and induced traumas as foils before contested trauma, a gray area and a main interest.

This section will cover the three sections and give examples of each as well as propose control as a function of trauma. In this sense, trauma can be considered a catalyst that triggers a series of events or actions and is wholly influenced by the global warming and its constituent, climate change.

I argue that trauma is necessary to 23

Natural trauma is likely the easiest to understand. We have likely all seen natural trauma before via personal experience or news.

Natural trauma is the direct result of a natural disaster or abnormal event caused by the innate forces within a climate system. These traumas are often publicized and sensationalized. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires caused by lightning are categorized as natural traumas. It is important to note that these traumas, despite modern day technology, cannot be stopped. They can be predicted, tracked, and observed, but they cannot be controlled. They are largely dependent on the severity of the localized situation. Natural traumas can be observed via a gradient, such as a series of heat waves or real time updates of varying hotspots within a system of wildfires. They can also be observed as events within a geographic territory that begin and end (such as natural disasters with a definitive beginning and ending) even though their ramifications may last a lifetime such as the 2012 Bayou Corne sinkhole that displaced hundreds.4 To re iterate, natural traumas are absolute forces of nature – no one entity

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has agency over it aside from the complex systems of climate that dictate its severity.

Induced Trauma Notwithstanding the severities of natural trauma, the opposite end of the three is induced trauma.

Induced trauma, indeed a nod to induced earthquakes in the field of geoscience, happens solely by humanity and its claimed agency over territories, ecosystems, and other large non-human entities. In other words, induced trauma is the complete, unquestionable failure of human infrastructures and the control over them. The most provocative example of this is the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. Many would argue that its ramifications echoed past the event itself. I argue that the spill was caused solely by American societal need and dependence on extractive energy practices. Likewise, a mine explosion caused by a spark in a poorly ventilated mine shaft in the Appalachian mountain region would also be considered induced trauma.5 The 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion, also caused by BP, killed fifteen American workers and injured 180 others.6 In North Carolina, the 2008 fly ash containment failure released 1.1 billion US gallons of coal fly ash slurry that contaminated groundwater and river water adjacent to the Kingston fossil fuel plant.7 The resultant environmental consequences, according to two TERRA INCOGNITA

2019 articles published in Men’s Journal by investigative journalist JR Sullivan, resulted in a lawsuit filed against Jacobs Engineering Group (the engineering firm responsible for the slurry cleanup) due to health issues caused by the byproduct among former workers at the cleanup site.8 It is worth noting that though much of the onus of the environmental cleanup leaned against the quasigovernmental Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), TVA enjoys the luxury of immunity of lawsuits.

Unfortunately, in addition to long lasting environmental issues, the result of induced trauma among the energy sector causes illness among its constituents long after the actual disaster is over.

The issue is not the fact that the traumas happened as a result of unfortunate circumstance and, of course, human error, and that we need to confront such things with increased economic resiliency and/or government accountability though both would be nice, too.

The much larger issue is that the broad exertion of control over a separate, volatile entity such as the territorialization of crude oil and other fossil fuels produces an equally isolated, volatile system that results in horrific events. This sort of vicious cycle exists on a variety of scales in a variety of geographic places. In the realm of design, the same questions can be provoked. Are we exerting the same control over non-human entities that leads to induced 24

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In reference to the 1968 Farmington Mine disaster.

6 Per a 2007 US Chemical Safety Board investigation after the incident.

7

According to CNN’s 2008 coverage of this accident, one account said that the slude “could fill 800 olympic-sized swimming pools.”

8

JR Sullivan’s extensive coverage of this story can be found here: http:// www.jr-sullivan.com/ dirty-work

Above: GIS images of the California wildfires as of October 2020 visualized as extruded shapes based on acreage burned. (Zachary Orig, digital GIS diagram, 2020)

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The sole surviving miner that day, Randal McCloy, wrote a letter to the families of the twelve deceased miners. The letter was published by the Charleston Gazette amd noted that he and another miner had confirmed the presence of methane inside the mine three weeks before the incident.

trauma and lasting negative health, economic, and social effects? Though the thesis is not centered on themes of redlining, environmental injustice, and issues of greenwashing in architecture/ planning, perhaps these questions can lead to answers for them.

Contested Trauma It is then necessary to discuss the most perplexing trauma: contested trauma. Contested trauma is, in a sense, traumas as a result of extenuating circumstances focused within industries that humans attempt to control. Industries of fossil fuel extraction once again provide a clear dark matter for contested 25

trauma to operate within. Given the numerous environmental issues with extractive industries throughout the world, contested trauma is defined as typologies of traumas that arise from the interaction between natural and induced traumas. For example, the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and resultant nuclear meltdown is an example of contested trauma.

If perhaps the nuclear plant were located in a different place, or if the tsunami occurred elsewhere, then it is plausible to speculate that the meltdown never would have taken place. Likewise, the 2006 Sato mine explosion that killed twelve miners as a result of a lightning strike (though it is worth noting that this is theorized) can be categorized as a contested trauma in that the conditions in which the mine found itself were poor, but the explosion never would have happened without the lightning strike.9 Contested traumas are important in that they reveal the how’s and why’s of an infrastructural opportunism. When the brittleness of an entire system is exposed when natural events catalyze a traumatic event, is it possible that they were designed all wrong in the first place and that pouring resources into either preventing or fighting the consequences of such an event are neither sustainable nor in the best interests of the stakeholders at large?

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Above: Energy logistics flow chart (Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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Above: Categorizing trauma (Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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The Agency of Infrastructure

The Agency of Infrastructure III. Literature Review

“Economies can be understood to operate through the principles of ecology… the next generation of architecture and infrastructure needs to enable cities to operate in metabolic synergy with their expanded environments.”

Geoffrey Thun et al.

Infra Eco Logi Urbanism: A Project for the Great Lakes Megaregion (2015)

The Substrate that Produces Investigations of infrastructure within the allied fields of architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture are TERRA INCOGNITA

provocations within large issues of systems-thinking. Designers including Kate Orff, Chris Reed, Neeraj Bhatia, Pierre Balanger, Nicholas Pevzner, and James Corner have all leveraged infrastructural thinking and intervention at some point during their careers with a notable shift from their respected fields in that they choose to put a large amount of focus into the dark matter of the problems – that is, defined by Dan Hill as “the substrate that produces”.1 The governmental organization, the petrochemical conglomerate, and the global chain of logistics. Not surprisingly, the scholars put as much emphasis on the analysis of diverse landscapes as they do on designing them.

Therefore, it is worthwhile to discuss five main sources by five significant contributors to the field of infrastructural opportunism that each take a closer look at the role of infrastructure and energy as it relates to the field 30

1

Dan Hill expands on dark matter on pages 80-86 his book “Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary.”

Above: Drift & Drive. Master plan of Petropolis along the southeast coast of Brazil (Joanna Luo, Weijia Song, Alex Yuen)

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of architectural thinking. In this section, I look to provoke the role of architecture in each of these fields and raise questions that are relevant to my own research. The discussion of relevant literature and projects associated with each source will allow a deeper understanding of supporting literature as well as intellectual allies to the work.

Dichotomous Relationships The first and most significant work on which the thesis is based is The Petropolis of Tomorrow edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper. Bhatia, whose work has included water urbanism within the San Joaquin Valley, works with co-editor Mary Casper alongside a team of researchers from Rice University using speculative design as a method of research.2 The resultant work is that of several dichotomous relationships: water and oil, territorialization and displacement, and extraction and consumption. Comprised of contextual essays, photo essays, and speculative student projects, the anthology embraces a holistic approach to the analysis of large systems of energy, extraction, and consumption and attempts to frame new, optimistic interpretations of the twenty-first-century relationship between urbanism and the extraction of natural resources.

The publication provokes the

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role of the harmonization of natural resources and the city. In his foreword, Bhatia describes the work as “a critical perspective on [the South American] new urban frontier” through “envisioning the oil platform as a new geography of urbanism.”3 Alongside the acknowledgment of Brazilian reliance on oil, the work posits new, twenty-first century “extraction towns” that are “new hybrids between industry and urbanism.”4 I ask, are there similar landscapes that exist within the specific realm of fracking in America, a relatively new technology that has seemingly revived a post-peak oil industry?

Besides, do such infrastructures related to fracking (in commission or otherwise) serve new purposes beyond their intended lifespans?

Cancer Alley The second, which is notably taking a more environmentally dystopic stance, is that of the collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect and Macarthur fellow Kate Orff in Petrochemical America. The book, organized into two main parts of photography and diagramming, posits an interconnected system of logistics, resource extraction, and corporate displacement in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” due to the existing literal and figurative infrastructure of oil.5

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2

This work features photoessays, speculative projects, and writings focused on provoking urbanism’s relationship with energy extraction along the Brazilian coast.

3

Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, Petropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Actar Publishers, 2013), 4.

4 The idea of the twenty first century extraction town implies that Bhatia and his team likely believe that the extraction of oil belongs in future interpretations of the city. The speculative projects that follow seem to affirm this, especially when evaluating the imposition of urban program onto the network of oil rigs within the territory.

5

Orff, on pages 166167, also posits that Cancer Alleys exist throughout the entire world.

Above: Petrochemical Landscape (Kate Orff)

Above: Requiem for a Bayou (Kate Orff)

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Misrach leverages his journalistic, eloquent style of visual storytelling alongside Orff ’s knowledge of the consequences of fossil fuel extraction. The two work in tandem to represent and combat the displacement of minority communities in Cancer Alley as well as the various chemical byproducts of oil refineries, pipelines, and wellheads in the area. Speaking to the unforeseen effect that oil extraction has on entire communities and environmental ecosystems, Orff paints a problematic picture with the petrochemistry industry in Cancer Alley: “We have collectively made a landscape that is a machine for consuming petrochemicals which, in its dispersed state, demands more energy to heat, more gasoline to travel on, and more fertilizer to grow. Treating the denatured extant landscape that we have made as ‘natural,’ we fail to see the systems that have defined it or its consequential scale. In the process, our landscape has become paradoxically and wildly haphazard.”6 It is possible to rethink these processes and to challenge the way we frame them. In consideration of petrochemicals, which I argue have embedded traumas within and throughout the systems, the haphazard, carbon-dependent landscape that Orff refers to is entirely human created and is, therefore, able to be reversed by humans as well.

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Towards Coupling The third work considers an anthology of essays and projects towards an infrastructural opportunism. Pamphlet Architecture 30 Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press and coedited

by InfraNet Lab and Lateral Office, offers the injection of architecture into unlikely realms.

In a foreword by Harvard professor and urbanist Charles Waldheim, the theorist who coined the term “landscape urbanism”: “the work of Infranet Lab / Lateral Office presented…avoids the cliched naivete of much that stands for an infrastructural approach to urbanism today. In so doing the work… reminds the attentive reader of many under-pursued potentials in the infrastructural approach to urbanism yet to be explored.”7 The essays and projects that follow, it seems, are a proclamation of architecture’s ability to confront vast areas of significance using decisive, strategic, and contextual approaches to each issue at hand. Among these are Keller Easterling’s Fresh Field and David Gissen’s The Architectural Reproduction of Geography, both of each discuss landscape and mapping, respectively, as agential components entirely capable of influencing landscapes of infrastructure in their own right.8 A relevant question that arises 34

6

Kate Orff and Richard Misrach, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014), 193.

7

Charles Waldheim, “Urbanism After Form,” in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, ed.

Infranet Lab and Lateral Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 4.

8

Keller Easterling’s research focus on global infrastructure is expanded on in her 2014 book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space.

9

Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd, “Performance as Form,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 5.

10 Stoll and Lloyd, “Performance as Form,” 5.

from the review of the literature featured in the work is that of architecture’s role in large scale issues of infrastructure and the performance of a conglomerated networked architecture. What types of programs can arise given an architectural imposition onto an energy transition? Can emergent urbanisms be examined through the injection of architecture into unlikely fields such as energy extraction?

Infrastructural Ecologies The fourth work, Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, curated by Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd, expands and explores Waldheim’s landscape urbanism theory (in addition

11 Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd, “Regional Fields: Infrastructure Proposition IP2100,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 46-55.

Right: Island PropositionIP2100 (Scott Lloyd)

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to Stan Allen’s infrastructure urbanism work) towards a coupling of infrastructure and architecture that “must respond to new, complex, and fragmented urban landscapes.”9 This coupling, perhaps in agreement with Lateral Office’s Mason White and Lola Sheppard, calls for “new disciplinary hybrids of composites in order to be able to fully respond to the challenges at hand.”10 Among the essays featured in the work, Stoll and Lloyd’s Regional Fields: Infrastructure Proposition IP2100 proposes an ecological understanding of cities due to the globalization of infrastructure, both visible and invisible, and a dichotomy of natural and human systems via an infrastructural “spine” that connects Tasmania and Australia. This proposal, among other considerations, finds itself in critique of oil dependence and seeks to solve it using a decentralized grid of a series of renewable energies: namely, tidal, solar, and wind.11 It is worth noting that though the project considers the infrastructural spine and literal connection between Tasmania and Australia as a networked, composite infrastructure, what is more interesting is the consideration of flows between each proposed system. For example, the linkage between energy used in incineration and energy to be considered in a residential node.

I seek also to affirm using site

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Left: Playground (Janette Kim and Eric Carver)

(to be discussed in part five) as a researched case study within the larger picture of studying how different programs and disciplines can interact and supplant one another in unlikely ways, creating a new ecology. Moreover, the flows that Stoll and Lloyd argue are embedded in IP2100 can also be explored in some of White and Sheppard’s essay New New Deal: Infrastructures on Life Support, which similarly posits a land bridge as infrastructure within the Bering Strait.12 Within my own research, there is no doubt of sizable overlap in the realm of interest in entire infrastructural ecologies. Can such ecologies take place using the proposed site as proving ground for experimenting with techniques of infrastructural coupling?

Strategies for Energy The fifth and final work to discuss is The Underdome Guide to TERRA INCOGNITA

Energy Reform, a tag-team effort

by California College of the Arts professor Janette Kim and Rhode Island School of Design architectural historian Erik Carver, Underdome explores the intricacies of energy policy and the role of architecture’s provocations within it using four main sections of provocation.13 Organized into four sections (power, territory, lifestyle, and risk), the book leverages essays, theoretical architectural intervention at a range of scales, and interviews previously held at Columbia University to explore how design and energy management overlap in an effort to insert architecture’s voice where many don’t expect it. The book considers the creation of framework and strategy as design rather than wall section and floor plan.14 The approach signifies the possibility of designing the systems that artifacts inhabit and affect, not so much the artifacts

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12 Mason White and Lola Sheppard, “New New Deal: Infrastructures on Life Support,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 56-63.

13

Janette Kim and Eric Carver, The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 10-20.

14 It should be noted that Underdome does little to propose actual intervention at a concrete, specific site.

The authors propose systemic change and myriad of options to confront the bigger issue of climate change.

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Though Kate Orff leverages environmental trauma in a similar way I’ve proposed, the work she does alongside Richard Misrach is arguably more effective at communicating the issues, not designing a composite network.

themselves. Interestingly, the work does not serve as a “guide” to anything, as the book’s authors admit; instead, the book “frames debates to inform the decisions that affect our environment.” As it relates to the thesis, Underdome does an excellent job as operating at an axonometric, analytical scale to explain the bigger, much larger issue of climate change.

Through its essays and graphic representations, energy reform is interrogated and a conversation toward alternative energy is begun. Though lacking a specific site, Underdome does not really need one- it accomplishes much through very little contextual evidence, though I am critical of the perception that the work only scratches the surface.

environmental traumas offer a unique framework that incentivizes action toward confronting issues of global heating when considering the way traumas interact with the infrastructures that caused them.15 What types of traumas, either localized or grand scale, influence infrastructural change and improvement? It is possible to hypothesize a new infrastructural ecology through mapping visible networks and its relationship with the invisible networks, the “terra incognita”, the unseen earth, that lies directly beneath it in territories both large and small.

Trauma as Opportunism To conclude, it is imperative that these works be considered guides for my own research in that they each offer different perspectives and methodologies in which they approach the topics of urbanism, infrastructure, territory, mapping, and energy. It is important to note as well that my own research deals with similar topics conducted by the aforementioned scholars. Though it is evident they each analyze systems and the relationships between such systems, I argue that, among these commentaries, trauma should also be included as a dynamic system in its own right in order to justify composite frameworks. Specifically, 37

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01

Production

Left, above: Images of arly oil infrastructure. Circa 1909.

Authors unknown.

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“The word ‘infrastructure’ was used to describe public assets that facilitate production.

Building upon this notion, infrastructures might also be understood as the framework for new economies, not simply during their period of construction but serving as ongoing catalysts.”

“The opportunity for projecting a future infrastructure lies in embracing this condition in a more inclusive manner. The intention is to declare infrastructures as open systems, adaptive and responsive to environments in use.”

New New Deal: Infrastructures on Life Support Lateral Office: Mason White, Lola Sheppard in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks Edited by Katrina Stoll & Scott Lloyd

Mason White and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office posit a larger, more significant role of infrastructure not solely as a construction but also as a driver for “new economies” and “ongoing catalysts”, which I interpret as a challenge to the existing condition of how infrastructure currently stands. They frame their argument using two main projects: a quasi-civic infrastructural project in the Bering Strait and a hydro-ecologic project based in the Colorado River basin.

On a similar note, a history of oil can be surveyed using historical imagery (right). The images shown exhibit both the scale and massiveness of early oil infrastructures, with sites engulfed with smoke and steam not uncommon.

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02

Energy

Above: Modern landscapes of oil. (Aaron Rothman, digital aerial image)

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“Any understanding of the agency of architecture in relation to energy requires an analysis of power in its multiple forms and sites. While the image of government is under fire today, let us not forget that ideological black boxes, such as efficiency, science, and nature, still need to be opened for retooling by those who would rebuild our future environment.”

“Architecture can be an art of unexpected combinations, reacting to hazards by drawing together and making visible common futures.

After all, in a climate crisis, shouldn’t every option be on the table?”

Introduction: Renovating the Global Interior in The Underdome: Guide to Energy Reform Janette Kim and Erik Carver

A tag-team effort by California College of the Arts professor Janette Kim and Rhode Island School of Design architectural historian Erik Carver, Underdome explores the intricacies of energy policy and the role of architecture’s provocations within it. Organized into four sections (power, territory, lifestyle, and risk), the book leverages essays, theoretical architectural intervention at a range of scales, and interviews previously held at Columbia University to explore how design and energy management overlap in an effort to insert architecture’s voice where many don’t expect it. The book considers the creation of framework and strategy as design rather than wall section and floor plan. The approach signifies the possibility of designing the systems that artifacts inhabit and affect, not so much the artifacts themselves.

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03

Systemic Change

Left: Diagram of oil production. Places Journal: The Territory of Extraction: The Crude North. (Michael W. Smith)

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“Replicability of solutions, derived from delivering projects, enables systemic changes that are allied to the public good.”

“Strategic design tries to ally pragmaticism with imagination, deliver research through prototyping, enable learning from execution, pursue communication through tangible projects, and balance strategic intent and political capital with iterative action, systems thinking and user centredness.”

Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary Dan Hill

Dan Hill, an urbanist, designer, and director of strategic design at the Swedish Government’s innovation agency, writes in his essay a multidisciplinary methodology (called strategic design) to approaching large, global challenges such as climate change, public health, and education. In his essay, Hill describes how strategic design praxis can be applied to “big-picture” challenges through identifying a series of questions that enables architects and designers to move freely within a space of problems and questions, meta and matter, and point and difference to provoke new, unexpected solutions to the issue at hand.

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04

Mapping

Above: Oil and Shale reserves and their associated infrastructures. (Map

by Cesar Lopez with Johanna Hoffman / The Open Workshop)

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“Maps illustrate givens for many contemporary architects (in the weak literalness of so-called reality mapping exercises), but much more powerful are maps that illustrate the search for an arena for the architect. In this instance, maps not only show facts (the locations of towns, rivers, and other socio-natural features), they also provide commentary on where architectural ideas will appear and when.”

“Within a large area, they articulate where the architect’s thoughts will and will not be, where his or her effects will be felt and where not.

These maps represent the crisis of authorship that defines the contemporary field, while still demonstrating the capacity of human beings to shape large arenas.”

The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography David Gissen in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism Edited by Infranet Lab and Lateral Office

David Gissen specializes in the overlaps of environmental histories and urbanism with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His essay in Pamphlet Architecture 30, published by Princeton Architectural Press, attempts to challenge the notion of mapping as methodology using geography as a lens to study the “arenas” that design engages itself with. Gissen also challenges the “ahistoricity” of geography that he believes architecture can attempt to question.

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05

Global Heating

Above: Article “California wildfires burn 771,000 acres in one week, killing 5 and degrading air quality.” Washington Post.

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46

“Climate change is expected to have a huge impact on the natural world, including the destruction of valuable ecosystems such as coral reefs and the removal of habitats for many other species. But climate change is also a major social issue...we are all in some way connected to climate change - making it the ultimate global problem.”

“Most IGOs involved in energy governance have three simultaneous energy objectives, the ‘trilemma’ of global energy challenges: energy security, reducing energy poverty, and climate mitigation. It appears, however, that the compatibility of these objectives is largely taken for granted.”

The Global Energy Challenge: Environment, Development, and Security Caroline Kuzemko, Michael F. Keating, and Andreas Goldthau

The Global Energy Challenge brings politics into the conversation of energy and infrastructure. Kuzemko, Keating, and Goldthau all bring an expertise of non-design into the mix. Through associating their research into public policy and energy economics, a thorough review of the global climate challenge is created that leverages an interdisciplinary approach to energy issues. Topics covered include intergovernmental energy organizations, social science data, and the effects of globalization on energy policy and security.

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06

Petroleum Lifestyle

Above: “The Santa Isabel wind farm near Salinas, Puerto Rico, which did not suffer damage after Hurricane Maria but remained largely curtailed months after the storm.” (Nicholas Pevzner, digital photograph, 2020)

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“A national conversation about recalibrating America’s economy away from fossil fuels toward more renewable and sustainable foundations has been intermittent at best, where the extent of the situation just as we begin to understand it seems already beyond our reach.”

“America’s oil-based lifestyle, perfected only in the previous one hundred years, is now so ubiquitous in terms of driving automobiles, buying and building with plastics, and eating petrochemically fertilized and preserved food, that its scale can be difficult to grasp.”

Introduction - Petrochemical America Kate Orff and Richard Misrach

Kate Orff, a landscape architect, urbanist, and leader of the awardwinning landscape architecture office Scape, collaborates with Richard Misrach in a thorough analysis of the various systems and infrastructures at play in Louisiana’s notorious Cancer Alley. Orff posits the dire result of various petrochemical processes at play, from extraction to consumption, and the effect that such large systems have on climate change and global heating. Richard Misrach, a photographer, offers a more intimate viewpoint of the adjacent communities affected by the extractive industries from homes to abandonments.

Orff ’s thesis of climate mitigation via the creation of the “ecological atlas” posits the importance of relegating time and effort toward representing the systems at play and its stakeholders rather than the final product.

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07

Hidden Substrate

Above: IP2100 (Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd)

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“The space of global infrastructure is, then, a fresh field- a new pasture of territory and opportunity that lies on the other side of an altered theoretical framework. The seemingly innocuous layers of infrastructural space are filled with profound indicators about how the world really works, but they also tutor special artistic and political faculties.”

“When making infrastructure or infrastructural architecture, one is not only shaping outlines and profiles, but also agency and disposition.”

Fresh Field Keller Easterling in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism Edited by Infranet Lab and Lateral Office

Keller Easterling, professor of architecture at Yale University and author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, puts forth an infrastructural position of infrastructure as fresh field, unexplored territory, and (perhaps in Dan Hill’s perspective) dark horse. Easterling takes the affirmative position on the idea of the active form (perhaps in opposition to the conventional architecture site) and disposition of infrastructure, countering the common idea of infrastructure as solely invisible substrate. In a separate but similar essay Disposition and Active Form, she argues that the “designer of active forms is designing the delta or the means by which the organization changes - not the field in its entirety but the way it is inflected.” It is possible to consider infrastructure as an entire system that is capable of being reconfigured not solely in the realm of recreating objects, but towards a new inflection of the consumption of energy.

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08

Fracking

Above: The Missouri Triangle, Taft, California (Payam Rahimian, digital photograph, 2011)

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“Over the years, the Southern San Joaquin Valley proved to be a fertile ground for continued oil discoveries. With steam flooding technologies, the valley’s oil production peaked in 1985. Following a drop in production from 1985 to 2011, in recent years, the state has experienced a new boom through unconventional oil extraction, such as hydraulic fracturing. Fracking is not new to California, which has been employing the technique for several decades. What is new, however, is the more extreme process and technology associated with well stimulation that requires great amounts of water, chemicals, pressure, and energy. A modern high-volume hydraulic fracturing project uses up to eight million gallons of water per job. This makes fracking highly controversial, particularly in a region currently starved for water.”

The Cheap Frontier: Operationalizing New Natures in the Central Valley Neeraj Bhatia in Places Journal 05 - Extraction

Towards a non-conventional architectural and infrastructural site, Neeraj Bhatia confronts California as proving ground for adaptive reuse. Water politics, agricultural land use, and hydraulic fracturing methods of oil extraction are argued as the creation of interdependence on natural resources. Bhatia further interrogates acts of extraction in Kern County specifically, citing disproportionately high water usage in comparison to the rest of the drought-prone California.Bhatia’s research includes a thorough analysis of ground-level detail via site photography in addition to work from his firm, Open Workshop, that reveals and analyzes the territories of water and extraction in southern California.

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Territorial Reoperations

Territorial Reoperations IV. Research Methodologies

“Thus, the various cartographic procedures of selection, schematization and synthesis make the map already a project in the making. This is why mapping is never neutral, passive or without consequence; on the contrary, mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of any design process, first disclosing and then staging the conditions for the emergence of new realities.”

James Corner The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention

Interrogating Mapping Given the research emphasis on environmental trauma, infrastructures, and invisible networks, digital diagramming and mapping large amounts of geographical data using GIS (geographic information systems) proves to be useful to frame the research and visualize layers of information. Though maps are the main types of artifacts produced TERRA INCOGNITA

both as a way to research and to visualize the narrative, profiles of trauma, material experiments and diagrams are also used as supplement. Two main methods of mapping, underpinned by Dan Hill and David Gissen respectively (with a very relevant nod to James Corner’s The Agency of Mapping), are developed in the thesis to understand the topics while also attempting to interrogate the act of mapping itself.

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Right: Nodding Donkeys (Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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Dark Matter Matters The mappings, derived from real data, can allude to a site for case study through locating a proving ground in which to operate and propose an exploration of overlaying invisible and visible typologies of information networks.1 Overall, the types of mappings that support the existing research leverage public datasets from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the California Geologic Energy Management (CalGEM) in an effort to map, in urbanist Dan Hill’s words, the “matter” and “dark matter” of a given geographic area.2 Whereas an oil pipeline or oil derrick is a literal matter that is produced, the other “83%” (the petroleum energy organization, the oil logistics chain, and the pipeline operators) is considered dark matter: once again, in Hill’s words, “the substrate that produces,” and in my words, the vector for matter.

This invisible substrate can be drawn in my thesis to Aera Energy LLC, a joint subsidiary of Royal Shell Group and ExxonMobil.

Aera Energy’s sphere of influence within Kern County influences the resultant fracking permits that the state of California issued in 2020, which lead to civil and petroleum engineering groups to design and consider the method of oil and natural gas extraction, the lawsuits that attempted to block it, the marketing teams that

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work to affirm its necessity, and so on and so forth.3 While this is considered the dark matter, the matter is the pipeline and oil derrick. Approaching the problems of the various topics that this thesis has engaged (or will engage in) with the mindset of systems thinking hiding behind an actual object is largely the driver of the environmental analyses and resultant infrastructural ecologies.

Geographic Information With that in mind, other key real-time geographic, geologic, and environmental information including but not limited to shale oil basin locations, oil fields, oil refineries, petroleum terminals, coalbed methane fields, surface and subterranean coal mines, pipeline networks, railroad networks, earthquake fault lines, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricane paths, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and levels of airborne particulate matter are used to create mappings that expose the aforementioned terra incognita.4 Alternative mappings, derived instead using threedimensional GIS views, are also used. Sectional drawings are utilized to exhibit subterranean and above-ground consequences of fossil fuel energy extraction: namely, fracking induced seismicity, hydrocarbon seepage due to idle wellheads, and above ground oil expressions from failed steam injection.

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1

The dichotomy between visible and invisible is discussed thoroughly by Kate Orff in her mappings for Petrochemical America in her introduction.

2

Dan Hill, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, 80-86.

3 Information regarding fracking in California is owed in large part to the FracTracker Alliance, a non-profit nonpartisan group dedicated to factfinding the world of unconventional oil.

See also Wall Street Journal senior energy reporter Russell Gold’s book “The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Revolution and Changed the World,” specifically pages 98-101.

4 The composition of these elements is an attempt to see territory in new ways. Page 210 of James Corner’s “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention” speaks to this quite well.

Searching for the Arena

5

David Gissen, “The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography,” in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, ed.

Infranet Lab and Lateral Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 42-45.

6

James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention, 218220.

One additional concept should be evaluated in more detail in regards to methodology as well as the title of the thesis: the search for the architect’s arena. Again, I will reference David Gissen. The term “arena” in this context is owed in high regards to his essay The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography.5 He argues that maps “illustrate givens for many contemporary architects (in the weak literalness of so-called reality mapping exercises), but much more powerful are maps that illustrate the search for an arena for the architect. In this instance, maps not only show facts (the locations of towns, rivers, and other socio-natural features), they also provide commentary on where architectural ideas will appear and when.”

This thesis seeks to affirm Gissen’s view and its relevance alongside the discipline of geography in light of making visible what is invisible.

In this sense, territory is human construct and arguably dependent on its representation. Likewise, and not unlike Corner’s analysis of Waltercio Caldas’s Japão as returning to “terra incognita” earth unseen, the maps as artifact serve to rediscover earth unseen among landscapes that are perhaps too well known.6 A certain emphasis on the collision of visible and invisible networks seems to be evident, and the existing literature suggests that infrastructural ecologies live and breath within these complex networks. The next question that is provoked is then, as it relates to post-trauma: where is the arena?

Right: Japão (Waltercio Caldas, transfer type, ink, and metallic ink on paper, 1972.)

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Oil Study october 21, 2020

Frames 1-5

Frames 6-10

Frames 11-15

Frames 16-20

Frames 21-25

An experiment was designed to test and study the visual and material properties of oil and water as it relates to spill. Using stored bacon grease and approximately 250ml of water, oil was poured into the glass evenly over a period of five seconds.

The results were further deconstructed into a series of fifty frames with twenty five shown below. The experiment can also be visualized using blending techniques with composites of a series of five frames also being visualized, or with a series of one frame from each series of five, shown to the right.

Wyoming Coal Extraction Networks of coal mining in Wyoming were explored as possible site due to the world’s largest coal mine, the North Antelope Rochelle mine, exporting a sizeable amount of the United State’s coal. This coal, classified according to its volatility, was often exported via rail to various power plants across the country.

(Zachary Orig, digital GIS diagram, 2020)

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Louisiana Offshore Drilling Landscapes of oil pipelines and offshore oil rigs dot the Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama coastline. These rigs connect to a vast landscape of oil pipelines originating from the cities of Corpus Christi, Houston, and New Orleans.

Red and yellow areas represent areas of predicted damage following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. These projections were, unfortunately, extremely incorrect.

(Zachary Orig, digital GIS diagram, 2020)

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California Oil Wells Initial investigations of extraction in Kern County, California revealed an astounding number of oil related infrastructure adjacent to residential areas in Bakersfield, California. The Kern River Oil Field, the third largest oil field in California and the fifth largest in the United States according to CalGEM, was historically once allowed to drain wastewater directly into the water table within the region.

This disposal method has since been banned.

(Zachary Orig, digital GIS diagram, 2020)

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A New World

A New World V. Site Considerations

“The Monterey Shale formation, which covers an area of approximately 2,520 square miles between Central and Southern California, is the site of the majority of unconventional reserves. Even at the lower estimates of ten billion barrels of reserves, this would position the Monterey Shale as a major competitor to the Bakken shale in North Dakota. Presently, there are approximately 84,000 active and new oil and gas wells in California, most of which are located in San Joaquin Valley, but increasingly these wells require water to keep them feasible.”

Neeraj Bhatia The Cheap Frontier: Operationalizing New Natures in the Central Valley

California as Inquiry Using methodologies explained in the previous section, three main energy megaregions are developed as exploratory sites. Trauma is proposed as framework to explore infrastructural issues in this thesis, and likewise, the sites become case studies for further inquiry. I will discuss the three megaregions briefly before elaborating the specific chosen site of the South TERRA INCOGNITA

Belridge Oil Field in Kern County, California, as a particular case study.

Trauma and Infrastructure To begin, initial studies within the entire world suggest masses of energy infrastructure in some areas more so than others. The observations within the regions of the Louisiana coastline and Gulf of Mexico, the eastern 70

Above: Map of Southern San Joaquin Valley Oil and Gas Fields (State of California Department of Natural Resources Division of Mines, geological map, 1943)

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A NEW WORLD

Left: Wyoming surface mining.

(Dustin Bleizeffer, digital photograph, 2020)

Wyoming surface mining system, and the desert oil landscape of Kern County corresponds to three infrastructural landscapes: the landscape of offshore oil logistics, the landscape of rural surface coal mining, and the landscape of fracking wars respectively. These landscapes also correspond to certain environmental traumas.

One need not ponder too long to see the relevance of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and the resultant scrutinization of offshore oil drilling, or perhaps the 1952 Kern County earthquake and the questions of fracking induced seismicity. The main takeaway is that the overlay of trauma within sites of extraction are commonplace (see section I.) Effects of Extraction Urban and suburban areas are heavily affected economically, environmentally, and politically by acts of extraction occurring in and TERRA INCOGNITA

around it. Kern County, California, is relevant within all three realms as it is located on top of the Monterey shale formation, one of the most abundant oil reserves in the world. As one of the most polluted counties in the US, it sits at the southern of the San Joaquin Valley and encompasses the midsized city of Bakersfield as well as several rural towns scattered within it.1 Kern County. Economically, and not surprisingly, Kern County is the state’s largest producer of oil and accounts for 4% of overall US oil production according to the California Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources.2 Environmentally, the county suffers from severe air pollution and water shortage. Neeraj Bhatia, mentioned earlier in this series of writings, unpacks the tensions within the county’s oil and agriculture industries as disproportionately massive consumers of water. He writes: 72

1 Nate Berg, an environmental reporter for The Guardian, writes in his 2017 article: “Emissions from agriculture, industry, rail freight, and road traffic together create one of the country’s worst concentrations of air pollution a condition exacerbated by geographic and climatic conditions that trap dry, dirty air over this southern section of Central Valley like the lid over a pot.”

2

More relevant information regarding crude oil production can be found via the US Energy Information Administration’s website: www.eia.gov

3

Neeraj Bhatia, “The Cheap Frontier: Operationalizing New Natures in the Central Valley,” Scenario Journal 05, (Fall 2015).

4

Per 2010 US Census data.

“Emerging as a primary resource for the state, the tensions between agriculture and oil are strongest in Kern County where both industries have consumed approximately 2.7 million acrefeet of water in recent years. To put this in context, Kern County’s water consumption could support an urban population of 15.9 million people at Los Angeles’ per capita consumption rate.

Not only is this water a precious resource to both industries — in a place with one of the lowest groundwater tables in the state and a lack of regulation over water effluent dumping, this water and its cleanliness is also heavily threatened.”3 To add, it might also worth noting that such issues have a profound relationship when viewed alongside statistics of demographic and income.

Kern County, though one of California’s most diverse counties, teeters along the poverty line given median income of $15,760 per capita.4 The issue is further exacerbated politically by the lack of government oversight within niche regulation areas of the oil industry, such as idle wells and surface expressions, according to FracTracker Alliance.

The combination of these factors enables Kern County as a dynamic, loaded megaregion worthy of intervention. Coupled with ideas of an infrastructural ecology explored through scholars including Katrina Stoll, Scott Lloyd, Mason White, and Lola Sheppard, Kern County’s numerous oil fields and factors of influence serve as a significant area for further study.

Right: The Missouri Triangle, Taft, California (Payam Rahimian, digital photograph, 2011)

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A NEW WORLD

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The United States of Energy Mapping United States Energy Logistics (Zachary Orig, digital GIS diagram, 2020)

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A NEW WORLD

Wyoming: Surface Mining

Above: Mapping Wyoming surface mining operations (Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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Louisiana: Offshore Oil

Above: Mapping Gulf of Mexico offshore oil operations (Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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A NEW WORLD

Southern San Joaquin Valley Wildfires, shale oil basins, and spheres of influence in the southern San Joaquin Valley (Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

Post-Traumatic Infrastructures

Post-Traumatic Infrastructures VI. Proposal “It is now doubtless that the question of infrastructure will dominate the concerns of architects, landscape architects, urbanists, and planners for the foreseeable future, both as a site of research and analysis and as a field of potential intervention.”

Geoffrey Thun and Kathy Velikov Conduit Urbanism: Retooling Regional Ecologies of Energy and Mobility

Composite Networks Geoffrey Thun and Kathy Velikov write in their essay Conduit Urbanism: Retooling Regional Ecologies of Energy and Mobility that “small-scaled adjustments in technology, new performative or typological constructs, or a reorganization of constituent elements, may have vast repercussions in [infrastructural ecology’s] mechanics.” They TERRA INCOGNITA

elaborate: “Architecture’s agency lies first in being able to recognize the system and its agents, and second, in finding effective means of implementation and intervention within this matrix.”1 Architecture is able to operate at large scales within the human construct of territory and lends itself to the strategies of the architect and designer to operate multidisciplinary in analysis, communication, and implementation. As architects and designers, we must ask: what agency does architecture have within the energy, geology, geography, extraction, economics, etc. of Kern County? What futures does Kern County hold for an energy transition, if any? What sorts of economic, environmental, or political factors serve as influencing components within its localized (and global) ecology?

This proposal seeks to approach the South Belridge Oil Field in 82

1

Geoffrey Thun and Kathy Velikov, “Conduit Urbanism: Retooling Regional Ecologies of Energy and Mobility,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 64-69.

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Kern County, California, as case study for infrastructural ecology given a matrix of trauma that is embedded within the site.

The site, analyzed with sets of economic, environmental, and political issues in the last section, recently received eighteen of the twenty-two newest permits for fracking in California in 2020.2 Thus, the project frames trauma as opportunistic for infrastructural intervention in light of various environmental issues that the oil field (and Kern County as a whole) experiences.

Triptych The thesis proposes three angles in which to engage: traumatic inquiry, post-frack energy, and utopian playgrounds. It does not propose a sequential approach in each with given time frames; instead, it allows an ebb and flow with these concepts as the semester progresses, allowing for each to influence one another.

Traumatic inquiry explores trauma as framework, confronting the oil field’s environmental traumas: namely, fracking induced seismic events, idle wellheads, and surface oil expressions, though there are others.3 How can design inject itself into solving the environmental traumas of fracking induced seismic events, idle wellheads leaking toxic hydrogen sulfide, and surface oil expressions? What effect does addressing these traumas have on the surrounding communities in TERRA INCOGNITA

and around Aera Energy’s sphere of influence in Kern County?

Furthermore, post-frack energy will challenge the area’s reliance on harmful unconventional oil extraction practices such as fracking (though, again, there are others.)4 Can we interrogate new ways of utilizing energy that do not utilize unconventional oil and natural gas extraction? What symbiotic or catalytic role does oil and natural gas extraction have within possible alternative forms of energy? What are strategies for the future of an energy transition beginning at the South Belridge Oil Field? How do these new energy systems embed itself into the existing landscape of oil and natural gas extraction, and over what period of time (if any) would such a transition take place? Lastly, utopian playgrounds experiments with coupling programmatic performances and interactions within the South Belridge Oil Field toward an infrastructural ecology that interacts not only with its constituents and stakeholders, but with the various complex systems embedded within it. How can utopian programmatic possibilities of the energy transition, such as but not limited to decentralized energy communities, solar farms, wind farms, almond agricultures, recycling stations, energy tourisms, oil/gas history museums, residential nodes, and others play into the bigger picture of allowing design to influence infrastructure 84

2

Per a FracTracker Alliance article entitled “California, Back in Frack” by Kyle Ferrar, MPH.

3

Traumatic inquiry covers much of what is already discussed - one important point to make, for clarification, is the fact that these inquiries lead to design intervention.

4 Another example includes extraction from oil (tar) sands.

Jim Robbins, an environmental journalist, writes extensively on this extraction in Alberta, Canada, in his Places Journal article “The Dilbit Hits the Fan.”

at a number of different scales in an unlikely discipline of study?

Not unlike the speculation of designing a composite network according to Stoll & Lloyd, can a myriad of infrastructure perform, live, breath, and respond to environmental inputs? Can the outputs of such a system become the inputs of another, creating an infinite chain of use and reuse?

questioning the agency of the architect and the ability of architecture to insert itself into non-architectural questions. The thesis affirms that architects and designers have the tools and systems mindset to engage in such conversations. In the words of Janette Kim and Eric Carver: “After all, in a climate crisis, shouldn’t every option be on the table?”

Every Option on the Table

Above: California Governor Newsom discussing the oil expression (background) with petroleum engineers.

Right: The Lucas Gusher at Spindletop, Texas (John Trost, 1901)

Overall, the project takes multiple forms of analysis, systemsthinking, and intervention. The gall to research and comment on interdisciplinary issues is undoubtedly difficult. That being said, the focus of the proposal is to illicit questions that lead to explorations that perhaps lead to more questions. As the thesis suggests, that there are actually multiple sites and proposals concerning the subject matter at hand. That being said, it is evident that this thesis is interested in many things and seeks to provoke many things. It is advantageous to say that it is more interested in the underlying relationships, systems, and performances that take place within the many things. Though the existing fields that many of the aforementioned engage in overlap, whether that’s environmental science, architecture, landscape architecture, infrastructure, urbanism, geography, or policy, this thesis seeks to operate trans-disciplinarily and without boundary. The thesis is overall 85

POST-TRAUMATIC INFRASTRUCTURES

The Consequences of Fracking Unconventional oil extraction, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) among them, is often misconstrued as typical oil extraction and leveraged as a political tool. It is necessary to understand that fracking does not take place at every drilled oil well - it is a technology and technique that allows higher rates of productivity through otherwise idle wells by drilling horizontally and creating cracks through forcefully injecting fracking fluid.

Environmental consequences of fracking include chemical seepage, water contamination, induced seismicity, and hydrocarbon pollution.

(Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020)

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Belridge Permits The South Belridge Oil Field has had a history of unconventional oil extraction, illustrated as yellow dots on the map to the left. In addition, Governor Newsom approved twenty-four additional fracking permits in 2020, eighteen of which are located at the South Belridge Oil Field, illustrated as red dots. Along with the North Belridge Oil Field, these permits pose renewed risks in the area.

(Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020) Data from Energy Information Administration datasets (EIA, 2016)

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Population Distribution

Pipeline Network

Oil Well Density

Atmospheric Particulate

Cropland

Oil Fields

Kern County Particulate Kern County’s direct relationships with its existing oil infrastructure and its agricultural industry reveal invisible territories of oil fields, atmospheric particulate measures, and population.

(Zachary Orig, digital diagram, 2020) Data from United States Department of Agriculture, CalGEM, and Energy Information Administration datasets (EIA, USDA, CalGEM 2016)

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Investigating Belridge

Investigating Belridge VII. Design as Intervention “Infrastructural opportunism is the strategy that leverages what has typically been investment in mono-functional, efficiency-focused infrastructure (like highways and power lines) for added social and environmental gain.”

Linda C. Samuels A Case for Infrastructural Opportunism

Climate Fictions The second part of this booklet investigates Belridge as a site of criticality. The site has presented itself a number of challenges, from environmental traumas to its use as political leverage. The task is then to interpret these findings and propose new futures for the oil field.

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The wasteland, interpreted from land and air, lends itself to an ordered chaos. The system-ofsystems that dictate Belridge, ranging from a hierarchical organization of infrastructure (in the form of pipelines, oil derricks, petroleum terminals, natural gas storage areas, etc.) to the natural systems that such infrastructures are affecting (in the form of ecology, water, atmosphere, etc.)

These shifts in the natural world allow designers to leverage two main methodologies of design research toward a reinterpretation of environmentally unstable areas: climate fiction (cli-fi) and speculative urbanism.

Thus, the images presented in this section seek to explore infrastructure in new and usual ways while also illustrating Belridge’s existing conditions through mapping, drawing, and narrative.

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Right: The Detoxification Rig (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Above: Belridge Oil Field Section (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Above: South Belridge Oil Infrastructure (Zachary Orig, GIS diagram, 2021)

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Above: Kern County Periphery - Oil Field Network (Zachary Orig, GIS diagram, 2021)

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The World We Created A future where oil is all we know (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Above: LOCUS Landing (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Above: Helmet Digitalisms (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Left, above: Seed Dispersal Apparatus (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

Above: LOCUS Seed Dispersions (Zachary Orig, speculative mapping, 2021)

Left, below: Silo Pipelines (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Above: LOCUS Flight Paths (Zachary Orig, speculative mapping, 2021)

Right, above: Oil Cleanup (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021) Right, below: Dispersal Sites (Zachary Orig, digital image, 2021)

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Infrastructure Diagrams Given the landscapes of infrastructure that are present in Belridge, each one can be interpreted and represented as its own system. In each stage of these systems, possible traumas reveal a network of dangerous volatility where things can go wrong at nearly every stage of refinement.

(Zachary Orig, digital diagrams, 2021) TERRA INCOGNITA

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Speculative Urbanisms

Speculative Urbanisms VIII. Design as Narrative “A reconsideration of logistical urban infrastructure is pressing... greater attention and integration to the landscape of waste, water, transport, food, and energy may in fact elucidate the more fundamental processes that underlie and precondition the ongoing and unfinished urbanization of North America. ” Pierre Bélanger Landscape as Infrastructure

Strangeness The ability of architects and designers to act upon scenes of speculative urbanism are equally interrogated in this thesis. In regards to pedagogy, I will discuss two main designers that leverage speculative urbanism in much of their work.

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First, Smout Allen, an architect and designer whose work is arguably interrogating the role of representation more so than the actual form of architectural objects, leverages drawing techniques that imply ignorance to scale and realism.

Specifically, the exhibition of Allen’s Liquid Kingdom (which at one point was exhibited at the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2017) is interpreted as a speculative center for tourism and glorification of a seemingly vacant landscape.

Such representations are possible to be read concerning form, mainly- but what is more impressive is the careful craft and composition of urbanistic elements that implies a spatial organization that is on one hand impossible and, on the other hand, strange.

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Right: The LOCUS Exodus (Zachary Orig, photomontage, 2021)

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based on socioecological issues.

These issues include oil extraction, water shortages, trash, and even space debris among many others. Though the work is most easily read at first-glance as an experiment in the representation of Earth’s many issues, its focus on geography and “projective design” through an understanding of the socioecological is unmistakably useful as it relates to this thesis.

Left: Networks of Conduits (Zachary Orig, photomontage, 2021)

Right, above: After Oil (El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn with Jia Weng, Rawan Al-Saffar, Kartiki Sharma, Hsin-Han Lee, Namjoo Kim, Sihao Xiong, 2016)

Right, below: Of Oil and Ice (El Hadi Jazairy + Rania Ghosn with Kelly Koh, Rawan Alsaffar, Max Jarosz, Shuya Xu, 2017)

Socioecological Issues

An analysis of any one of the projects featured, which confront a variety of issues noted earlier, exposes a world that is brittle, volatile, and vulnerable as a result of human activity. Therefore, the thesis in its finality visualizes a story of Belridge that is equally dystopian and utopian through a critique of humanity’s obsession with consumption. The story amplifies strangeness through hyperbole - apparatuses designed to clean up the oil field are intentionally not designed in detail or in section. Rather, an experiential approach is taken to immerse those who observe it.

Second, the work of Geostories and of the firm Design Earth led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology contribute to a body of speculative work that seeks to interpret Earth’s issues in new ways. The work postulates design intervention to an earth in crisis and seeks to render images and narrative 119

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“ postscript december 4, 2020

Creating Ethos

When I first began thinking about what this thesis would become, I had become fascinated with Columbia GSAPP professor Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City, a reference book that sought to communicate the complex systems of the city to someone who had no idea how the city operated. Among the many systems she analyzed, “Power” was the third chapter and illustrated the movement of electricity, both non-renewable and renewable, from its inception to its extraction, refinement, and distribution. She, like James Corner, was interested in making the invisible, visible.

Looking through the past work of many semesters, I realized that many of the readings and scholars I was interested in were operating at a scalar analysis of making the invisible visible. The work presented within this thesis (and perhaps my own older work) operates within global scales to micro-scales and everything in between in an attempt to communicate what I feel is important to myself and to the larger discipline of architecture as a whole. I believe part of the reason the undergraduate thesis occupies much of an undergraduate student’s thought is due to its intimate ownership.

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A project that was born from our own interests, our own research, and consequently our own drawings- not that of a professor who was teaching a studio that we either chose or were assigned. Any possible retooling could yield entirely new projects which could then become new explorations in their own right.

I think, when discussing the ethos of the self-directed project, it is possible to be intimidated by the wide range of topics we as students have been exposed to over the past four and a half years. Perhaps the beauty of the self-directed project lies not in the work itself necessarily, but in the diversity of the work that is explored. As a design school, and furthermore as a design pedagogy, it has always seemed that our work was an eternal work-in-progress. Theses and dissertations, regardless of the level or context, have the ability to reveal a designer’s innermost thoughts, beliefs, and values. Beyond a graduation requirement, it is both a tool for the future and, in some ways, the future. Final reviews could be perceived as the end of the traditional design project- but, fortunately, not for the self-directed project. The self-directed project is really the creation of an ethos for how we as designers will move the only way we were taught: forward.

Zach

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Notes I. Terra Incognita

positioning

II. Anthropogenic Trauma

framing

1 Per The Washington Post, this number increased to thirty as of December 2020. For comparison, the average is twelve. And for more comparison, estimates of the damage caused on US mainland peaked in the tens of billions of US dollars.

2 The blackout is a significant talking point of Jane Bennett’s essay “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.”

3 The effects of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rica’s fragile energy infrastructure is further discussed and explored in Nicholas Pevzner’s essay “Speculative Designs for Energy Democracy”, published in Scenario Journal 07: Power. Pevzner led a studio at UPenn in the fall of 2019 looking to restore resiliency after evaluating the long-term energy challenges that the island faced. Good stuff.

4 The Bayou Corne incident was photographed seven years later by Virginia Hanusik with text by Katy Reckdahl in her essay “When the Ground Gives Way.” 5 In reference to the 1968 Farmington Mine disaster.

6 Per a 2007 US Chemical Safety Board investigation after the incident.

7 According to CNN’s 2008 coverage of this accident, one account said that the slude “could fill 800 olympic-sized swimming pools.”

8 JR Sullivan’s extensive coverage of this story can be found here: http://www.jr-sullivan.com/dirty-work 9 The sole surviving miner that day, Randal McCloy, wrote a letter to the families of the twelve deceased miners. The letter was published by the Charleston Gazette amd noted that he and another miner had confirmed the presence of methane inside the mine three weeks before the incident.

III. The Agency of Infrastructure

allies

Dan Hill expands on dark matter on pages 80-86 his book “Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary.”

2 This work features photoessays, speculative projects, and writings focused on provoking urbanism’s relationship with energy extraction along the Brazilian coast.

3 Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper, Petropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Actar Publishers, 2013), 4.

4 The idea of the twenty first century extraction town implies that Bhatia and his team likely believe that the extraction of oil belongs in future interpretations of the city. The speculative projects that follow seem to affirm this, especially when evaluating the imposition of urban program onto the network of oil rigs within the territory.

5 Orff, on pages 166-167, also posits that Cancer Alleys exist throughout the entire world.

6 Kate Orff and Richard Misrach, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014), 193.

7 Charles Waldheim, “Urbanism After Form,” in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, ed. Infranet Lab and Lateral Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 4.

8 Keller Easterling’s research focus on global infrastructure is expanded on in her 2014 book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space.

9 Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd, “Performance as Form,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 5.

1

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Stoll and Lloyd, “Performance as Form,” 5.

Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd, “Regional Fields: Infrastructure Proposition IP2100,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 46-55.

12 Mason White and Lola Sheppard, “New New Deal: Infrastructures on Life Support,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 56-63.

13 Janette Kim and Eric Carver, The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 10-20.

14 It should be noted that Underdome does little to propose actual intervention at a concrete, specific site. The authors propose systemic change and myriad of options to confront the bigger issue of climate change.

15 Though Kate Orff leverages environmental trauma in a similar way I’ve proposed, the work she does alongside Richard Misrach is arguably more effective at communicating the issues, not designing a composite network.

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IV. Territorial Reoperations

methodology

The dichotomy between visible and invisible is discussed thoroughly by Kate Orff in her mappings for Petrochemical America in her introduction.

2 Dan Hill, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses, 80-86.

3 Information regarding fracking in California is owed in large part to the FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit nonpartisan group dedicated to fact-finding the world of unconventional oil. See also Wall Street Journal senior energy reporter Russell Gold’s book “The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Revolution and Changed the World,” specifically pages 98-101.

4 The composition of these elements is an attempt to see territory in new ways. Page 210 of James Corner’s “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention” speaks to this quite well.

5 David Gissen, “The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography,” in Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, ed. Infranet Lab and Lateral Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 42-45.

6 James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention, 218-220.

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V. A New World

locating

Nate Berg, an environmental reporter for The Guardian, writes in his 2017 article: “Emissions from agriculture, industry, rail freight, and road traffic together create one of the country’s worst concentrations of air pollution a condition exacerbated by geographic and climatic conditions that trap dry, dirty air over this southern section of Central Valley like the lid over a pot.”

2 More relevant information regarding crude oil production can be found via the US Energy Information Administration’s website: www.eia.gov 3 Neeraj Bhatia, “The Cheap Frontier: Operationalizing New Natures in the Central Valley,” Scenario Journal 05, (Fall 2015).

4 Per 2010 US Census data.

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VI. Post-traumatic Infrastructures

proposal

Geoffrey Thun and Kathy Velikov, “Conduit Urbanism: Retooling Regional Ecologies of Energy and Mobility,” in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, ed. Katrina Stoll and Scott Lloyd (Berlin: Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2010), 64-69.

2 Per a FracTracker Alliance article entitled “California, Back in Frack” by Kyle Ferrar, MPH. 3 Traumatic inquiry covers much of what is already discussed - one important point to make, for clarification, is the fact that these inquiries lead to design intervention.

4 Another example includes extraction from oil (tar) sands. Jim Robbins, an environmental journalist, writes extensively on this extraction in Alberta, Canada, in his Places Journal article “The Dilbit Hits the Fan.” 141 1

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Acknowledgements College of Architecture + Design Faculty James Rose Brian Ambroziak Scott Wall Tricia Stuth Ted Shelton Gregor Kalas Avigail Sachs Jason Young Jennifer Akerman Friends + Family Chanel Briones Maria Orig Lawrence Orig Anthony Orig Becca Orig Annmarie Groves Taylor Groves

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2020-2021 University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design Thesis Cohort

Allie Ward Schuyler Daniel Michael Travis Rachel White Maggie Redding Brian Nachtrab Paige Lincoln Arden Gillchrest Zachary Orig

alternative urbanism: collective spatial agency

entropic architecture: preservation by citizen maintainers

materializing the line

on display: interrogating the in-between

artifice domesticity: analyzing queer identity’s situation in the twenty-first century home

a nation is a machine for capital

fluxual disturbance

double think: architectural diplomacy and subterfuge

terra incognita: post-traumatic infrastructural opportunism

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Terra Incognita post-traumatic infrastructural opportunism