Archinect - News

Developer Fabrix employs urban mining to cut carbon footprint in its projects

2022-02-01T17:46:00-05:00

When old office blocks are demolished, their steel frames are typically smelted down to be recycled, emitting thousands of tonnes of carbon in the process. But at One Broadgate, the steel beams that once framed the London headquarters of inter-dealer broker TP Icap Plc will instead be salvaged from the site and recycled by developer Fabrix. Chief Executive Officer Clive Nichol says the example proves it’s possible to “apply the circular economy to structural elements of buildings.”

Fabrix has purchased 139 tons of steel from the contractor behind the demolition of One Broadgate and plans to use it on other projects in London. The process, known as urban mining, recovers and resells raw materials from waste products.

As reported by Bloomberg Green, engineering consultant AKT II estimates that reused steel could reduce the carbon impact of a building by up to 80%. The U.K. is attempting to encourage this practice, in which construction materials with large carbon footprints would be resold through a marketplace. This move comes at a time of ballooned steel prices in the U.K.

Sean Lally speaks with Adam Frank about ‘Alien Anthropocenes’ for episode 93 of Night White Skies

2022-01-26T10:49:00-05:00

In a new partnership with Sean Lally's Night White Skies podcast, we're going to be sharing new podcast episodes with our readers here on Archinect. Night White Skies addresses "architecture’s future, as both earth’s environment and our human bodies are now open for design," with recent episodes covering issues such as contemporary fiction, CRISPR, evolution and genetics, Radical Gaming & Climate Histories.

In Sean's latest episode his guest is Astrophysicist Adam Frank, author of the book ‘Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.’ The following text is written by Sean...

There is a burden that comes with believing you’re unique. It’s not particularly overbearing when it’s an individual's talent or an animal’s quirky behavior, celebrated for its differences. But somehow believing you're unique in your destructive thoughts and behaviors is quite an alienating experience.

Most of us deal with such shortcomings knowing others also deal with them. Seeing others work ...

How 'Anthropocene mining' offers architects growing alternatives to the way we build cities

2021-12-17T14:05:00-05:00

Why don't we re-use what we've already extracted, rather than gouging the planet for ever more raw materials? This thought has spurred a growing band of architects and building firms to look at how to re-use the huge range of materials already hiding within our built environment, from concrete and wood to the metallic bounty within electronic waste

Architecturally-rich cities are both a fount of reusable materials and a way of circumventing the awful cycle of environmental and human destruction caused by mining for the raw substances needed to help mitigate the effects of the built environment on climate change.

Recent projects like the updated version of the Barbican-backed London Centre for Music replacement, which aims to reuse 90% of the site’s existing materials, or the Parisian Montparnasse Tower remodeling currently being undertaken by Bellastock offer the industry high-profile models of how to adapt to the new mandate of climate-sensitive materials usage set forth in Duncan Baker-Brown’s groundbreaking 2017 book The Re-Use Atlas.

Previously on Archinect: This house made of trash teaches a lesson in green housekeeping

"The hardest thing is to change our way of thinking," Bellastock technical director of reuse Mathilde Billet told the BBC. "We need to imagine the city as a material bank, conducive to re-use. There are no ...

The AIA California has declared a state of climate emergency amidst another intense fire season

2021-08-14T13:30:00-04:00

On July 24, 2021, the AIA California Board of Directors officially declared a climate emergency to immediately accelerate the de-carbonization of the built environment. This action calls on each of us to make immediate and meaningful impacts in our profession, it enables AIA CA to move rapidly and boldly to influence public policy, and it challenges other organizations to join us in recognizing the importance of climate action and the immediacy of the issue.

Wildfires have dominated the news cycle for three of the last four fire seasons. Architects all over the state have been proffering solutions ranging from ICFing homes to fireproof prefabricated Quonset huts.

The AIA declaration comes on the heels of the UN’s devastating Climate Action Report. The chapter had recently issued a statement urging the legislature to adopt updated building code policies across the state, which has lost nearly 60,000 structures to fires since 2005.

California is experiencing a historic drought that has coincided with a multipronged housing crisis. More people have left the state than moved in for the first time in history. The AIA's full emergency declaration can be accessed here.

Nearly two decades in the making, Dubai's Palm Jumeirah nears completion

2019-06-24T15:49:00-04:00

The Palm Jumeirah has been Dubai’s most enduring work in progress for two decades. Now developer Nakheel is adding the finishing touches. Several major additions to the world’s biggest man-made island are approaching completion as it transitions from a near-perpetual construction site to a near-finished community—with hundreds of shops and restaurants set to open in the year ahead.

"Among the latest additions are a shopping mall and a tower that will form the centerpiece of the island, located close to the site originally earmarked for a 48-story Trump Tower," reports Mansion Global.

Palm Jumeirah in 2012. Photo: Richard Schneider/Wikipedia.

Meanwhile next door, the hyperambitious and once-declared-dead-but-now-happening-again The World artificial archipelago of 300 islands is reportedly seeing revived development again.

Geoff Manaugh joins Liam Young at Archinect Outpost to discuss the just-released book Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene

2019-03-14T14:21:00-04:00

Join us at Archinect Outpost on March 23th, from 7–9pm to host Liam Young and his newly edited book: Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene.

Young and Geoff Manaugh will be in attendance to present their thoughts on the book, followed by a book signing. Machine Landscapes can be preordered from Archinect Outpost here.

You can RSVP here to reserve your spot at the event.

From the publishers at Wiley Books: "Machine Landscapes surveys the architectural spaces in the world that are now entirely empty of people. The data centers, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialized agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis."

New City, Liam Youn...

By no means a comprehensive description of the city of the future

2018-10-16T11:50:00-04:00

More speculation on the always-relevant subject of "Old People in Big Cities Afraid of the Sky." #futurism #urbanism #demographics #climatecrisis #Mid21C

Joe Frem, Vineet Rajadhyaksha and Jonathan Woetzel report on four major forces (the competition for talent, an increasingly connected world, the Anthropocene age, and technology’s ever-expanding role) shaping today’s cities and offer a 14-point vision for thriving cities of the future.

h/t @Bruce Sterling

'Deep adaptation' in the face of planetary climate catastrophe

2018-10-02T18:36:00-04:00

In the language of climate change, “adaptation” refers to ways to blunt the immediate effects of extreme weather, such as building seawalls, conserving drinking water, updating building codes, and helping more people get disaster insurance. [...] But some researchers are going further, calling for what some call the “deep adaptation agenda.”

Bloomberg's Climate & Environment Reporter, Christopher Flavelle, lays out a range of climate change projections—from the general consensus to the more pessimistic—and how an array of 'deep adaptation' measures could help to mitigate the damage. "Rather than simply asking people to water their lawns less often [...]," Flavelle writes, "governments need to consider large-scale, decades-long infrastructure projects, such as transporting water to increasingly arid regions and moving cities away from the ocean."

Global heatwave is symptom of early stage cycle of civilisational collapse

2018-08-13T18:59:00-04:00

This summer’s extreme weather has hit home some stark realities. Climate disaster is not slated to happen in some far-flung theoretical future. It’s here, and now.

Penned by Nafeez Ahmed, investigative journalist, recovering academic, tracking the Crisis of Civilization, the article points to a more urgent than urgent times in terms of civilisation and not merely the climate change.

Also an urgent quote from a friend internalizing the article for architecture, "I am surprised that with contemporary conditions that require a radical re-orientation and re-conceptualization of discipline and profession, architecture professors continue to talk about elements, tectonic, "Fundamentals", context, composition, scale, poche, sustainability... Bla,bla... Let's build a new ontology..."

-Alex Santander, Architect. Tijuana, Mexico

The World is coming back to life in Dubai

2018-02-14T14:26:00-05:00

Underwater bedrooms, ‘Lohan Island’ and snow all year round – a decade after it was scuppered by the financial crash, the fantasy archipelago of 300 artificial ‘countries’ is back in business. Has anybody learned anything?

Remember The World? Dubai's lofty vision a decade-and-a-half ago to recreate the globe's map with artificial, celebrity-owned islands dredged from the Gulf floor that was just as grandiose and monumental as its financial crash in 2008? Well, it appears to be back in business again.

The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright takes a trip to the long-abandoned and now-bustling-with-development-again artificial archipelago of 300 islands 2.5 miles off Dubai's coast and confirms: "After a decade in limbo, The World is back – with more ambitious plans than ever before."

And yes, Lindsay Lohan is designing her own island, too.

Taking up the challenge of the back loop

2017-07-01T19:40:00-04:00

Like a Shell futurologist, one can imagine multiple disastrous futures for Miami. Will it become a southern Super Venice, a la Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York of 2140...Perhaps the hard realism of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife is more apt...Or imagine a super Katrina resulting in something a little more Odds Against Tomorrow:

from Key Largo John Pennekamp nature center, by author, February 12, 2017

Stephanie Wakefield penned some Field Notes from the Anthropocene, inspired by a recent honeymoon in Miami Beach. In which she explores 'experimentation' as a mode of dwelling in the Anthropocene and the emancipatory possibilities offered by the concept of the 'back loop.'

Norwegian government dedicates $4.4M to upgrade Arctic seed vault

2017-06-14T12:06:00-04:00

The Global Seed Vault, built in the Arctic as an impregnable deep freeze for the world’s most precious food seeds, is to undergo a multi-million dollar upgrade after water from melting permafrost flooded its access tunnel. No seeds were damaged but the incident undermined the original belief that the vault would be a “failsafe” facility, securing the world’s food supply forever. Now the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, has committed $4.4m (NOK37m) to improvements.

Global warming has caused meltwater to penetrate the Global Seed Vault in the Arctic

2017-05-22T12:39:00-04:00

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

Containing almost one million packets of seeds, the Global Seed Vault is intended to serve as something of a biological back-up in the era of mass, man-made environmental destruction. It's buried under permafrost, which was thought to ensure that the structure would remain impregnable for thousands of years. But already global warming has threatened this archive of living matter.

“This is supposed to last for eternity,” stated Åsmund Asdal at the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, which operates the seed vault. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Princely pests: new study reveals wealthier homes tend to host more insect species

2016-08-04T13:58:00-04:00

When it comes to cleanliness, common sense suggest wealthier homes are at an advantage. Live-in maids and cleaning services should, ostensibly, help create antiseptic, exclusively human enclosures. Yet new research shows there’s a correlation between socioeconomics and the presence of bugs in the home: more affluent neighborhoods host a greater number of species than lower-income areas.

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: more green space means more plants that harbor insects. In fact, socioeconomics impacts diversity across the board, with higher affluence associated with more birds, bats, reptiles, etc.

Humans don’t live aside “nature”, but are an integral and influential force in ecology. Despite all our pesticides and cleaning products, our homes are entangled in a mesh of bacteria, fungi, plants, insects, and animals. According to the study, the average home hosts about 100 species of arthropods, ie. insects and spiders

"Our houses are really permeable and dynamic,” s...

Global warming is redrawing national borders

2016-06-16T12:35:00-04:00

"Climate change is happening so fast and on such a huge scale that it's forcing us to change the borders of a country," said head of the mapping expedition, Marco Ferrari... The borders of a country are "something we always consider as stable, as a political device, the foundation of the modern state, the most sacred thing, but this huge natural transformation makes clear how disruptive and alarming these changes are," he said.

"Even the biggest and most stable things, like glaciers, mountains—these huge objects, they can change in a few years. We live on a planet that changes, and we try to make rules, to give meaning, but this meaning is completely artificial because nature, basically, doesn't give a shit."

Global warming is one of the most visible aspects of the Anthropocene, a name for the era in which humans activity registers on the geological record. For more on the Anthropocene and its relation to architecture, check out past some past Archinect coverage:

Were Neanderthals the first architects?

2016-05-27T15:51:00-04:00

[...] the stalagmite rings were older than any known cave painting. It also meant that they couldn’t have been the work of Homo sapiens. Their builders must have been the only early humans in the south of France at the time: Neanderthals. The discovery suggested that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than anyone had given them credit for. They wielded fire, ventured deep underground, and shaped the subterranean rock into complex constructions.

The scientists trying to assist evolution and breed "super-coral"

2016-04-15T12:47:00-04:00

“A lot of people want to go back to something,” [said Ruth Gates]. “They think, If we just stop doing things, maybe the reef will come back to what it was. [...] Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.” [...] The power of selective breeding is all around us. Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, pigs [...] But the super-coral project pushes into new territory. Already there’s a term for this sort of effort: assisted evolution.

“'In the food supply, in our pets, you name it—everywhere you turn, selectively bred stuff appears,' Gates observed. 'For some reason, in the framework of conservation—or an ecosystem that would be preserved by conservation—it seems like a radical idea. But it’s not like we’ve invented something new. It’s hilarious, really, when you think about it.'”

As the world heats up, seas begin to rise, and farmland goes dry, our inherited ideas of "nature" are put under pressure. Here's some Archinect-exclusive features on unnatural nature and other aspects of life in the Anthropocene:

Global warming may be much more catastrophic (and happen much quicker) than we imagined

2016-03-22T13:50:00-04:00

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

James Hansen, an indisputably important climate scientist and activist, alongside a group of other influential experts, has released a new, 52-page paper that revises much of mainstream expectations for global warming. Hansen has called it the most important work he's done.

A synthesis of paleoclimatology, climate models, and modern observations, the document suggests that global warming will have a more violent and catastrophic impact than previously expected.

The scientists involved believe that Greenland and Antarctica could experience ice melt at much faster rates than imagined (up to several meters in a century), and that the melt could create a feedback loop further intensifying the effects of global warming.

In short, the cold, fresh water from the melted ice sheets would trap a layer of warm seawater beneath it, leading to a process known as "stratification." Such "blobs" of cold water – which could perhaps already be forming off the coast of Greenland (see image above) – would...

Philosopher Graham Harman to join SCI-Arc faculty

2016-02-23T19:40:00-05:00

Earlier today, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) announced that Graham Harman, Ph.D. will be joining its Liberal Arts faculty. Harman, who taught previously at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, has played a pivotal role in the development of "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology" (OOO), two related strands of contemporary philosophy.

Since his early exploration of the concept of "tool-being" in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Harman has laid the groundworks for a popular and influential revision of metaphysics, characterized by the rejection of anthropocentrism, which privileges the human over the nonhuman, and "correlationism", or the post-Kantian assumption that reality emerges from human thinking.

“Graham is a unique and notorious figure in philosophy and the arts. His fresh metaphysical project offers a way of understanding reality not as a product of the human mind, but rather as a cornucopia of independent and vibrant objects, la...

A cardboard and carbon-emission economy: the long-term effects of our desire for instant gratification

2016-02-16T14:00:00-05:00

A handful of scientists and policy makers are...grappling with the long-term environmental effect of an economy that runs increasingly on gotta-have-it-now gratification [...] The environmental cost can include the additional cardboard — 35.4 million tons of containerboard were produced in 2014 in the United States, with e-commerce companies among the fastest-growing users — and the emissions from increasingly personalized freight services.

As internet retailers compete to provide as-close-to-instant services to satiate our increasing desire for rapid gratification, our collective ecological footprint grows. The problem isn't just the cardboard boxes piling up on your doorstep, but also the carbon emissions required to get that Postmates or Amazon Prime delivery into your hands.

And according to experts (or at least those profiled by the Times), the responsibility lies equally with consumers as it does with the companies providing the services. In short, we need to "slow down consumption," states Robert Reed, spokesman for Recology, the main recycling processor in San Francisco.

For more on the ecological impact of our consumptive patterns, take a look at these links:

China may dam its only free-flowing river left

2016-02-04T13:07:00-05:00

...the Nu [River is] the last remaining major watershed in China without a dam. For years, though, the local government has planned to build a series dams along the Nu, too. Entire villages have already been relocated to make way. If the dams are built, China’s last free-flowing river will turn into a series of cascading lakes.

“It’s a uniquely Chinese phenomenon,” smiled Fan. “A local government sets up an investment company, attracts investors, approves and builds its own projects with developers. All of them make enormous profits. They claim this helps alleviate poverty, but it only causes common people more problems.”

Related:

The Age of the Anthropocene: a change as big as "the end of the last ice age"

2016-01-08T17:39:00-05:00

The new study provides one of the strongest cases yet that from the amount of concrete mankind uses in building to the amount of plastic rubbish dumped in the oceans, Earth has entered a new geological epoch. “We could be looking here at a stepchange from one world to another that justifies being called an epoch,” said Dr Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and an author on the study published in Science on Thursday.

"Are we human?" Curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announce concept for 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial

2015-12-01T15:05:00-05:00

We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes... Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the curators of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, announced the conceptual framework for next year's biennial in a press release held today in a library of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

Its overlong title, ARE WE HUMAN?: The Design of the Species: 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years, indicates primary conceptual concerns: the omnipresence of design, or the world as a designed object; the category of the human, alongside and contra that of the animal; and an expanded temporal focus that "spans from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years."

"Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human," the curators state in the press release. "The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species."

Rather than celebrate particular designers or imagine speculative futures, the biennial will be an "archaeolo...

Fatal shores? Sea snakes wash up on Southern California beaches

2015-11-10T18:38:00-05:00

For the first time since the early 1970s, a highly venomous sea snake has turned up on a southern California beach—the latest in a string of unusual wildlife sightings, including hammerhead sharks and red-footed boobies. Though a bite from this yellow-bellied snake can theoretically be lethal, shutting down all nerve signals to the respiratory system, “Jaws” this is not: the snake attacks only when provoked, and no one has ever documented a human fatality from Pelamis platura.

According to the Economist, the sea snakes and other unusual sea creatures popping up along the coast of Southern California are a symptom of the emergence of a mass of warm water, which may likely lead up to one of the most intense El Niño's in memory.

"This snake, which typically lives in tropical waters, has never before turned up so far north (in this hemisphere at least). While it is not clear what has brought it to Ventura County, experts say its arrival is a symptom of the record high ocean temperatures along the west coast. The phenomenon, climate scientists say, appeared in 2013 with the emergence of “the blob”, a large mass of warm water (four or five degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average) in the Pacific Ocean."

The Grand Canyon is contaminated with mercury

2015-08-26T21:59:00-04:00

Sadly, even the Grand Canyon, a symbolic landmark of America’s natural environment, unfortunately isn’t immune to the ravages of pollution. Concentrations of mercury and selenium in canyon’s food webs — the interconnected food chains in the environment — regularly exceed levels considered risky for fish and wildlife. Those findings are from a study from the U.S. Geological Survey scientists published in the journal Environmental Toxicity and Chemistry.

It's the kind of news that reads like Anthropocene poetry – both existentially dark and metaphorically potent. This vast fissure in the Earth's crust, which presents us with two billion years of geologic history and basically defines our image of the sublime, has been thoroughly contaminated by a relatively short period of industrial agriculture and other human activities.

More precisely, the selenium likely comes from agriculture and mining (although it also exists in the soil naturally). The mercury is thought to have been brought in by algae from Lake Powell, originating in "distant coal-burning electrical plants."

The researchers explained, "The findings of the present study add to a growing body of evidence showing that remote ecosystems are vulnerable to long-range transport and subsequent bioaccumulation of contaminants."

Researcher studied minnows, invertebrates and fish at six sites along the Colorado River and recorded mercury and selenium levels that exceed toxicity threshol...

Meet the jury of Archinect's "Dry Futures" competition: Ian Quate and Colleen Tuite of GRNASFCK

2015-08-24T14:48:00-04:00

Ian Quate and Colleen Tuite are the co-founders of “nomadic landscape architecture studio” GRNASFCK, based in New York City. The two began collaborating as graduate students at RISD in 2011, bringing Quate’s knowledge of botany and landscape architecture together with Tuite’s art practice background to focus on “the geologic past and speculative future”. Tuite is currently an independent art practitioner and Quate works as a designer for Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.

Their work under GRNASFCK is not that of an average landscape architecture firm, instead focusing on “unsettling easy or comfortable ideas about the relationship between architecture and ecology” – and their approach to the drought is no different. Their critical focus on geological time frames California’s drought as unique in the historical context of human civilization, where the overwhelming tendency in dealing with droughts is to simply up and leave.

From GRNASFCK's position on the opposite side of the coun...

New satellite images show progress in China's island-building project

2015-07-01T14:19:00-04:00

New satellite imagery of remote islands in the South China Sea shows several Chinese island-building projects are finished. In five of seven island projects, attention has turned to the next phase: building bases with potential military uses on the islands.

Taking a cue from the Gulf states, China has been engaged in a massive island-building project in the South China Sea. New images from the Washington Post show the staggering progress that is being made, with the first buildings cropping up. While relatively small, the South China Sea is one of the most important shipping channels in the world – and may also hold a massive reserve of oil and gas deposits. Control of the waterway has become a source of increasing geopolitical tension in the region and internationally, with the United States and other countries asking China to cease island-building operations. But according to the Chinese, the artificial islands are a legal expression of their sovereignty.

While artificial islands may seem incredibly modern – if not downright sci-fi – there's evidence that humans have been doing it for some time now. The massive Aztec city of Tenochtitlan largely consisted of artificial islands, or chinamitl, surrounding a smaller natural island in Lak...

Luxury Anthropocene: Dubai gets its first private floating islands

2015-06-11T13:25:00-04:00

Completely stable on the water, the base of the island is built to last for far over 100 years and will create a new underwater habitat for sea life, the company states, adding, it is building similar islands in Maldives and in Miami in the US.

Dubai's "The World", a man-made archipelago of islands arranged like a world map, is now spawning private floating homes. The "luxury floating private islands" will be designed to specific client wishes, and reportedly will all come with a pool. Developed by Amillarah Private Islands, these aren't in fact the only floating-homes being developed in The World – Kleindienst Group is selling "floating seahorses", with submerged bedrooms and bathrooms. Just don't call it a houseboat.

Editor's Picks #415

2015-05-14T09:32:00-04:00

Nick Cecchi penned a review of ‘Lina Bo Bardi: Together’ on view at the Graham Foundation through July 25th. He found the

"narrow focus wisely limits Together to investigating the conditions and experiences that helped shape Bo Bardi’s mature approach to architecture...Bo Bardi’s work and life resist reduction and compartmentalization into terms easily digested. To experience and understand Together is to experience the sum of conflicting experiences, opinions, and buildings Bo Bardi brought into this world".

midlander commented "that drawing of chairs is beautiful! I love her work. It's rugged and big without being standoffish. Knew nothing about her background - interesting".

Plus, Nicholas Korody published Getting Lost in the Ozone, the third installment of the recurring feature Architecture of the Anthropocene.

News
This week at the AIA National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, NCARB aims to settle the debate over the title “Intern Architect” with an address by CEO Michael Armstrong ...

Tracing how your litter ends up in the ocean

2015-04-03T17:55:00-04:00

Even on a dry day, tens of millions of gallons of dirty water dumps into the ocean through the region’s vast storm drain system. The 3,500-mile network was designed and built to empty streets of rainwater, but tons of litter also flow into the ocean through the intricate system of curbside drainages, underground channels, pumps and creeks. Stormwater pollution puts beach swimmers at risk, particularly after it rains. Marine animals and plants can also get sick or die

This is a really fascinating piece that attempts to trace how a cigarette butt flicked into a gutter in Bel Air could make its way across LA and end up in the ocean via Marina del Rey. Visualizations like this feel important because, while we may notice signs on the sides of the sidewalk saying that the gutter leads to the ocean, it's difficult for the individual to comprehend the complex way in which they participate in a problem like marine pollution.

For a more specifically architectural perspective on this issue, check out Architecture of the Anthropocene, Pt. 1.