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Infrastructure

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 9 months ago

Infrastructure Projects

 

Patricia Johanson's art is designed as functioning infrastructure, including sewers, water treatment systems and highways. It also provides wildlife habitat and parks for people. see www.patriciajohanson.com and Art and Survival: Patricia Johanson's Environmental Projects by Caffyn KelleyInformation on the book at: http://www.patriciajohanson.com/artandsurvival/index.html

 

Patricia Johanson's award-winning design for a pedestrian crossing in Salt Lake City.

 

 

Part bio-engineer, architect, and artist, Viet Ngo first began designing and building wastewater treatment plants that use his patented LemnaTM System (lemna is popularly known as duckweed) in 1983. Rather than use mechanical or chemical processes, Ngo's system uses small floating aquatic plants grown in specially designed ponds to treat waste to a very fine degree.

 

Malcolm Wells is an architect who experienced a devastating revelation in 1964 when he realized that "the most basic characteristic of all man-made construction... is its role as killer of living land." Since then, he has designed, built and advocated for a "a world made green again not in spite of the built environment, but because of it. Earth covered. Alive!" His book Infra Structures contrasts North America's crumbling, destructive infrastructure - roads, bridges, airports, seaports, ferry terminals, etc - with proposals for new, long-lasting, earth-coved public structures that will heal instead of smothering the land. See www.malcolmwells.com

 

 

Wells suggests that a great earthen roof could be built over the lifeless pavement at BC Ferry terminals. He writes, "Picture massive earth cover with thousands of tiny fir seedlings planted there. Picture ground covers and fish hawks. Think about the nutrients that would enrich the surrounding sea in the run-off from each rain. The solar engine would be back in business above the trucks and buses, and the land would once again be at peace."

 

 

A review of several artists working on infrastructure projects can be found at http://greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/sect5.html#urban

 

 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles describes landfills as social sculptures and accessible earthworks. She has been the artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977. She first made headlines with "Touch Sanitation," a performance piece in which the artist shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers. She is now working on a huge landfill site on Staten Island, which will be closed and gradually made into a park incorporating a memorial to victims of the World Trade Centre bombing Sept. 11, 2001 (whose remains, mixed with mountain of debris, were buried in this landfill). See Cabinet Magazine Issue 6, Spring 2002, It's About Time For Fresh Kills. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/6/freshkills.php

 

Robert C. Morgan, Touch Sanitation: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, High Performance Archives, http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/touch_sanitatio.php

 

In the community of Bear River, Nova Scotia, Solar Aquatics Technology is used to process sewage in the center of town. With this technology sewage treatment occurs in tanks containing a variety of ecosystems, including bacteria, algae, floating plants, snail and fish, that process the sewage before it goes through an artificial marsh similar to a natural wetland. Children play in the clean water at the end of the process. Sewage is not seen as a waste product, but as food that is used by the biological community. The Bear River facility has made the town proud and hosted visitors from all around the world, including “environmental tourists.”

 

http://www.rachel.org/bestPrac/detail.cfm?bestPrac_ID=35

 

Zero Waste

"Waste causes great loss of value and resources. Humans are the only species that create waste. We can learn to identify all types of waste and through their elimination, save money and achieve a more sustainable world. The visionary goal of Zero Waste expresses the need for a closed-loop industrial/societal system.

 

 

See http://www.zerowaste.org/index.htm

 

See also: Humanure Handbook

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