Nuclear Waste Sites

Humanities class assignment at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), instructor Jill Vesci, 2013

This theoretical proposal presents an archetypal approach to warning future generations of spent nuclear material. The assignment called for the development of a means by which we might deter future inhabitants of this planet from unknowingly stumbling upon our spent nuclear rods.

One could believe that the only way to communicate a notion of danger sufficiently transcendent of eon or language would be call to certain allegories which we can only hope descend throughout time.

For this, a design to block future wanderers from nuclear waste must call upon something so intrinsic to the human condition that its incorporation evokes unparalleled emotions. Perhaps one of the strongest of these elementals to our lives is the ground. For our species’ entire lifespan, it has solidly supported us. To decompose the ground is to decompose the human condition from its deepest fears, metaphorically. Its erosion speaks to our most inherent insecurities. It harps to the complete dissolution from life and certainty.

How should the ground be eroded? It seems natural that the form of a sharp form could suffice. The triangular figure, when brought to an extreme point, eludes danger and trepidation. Such an approach was taken by the US Department of Energy in its design for “Landscape of Repulsion”, an architectural signifier designed to warn passersby of a nuclear waste site in the far future.

There remains in this design, proposed in the 1980s, possibly one problem absolute to its interaction with human nature. Beyond conveying so much visually of danger, the form becomes so dense that it nearly blocks the vista behind itself. This poses an inherent issue when combated with human curiosity. The warning should in no way provoke man’s keen sense of exploration. It must be, in all ways, transparent. It must warn and show at once, grabbing the human’s deductive reasoning and deep allegorical relationships in the psyche.

For this precise reason, voids should be cut through the form, and man should be presented the ability to pass if he likes. It must be his choice to choose his fate based on his observations of the warning.

In these ways, the deformed forms provide an illusion to death. The composition, and in this sense the humanity which it contains, must be killed visually. Triangular stabs into its form signify its destruction. It suffers before the eye, and, when properly aligned, harps to the human eye’s ability to gather figures into a field. If this field can be manipulated to caution the mind to one specific area, the warning of the site should be sufficiently.