Heat Island
LAGI (Land Art Generator Initiative) 2012 Competition Entry
Site: Freshkills Landfill, Staten Island, New York
Team: Jake Boswell, Nina Thomson, and R.Mark Thomson

 

 

In 1975 Alan Sonfist reclaimed a piece of land in Lewiston, New York that had been used as a toxic chemical dump. The project, entitled Pool of Virgin Earth, collected wind-blown seeds throughout the spring, eventually producing a modest collection of wildflowers and invasive shrubs. Sonfist described this as a reminder of what the city once was or, more provocatively, could yet be (Sonfist, 1998). In 1982 Agnes Denes reclaimed a former dumping site at the tip of Manhattan, now Battery Park City, transforming it into her much celebrated Wheatfield, a critique of “food, energy, commerce, world trade, [and] economics.” Denes referred to this work both as “an intrusion into the citadel, a confrontation of High Civilization;” but also as a nostalgic “Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, forgotten values, simple pleasures” (Denes 1996 (1982). In both examples the artist embraces the waste dialectic of the late 20th century American metropolis, what Lawrence Buell has described as Toxic Discourse (Buell, 1998). Waste is both shunned as the literal by-product and also, perhaps cloyingly, embraced as the figurative life-blood of the industrial/corporate city. Both artists set forth the act of reclamation as a critique of, and bulwark against, the proverbial on-rush of civilization. Yet, both artists also freely acknowledge the ineffable attraction of the work’s hybridity — the illicit quality of an adolescent nature co-mingling with the implicit corruption of a toxic culture, and the increasing awareness of the complex and often ambivalent dialog between human actions and ecological responses. Denes’ work particularly, achieves this dialogue through the overt spectacle of immediate juxtaposition. The spectacle of Wheatfield is not defined merely by the act of planting a field of wheat on a former dump site, but by doing so within the cradle of the American cultural zeitgeist, Manhattan. Images of Wheatfield do not suggest a small, isolated, installation within the yawning maw of the city, but rather a comparable opponent of equivalent scale and grandeur.  The spectacle of juxtaposition thus brings home the obvious social critique, and yet also heightens the odd sense of ambivalence rooted in the eerie beauty of the ecologically disturbed and culturally dislocated (Williams 135).

 

Sonfist’s and Denes’ work precedes and underlays the Landscape Urbanism movement which surfaced in the mid 1990’s and early 2000’s and was, perhaps, most thoroughly realized in the original, year 2001, competition for Fresh Kills. Like the land artists before them, Landscape Urbanism sought a way of intervening within the built environment that utilized ongoing ecological process and management as fundamental design tools. Landscape Urbanism eschewed the idea of a static and consumable image of nature, for a nature in process, recognizing the scale of time and the complexity of ecological and cultural entanglements that continually shape and re-shape the cultural landscape (Corner, 2006).

 

Field Operations’ Lifescape, the winning entry into the original competition, and the basis for the current Fresh Kills draft master plan, envisions the transformation of the landfill into a “synthetic, integrative nature, simultaneously wild and cultivated, bewildering and cultivating.” This synthesis is achieved through an elegant drawing out of site constraints and potentials for varying “patches,” or ecological communities defined by the constraints of site aspect, soil moisture and quality, ecological drift and an imposed and corresponding disturbance regime. The proposed landscape is thus a direct reflection of the site’s altered state. Moreover, the design capitalizes on the site’s constructed condition in order to enhance the region’s ecological infrastructure, adding heterogeneous prairie and meadow patch types that are alien to the Mid-Atlantic Region in order to augment the site’s ecological capacity beyond its original condition. Lifescape’s project description states that “nature is no longer the image we look at, out there, but the field we inhabit, an active lifescape where life below ground, on the ground, in the water, and in the air is continually manufacturing new environments as it reproduces and evolves” (Field Operations).

 

 

Heat Island proposes an intertwined set of interventions: a landscape scale augmentation of the site that utilizes its embodied infrastructure and energy in order to amplify its cultural and ecological value within the region; and a new system of waste-to-energy infrastructure that would allow the City of New York to function in a more ecologically and economically sustainable way.

 

Capitalizing on the existing site infrastructure, Heat Island proposes a reutilization of the existing methane syphoning system in order to create a modified geothermal heat-pump. This heat pump would draw out the low grade heat being generated deep within the landfill and distribute it to the surface via the existing network of methane syphoning pipes. Raising the temperature of the site at the ground level would result in a fundamental alteration of its climatic, and thus biotic, nature. Since higher temperatures have been shown to lead to higher rates of precipitation, it is theorized that the heat pump will generates the equivalent of a lowland equatorial rain forest on the site – a jungle.  Beyond its explicit aesthetic value, the jungle becomes a hyper-performative bio-type within the regional network of habitat patches, a spatial anomaly allowing for a broader range of animal and vegetal species than would otherwise be possible. Moreover, the jungle becomes a permanent registration of the ongoing life of the landfill below, expressing the profound scale and ambivalent hybridity of human alteration of the land – an ecological cyborg.

 

For the production of energy, the Jungle is selectively harvested or “disturbed” in order to provide a balancing agent for a series of four urban-scale anaerobic bio-digesters. The bio-digesters, located on the existing flare station sites, re-utilize the landfill’s waste delivery and transfer infrastructure in order to bring in food and garden waste from across the city. Collectively the bio digesters would remove 220,000 wet tons of municipal solid waste from the city’s sanitation budget per year and add 6 Mega Watts of electricity to the city’s power supply.

 

A conceit of the project is that it co-mingles rather than conjoins the act of power generation and the act of sculpture.  Like Sonfist’s Pool of Virgin Earth and Denes’ Wheatfield, the spectacle of the jungle, the action of its perpetual cycles of disturbance and change, and the anomalous aspect of its being are meant as a critique of consumer culture and traditional ideas of nature, particularly the nostalgia and ecological fascism of the nativist movement. The bio-digesters feed off but juxtapose the jungle, residing within it as appropriately utilitarian monuments to waste culture — banal temples to the gods of consumption.