Toxic urbanism : hearth, heimatlosigkeit, home

Abstract

In an increasingly toxic world where the average person's body contains 29/35 of the toxins listed on the restricted and hazardous substance list, toxicity is unavoidable. This thesis asks how toxins can re-imagined to become active agents in design. Through the negotiation between hard and soft boundaries this work speculates on an architecture of gradients, densities, and velocities to produce temporal spaces of occupation. The year is 2024. Humanity has settled in a condition of toxic urbanism, contained by the toxic wastelands of the periphery. The Anthropocene has wreaked havoc and produced a world of toxins. Early estimates of the exponential destruction caused by our toxic landscapes of production were misled by constantly shifting metrics of toxicity provided by different agencies, bureaus, and offices. Our remediation efforts were too slow, too costly, and failed to produce any agency in the age of toxicity.We continued to produce superfund sites across the country. Landscapes of toxic air, contaminated soil and polluted water became our second nature. As we shifted from one machine age to the next, the continued autonomy provided to production landscapes allowed increasingly more toxic means of production to be developed, this methodology assured there would be no post-toxic future. Within the confines of toxic urbanism, people suited up in protective suits every day. They wore protection more for peace of mind than protection of body. As we destroyed the land, the interior was perfected, continuous halls stocked with machinery created a perfectly sterile environment that defined people's lives, the sprawling mechanized interiors of the no-stop city had finally been realized. We had come a long way. Ever since humanity created the cave fire, toxins had been part of our environment. The hearth, originally acted as both an object of environment and an object of culture. As we followed the flames into modernism we found ourselves in a state of homelessness explicated by the dichotomy between our technological culture and its toxic means of production. Heidegger, described the sensation as Heimatlosigkeit, the signification of our existential orientation in the era of Gestell. Humanity has however always been a risk adverse society, and as they began to reject the sterile environments of safety for toxic environments of experience agency was produced in the design of toxins. In an increasingly toxic world, this thesis explores how toxins can become active participants and drivers for the production of temporal spaces defined by the hard and soft boundaries they operate within. Architectural interests in materiality and dimension are replaced in favor of velocities, gradients, and densities that define zones of occupiability.