POST-FILL

2012-present

Not consequently a wal-mart sits adjacent to the site which has collected the residual consumer goods of the suburban culture. For years the region has been building it’s own foundation for a tabula rasa, for a landscape project. In the course of ten years since remediation decomposition has altered the site. As our consumer desires grow stronger our landfills also grow larger. In the mid-west there are nearly seventy five landfills nearing capacity. While simple solutions for remediation have been developed, post cap and greening these sites lay dormant as they shift, decompose, and settle through time.

Lyon township acquired user rights to the republic waste remediated landscape. An understated and uninformed reaction by the community was to utilize the site for ubiquitous neighborhood programming; benches, baseball fields, playground structures, and picnic areas. While the programming on top of the cap remained static during the first ten years of acquisition, the waste below continued to dissolve and compact ever changing and moving, a dynamic landscape.

While engineering has imagined infrastructure able to anticipate the changing nature of the contained waste, little opportunity has emerged to image new landscapes of possible futures as eccentric, unproportional and dynamic as the waste below them. Coupling relevant issues of designing through dynamic landscapes and engaging the remediation process, unexpected narratives and scenarios emerge. Designing through projection rather than the present. 

Water re:
As the land slopes and shifts low points wander through the field of monitoring caps. Using the weight of water and the shedding topography of the landscape, the proposal concentrates water to pools which over time create a weight large enough to amplify focused pressure to the compacting garbage. In the end the landscape finishes as a large crater filled with water. The residual berms which retained the waste erode into the lake mixing to a fully remediated marshland.

Follies:

The transforming terrain also leads to adjusting top soil. As the base decomposes, the water swales and the ground erodes. Building interventions atop such a charismatic territory is reduced down to the simple issue that rigid bodies do not like moving foundations. Instead the work imagines a series of follies; initially nestled within the ground bridging, connecting and grounded. As the earth adjusts to the happenings underneath it wears away from the structure slowly exposing more while reducing its footprint.

Manicuring:

Spotted through the landscape are a series of regulation caps. These caps monitor the methane levels being released from the decomposing waste. Currently a $30,000 budget is allocated to the mowing of a landfill. Why? because these caps need to be visible at a distance for safety and maintenance purposes. A small area surrounding each monitoring cap is all that is required to be manicured, this can be done with the mowing capabilities of a small heard of sheep. Tethered to each cap, the sheep graze the lawn providing the necessary radius of short grasses while greatly reducing budgetary constraints and maintenance efforts.

The means of extending our projections to the extreme allows a reach to the ends of reason and find emergent and revealing scenarios which would not have been discovered in the passive attention of resolving issues one by one. To resolve the post-landfill is to propose a projective landscape.

with William Liow