Geoff Manaugh is the author of BLDGBLOG and The BLDGBLOG Book, former senior editor of Dwell magazine and a contributing editor at Wired UK. In addition to lecturing on a broad range of architectural topics at museums and design schools around the world, and freelancing for such publications as The New York Times, Domus, and Abitare, Manaugh has taught at Columbia University, USC, the Pratt Institute, and the University of Technology, Sydney. In August 2011, he became co-director of Studio-X New York.
Apocalypse isn't only catastrophic destruction. The Greek word also means revelation, epiphany – a new beginning. What would you like to see destroyed before we can start something new?
Well, you’ve caught me on a bad day! Right now, I would say nearly everything should be torn asunder and replaced in a great flash with something new. The world is full of places and people – even new technologies – whose sudden absence would not trouble me.
Of course I don’t spend too much time wishing for a specific building or piece of infrastructure to disappear; I tend to think even the worst of the built environment can be absorbed in some fashion, even if only in a J.G. Ballard-type way, where terrible landscapes – shopping malls, corporate office parks – are recuperated, albeit through a kind of willful psychosis. These landscapes, if examined from the right perspective, can inspire a new, very alien way of thinking – a kind of apocalypse of thought – in which humans encounter something very definitely non-human. Or that was human but has become something else.
Have you ever been to a place or building that you would call »apocalyptic«?
Straightforwardly: yes, many times, parts of Berlin in the late 1990s, parts of north Philadelphia today, and many abandoned sites and facilities around the world. Just two weeks ago I was at a derelict rocket-fuel production complex in the middle of the Everglades in Florida. It was like Angkor Wat, surrounded by overgrown canals with large subtropical birds in the marshes nearby.
Moreover, I think every site, place, or landscape can be apocalyptic. Like you said: apocalypse means both something that is ending and something new that will be revealed. In this literal sense, a forest on the verge of spring growth is apocalyptic; even animal bodies in the chrysalis stage, or as an embryo, are going through a kind of anatomical apocalypse.
If we look at recent catastrophes such as the tsunamis in Japan or Chile, or the hurricanes in New York and New Orleans: can design save the world?
A different type of catastrophe comes to mind, actually: the much slower, invisible catastrophe of nuclear waste. I am fascinated – and deeply troubled – by the problem of radioactive waste, although radiation often lacks the instantly compelling media images we see from earthquakes or tsunamis. Nonetheless, it will outlive human civilization by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. How to design around this fact is just an extraordinary challenge: something more ambitious than a pharaoh’s tomb, but using insights from materials science. Your project – a kind of cemetery for atoms – needs to outlast entire mountain ranges: architecture designed on the timescale not of cities but of a planet. There are projects being built to avoid or postpone future catastrophes, designed on a scale so vast they can justifiably be called mythological.
I had the surreal pleasure of visiting such a site last summer. My wife and I went down – literally underground – into a specially built salt mine outside Carlsbad, New Mexico. There, the U.S. Department of Energy has been burying low-level nuclear waste, using the geological formation of the salt bed itself, as a permanent repository that should in theory, last hundreds of millions of years. A very sobering place to visit.
If the world ends on December 21, 2012 where would you like to be for the end-times, either as a safe place or simply a nice final resting place?
It depends how the world will end. The older I get, the more I think I just want to be with my wife somewhere when it happens – maybe ideally in Los Angeles or out in the desert somewhere.
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