Thermal Grove

Hybridizing Greenhouse Production with Waste-to-Energy

Vasteras, Sweden

Spring 2016

In Collaboration with Mike Johnson

Man has willed the elements of nature into his technological apparati, requiring additional energy to be extracted from the earth to promote his toils. These pursuits have run unabashed during times of wild speculation and ‘progress’ as he would assert. As he has moved forward with such ambitions, the cycles of an environmental system that he himself has defined, have been accelerated in a way that has disrupted their inherent balance, and now looms as a detriment to his own wellbeing. Is this the inevitable future for which he is headed?

 

But man is a clever creature. He now proposes ways to begin slowing this imbalance, and one day hopes to begin the process of reversing it. His fellow man is not yet convinced. He must be swayed by other means. Enchanting visions of the strange and familiar beseech his good judgment. They appeal to his curiosity, as his prior discoveries drift into focus. Does this foreign landscape, still partially deciphered, signal

a shift? Are we at a turning point? If not in the scientific conclusiveness, then perhaps in the perceptual realm of acceptance. There will be dissenters, there will be zealots, but what does this place tell us about our capacity to speed up or slow down seemingly unworldly forces governing our human experience?

 

Perhaps it is good to leave a vestige of that for which we are currently headed, a warning sign, a beautiful catastrophe.

The Thermal Grove is a direct response to the perceptual stigma harbored by the public for Waste to Energy facilities and their inherent place within the urban realm they inhabit.

How does one approach the stigma of the barren wasteland? These zones of service and industry were once peripheral blights on the cusp of the city proper, but growth and expansion threaten to overtake them, creating an uncomfortable tension between their necessary evils and the idyllic urban realm.

What shift in paradigms would need to take place in order to alter their perception in the public eye? One response is the creation of an equally poignant corporeal reality in the Thermal Grove. This project proposes that the byproducts of the Waste to Energy process become the tangible instigators of this radical landscape, an other worldly experience - one which is both alluring and aloof. What if it provoked questions of creation and destruction simultaneously?

The industrial process of production embodies an incredible amount of energy. The grove initiates a symbiotic relationship whereby the typical process of waste removal to produce heat and electricity, is amplified by transforming the fuel into atmospheric potential. It becomes an environment for growth.