ACSA Faculty Design Award
2016-2017 Winner Submission Materials
Pacific Aquarium
RANIA GHOSN
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
EL HADI JAZAIRY
University of Michigan
1
-2000m
-1500m
-1000m
-500m
0m
PACIFIC AQUARIUM
Mag 0
SEA LEVEL
EPIPELAGIC
Mag 1
1000 km
Mag 2
EXOSPHERE
{The Sunlight Zone}
Mag 3
0 km
-0.20 km
Mag 4
MESOPELAGIC
Mag 5
800 km
N
Satellite
{The Twilight Zone}
Camelopardus
Cassiopeia
600 km
-1.00 km
Continental Shelf
Polaris
E
W
N
N
Cepheus
400 km
Ursa Minor
Lacerta
Ursa Major
-2.00 km
Thuban
Draco
BATHYPELAGIC
Canes Venatici
Cygnus
Cor Caroli
200 km
THERMOSPHERE
Vega
{The Midnight Zone}
Lyra
Albireo
Delphinus
Equuleus
Leo
Bootes
Vulpecula
Coma Berenices
Corona Borealis
Hercules
Sagitta
-3.00 km
Denebola
Alphecca
E
W
Jupiter
Arcturus
Continental
Slope
Leo Minor
Mizar
Deneb
Altair
Serpens [Caput]
Aquila
100 km
Virgo
80 km
Mesopause
Serpens [Cauda]
Ophiuchus
Crater
Scutum
Meteor
Spica
Capricornus
-4.00 km
Moon
Libra
Corvus
Saturn
Mars
ental
Rise
MESOSPHERE
Antares
Stratopause
Contin
Scorpius
Sagittarius
Microscopium
Corona Austrina
Lupus
Norma
SE
40 km
Telescopium
Centaurus
ABYSSOPELAGIC
SW
60 km
Ara
Circinus
Triangulum Australe
°
20°
340
°
33
Ozone Layer
STRATOSPHERE
30
0°
40
0°
°
32
Ocean Basin
31
30
°
60
0°
°
Commercial
Airplanes
10 km
290
°
Tropopause
280°
Phillipine
trench
-7.00 km
Puerto Rico trench
Izu Ogasawara
trench
GARBAGE
PATCH
GARBAGE
PATCH
Middle America trench
Marianas trench
270°
Mount Everest
Aleutian trench
Japan trench
Ryukyu
trench
80°
90°
Bougainville trench
Java (Sunda) trench
260°
4 km
Tonga trench
HADAL
{The Trenches}
-8.00 km
100°
6 km
Kurile
trench
70°
8 km
-6.00 km
50
0°
20 km
-5.00 km
{The Abyss}
Crux
Rigel Kentaurus
Hadar
Peru Chile trench
How do we make sense of the
ocean at a moment in which it is
presented in crisis? The ocean is
a site of significant anthropogenic
transformations. It is simultaneously
the biggest resource for life on
earth and a large extraction and
dumping ground –of gyres of
marine debris, deep sea mining
plumes, and a carbon sink.
To live in an epoch shaped
by extensive environmental
transformations is to be confronted
with risks and uncertainties at the
scale of the planet. Paradoxically,
we remain so little mobilized in part
because of our failures to represent
the scales of a story that is difficult
both to tell and to hear.
Can an architecture that accounts
for the sites and concerns of
environmental externalities—their
dimensions, forms, relations—bring
the whole Earth into the domain of
public concern?
First, Pacific Aquarium outlines a
manifesto on the environmental
imagination through the medium
of the architectural project. It
engages the Earth as a grand
question of design making formal
12
0
0°
13
23
22
1 km
Planetary Boundary Layer
0°
0°
14
21
°
50
0°
1
200
°
0 km
SEA LEVEL
-9.00 km
0°
0°
TROPOSPHERE
24
2 km
°
°
250
110
°
Kermadec trench
1
°
190°
180°
170°
160
-10.00 km
-11.00 km
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the unaccounted for spaces
of environmental externalities
Drawing on dark ecology, each of
the nine projects incorporates the
externalities of resource exploitation
and climate change into matters of
concern that weave together scales,
temporalities, and species beyond
the human.
Second, channeling the sense of
wonder at cabinets of curiosities,
the Pacific Aquarium installation
appropriates the object of the
aquarium to take aim at the abysmal
distance between our selfish
economic worries and the great
scales of the Earth. Each aquarium
houses a resin cast model of the
architectural project along with
companion fish species. Collectively,
the nine aquariums reclaim the
production of nature into public
controversies by connecting political
ecology with speculative design and
collective aesthetic experience.
SITE
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the
Pacific, covering an area approximately the
size of Europe, has the world’s largest known
deposits of deep-seabed rare earth minerals. To
date, the International Seabed Authority (ISA)
has issued twelve exploration licenses for the
CCZ and designated nine areas of particular
environmental interest (APEIs).
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CONCEPT
Rather than strictly separating the interests
of mineral exploration from those of the
environment, the project consolidates the nine
proposed APEIs and overlays them onto the
exploration concessions. Each of the resultant
nine zones operates as a project that illustrates
the contradictory concerns of ecology and
economy within the same territory.
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OVERMINING
The International Seabed Authority mandates
the conservation of the flora and fauna in
the mining area of the Clipperton fault. A
terraforming infrastructure relocates transects
of substrate samples to a suspended ecological
reserve. Over a decade, the infrastructure
incubates a benthic ecosystem that will be
grafted onto the depleted seabed.
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UNDER THE WATER TOWERS
A catchment dome caps mining activities
occurring on the ocean floor to contain localized
sediment plume. Polluted water is separated
from surrounding water and transported into
a series of inverted water towers just below
the surface for processing. Purified water is
gradually released back to the ocean.
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MARINE LANDFILLS
Large-scale landfills capture floating waste,
oil, fuel and detergents from the Pacific Gyres.
Seawater cascades into a landfill to be filtered
by a one-way membrane surface. When a marine
landfill site is filled, the inverted pyramid is
sealed and becomes a floating island in the sea.
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IRON TOWERS
Suggested as solution to ocean acidification,
iron fertilization stimulates photosynthesis in
plankton converting dissolved carbon dioxide
into carbohydrates and oxygen. The vertical
tensile structure, which contains high iron
concentrations of water, extends the habitat
of phytoplankton to the deep ocean attracting
corals and other sea creatures to the structure.
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MEDUSA MAZE
Climate change opens a niche for the rapid
proliferation of jellyfish. The submerged maze
is a jellyfish Pac-Man, populated with planktons
and sea turtles. The Pac-Medusa is a jellyfish
husbandry for an emerging cosmetic industry. It
is also a Damnatio ad bestias, an Anthropocene
arena that pits the gelatinous beasts against
their predators in a luminescent aquarium.
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PARLIAMENT OF REFUGEES
The Parliament of Refugees is an assembly of
Anthropocene things, such as sea turtles, plastic
bags, CO32− molecules, scallops, bleached corals,
drowning wetlands, hammerhead sharks, algae,
Homo sapiens, Brighamia rockii, Nihoa finch.
The Assembly is organized around a hollow
pillar that connects it to the center of the Earth
through a submerged volcano.
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ROBOT FISH COLONY
Deepsea mining produces plumes that smother
near-bottom species away from their habitats. A
school of cyborg fish restores such habitats by
collecting the plumes into a massive spherical
sponge-like nest where the toxic particles
are solidified and processed into energy. The
fish subsequently decompose into organic
sustenance for the returning species.
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CLIMATE SANCTUARIES
The submerged building tells the story of the
first five submerged Pacific islands of Vanuatu,
Marshalls, Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati through
their cultural landscapes: volcanic mountains,
coastlines, highlands villages, cliffs and water
territories.
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CLASSIFIED SEDIMENTS
An artificial landform camouflages the entrance
to a sequence of vaults that extend deep
into the Earth’s crust to house security and
intelligence records on the deep sea. This icon
of secrecy dissimulates itself by mimicking the
cartographic resolution of the trigonometric
projection of the deep sea. The territory hides in
the map.
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INSTALLATION OVERVIEW
The installation appropriates the object of the
aquarium to take aim at the abysmal distance
between our selfish economic worries and
the great scales of the Earth. Each aquarium
constructs a section of the Pacific Ocean that
incorporates the externalities of resource
exploitation and climate change into scales,
temporalities, and species beyond the human.
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INSTALLATION DETAILS
[1] Medusa Maze; [2] Climate Sanctuaries, [3]
Below the Water Towers, [4] Marine Landfills,
[5] Iron Towers, [6] Overmining, [7] Classified
Sediments, [8] Robot Fish Colony, [9] Parliament
of Refugees.
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INSTALLATION OVERVIEW
@Oslo Architectural Triennale: After Belonging
Norsk design- og arkitektursenter
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20 OC
25 OC
15OC
O
15 C
BELOW THE WATER TOWERS
CO2 PROCESS PLANT
AIR
CO2
CHIMNEY
APARTMENT
KITE-TURBINE
JELLY FISH MAZE
25 OC
The nine didactic projects are
assembled into a new ocean creature,
an exquisite corpse. Each scheme is
drawn within the depth of the ocean
it occupies, with the scheme below it
attached, until the totality is unfolded to
reveal an exquisite corpse that extends
from the surface to the seabed.
20 OC
15 O
C
GEOGRAPHIC LEVIATHAN
O
15 C
15 OC
-500m
WATER SURFACE
SEA LEVEL
HORIZON
ATMOSPHERE
25 OC
Bruno Latour, “There is no Terrestrial Globe,”
in Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian (New York:
Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 216.
20 OC
O
15 C
The work of politics would be a matter of
containing different species within the
same artificial envelope. Politics is the art of
cohabiting together in this immense greenhouse
with species that have very different demands
for survival, who demand very particular regimes
of attention and techniques.
5O C
2 OC
5O C
40 C
35OC
O
-10OC
-20OC
4O C
2 OC
20OC
5O C
IRON TOWER
5 OC
10 O
C
4O C
2 OC
DEEP WATER
5 OC
4OC
CLIMATE SANCTUARY
O
5C
FISH COLONY
OC
10
JELLY FISH MAZE
INTERMEDIATE WATER
O
2
O
-4500m
2 OC
5 C
O
4OC
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-4000m
O
5C
2 OC
5O C
5C
O
5
-3500m
5O
C
O
3C
O
3C
C
5 OC
10OC
C
-3000m
-2500m
5O
C
O
5
10OC
15 OC
O
-2000m
-1500m
-1000m
3OC
C
4O
C
3O
C
O
5 OC
10
-500m
10 O
C
O
5 OC
5O
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4 OC
10
3
5
C
C
C
C
5O
C
0 OC
-4500m
-8000m
-7500m
-7000m
-6500m
-6000m
-5500m
HANGING GARDEN
-5000m
-4500m
0OC
LIMESTONE
OVER MINING
BOTTOM WATER
0O C
0OC
0 OC
O
2C
-2500m
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0m