Sublime Intervention
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Date
2019-06-18
Authors
Stone, Emma
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Abstract
Despite their remote location and green veneer, landfills, like
many industrial sites, have become monuments to consumerism.
Every day in Lane County, Oregon, the equivalent of six pounds
of waste per resident joins the local wasteshed. Destination: Short
Mountain Landfill. Landfills generate many kinds of experiences
and are capable of eliciting qualities of the sublime. The toxic
sublime is characterized by five tensions: beauty and ugliness,
magnitude and insignificance, known and unkown, inhabitation
and desolation, and security and risk. These tensions are identified
and illustrated by Jennifer Peeples through an analysis of Edward
Burtynsky’s photographs of toxic landscapes.
This project translates the toxic sublime from the analysis of
two-dimensional media into the design of four-dimensional
landscapes through critical practice. To do so, this project first
analyzes the origins and changing contexts of the sublime as
an aesthetic category, then synthesizes the history of waste and
landfills in America. A case study analysis reveals how the toxic
sublime is found in existing designed projects. This synthesis
and analysis informs the next phase, a site-scale design of Short
Mountain Landfill in Lane County, Oregon. The site-scale design
demonstrates how Peeples’ five tensions may be expressed in toxic
landscapes, such as landfills.
Description
85 pages. Examining committee chair: Mark Eischeid
Keywords
Landfill, Sublime, Toxic sublime, Landfill design, Post-industrial landscape