Pacific Aquarium

RANIA GHOSNMassachusetts Institute of Technology

EL HADI JAZAIRYUniversity of Michigan

ACSA Faculty Design Award2016-2017 Winner Submission Materials

1

0m -500

m

-100

0m

-150

0m

-200

0m

PACIFIC AQUARIUM

21

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

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.

SEA LEVEL

TROPOSPHERE

0 km

1 km

2 km

4 km

6 km

8 km

10 km

20 km

40 km

60 km

80 km

100 km

200 km

400 km

600 km

800 km

1000 km

Planetary Boundary Layer

Tropopause

STRATOSPHERE

Stratopause

MESOSPHERE

Mesopause

THERMOSPHERE

EXOSPHERE0 km

-0.20 km

-1.00 km

-2.00 km

-3.00 km

-4.00 km

-5.00 km

-6.00 km

-7.00 km

-8.00 km

-9.00 km

-10.00 km

-11.00 km

SEA LEVELEPIPELAGIC

{The Sunlight Zone}

MESOPELAGIC{The Twilight Zone}

BATHYPELAGIC{The Midnight Zone}

ABYSSOPELAGIC{The Abyss}

HADAL{The Trenches}

Ocean Basin

Continental Shelf

Con

tinen

tal

Slop

e

Cont

inen

tal

Rise

Mount Everest

Ozone Layer

Meteor

Satellite

CommercialAirplanes

Kermadec trench

Bougainville trench

Middle America trench

Puerto Rico trench

Peru Chile trench

Marianas trench

Ryukyu trench

Japan trench

GARBAGE PATCH

GARBAGE PATCH

Aleutian trench

Phillipinetrench

Java (Sunda) trench

Kurile trench

Izu Ogasawara trench

Tonga trench

Rigel Kentaurus

Vega

Arcturus

Hadar

Altair

Antares

Spica

Deneb

Polaris

DenebolaAlphecca

Mizar

Cor Caroli

Albireo

Thuban

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Moon

Aquila

Ara

Bootes

Camelopardus

Canes Venatici

Capricornus

Cassiopeia

Centaurus

Cepheus

Circinus

Coma Berenices

Corona Austrina

Corona Borealis

Corvus

Crater

Crux

Cygnus

Delphinus

Draco

Equuleus

Hercules

Lacerta

Leo

Leo Minor

Libra

Lupus

Lyra

Microscopium

Norma

Ophiuchus

Sagitta

Sagittarius Scorpius

Scutum

Serpens [Caput]

Serpens [Cauda]

Telescopium

Triangulum Australe

Ursa Major

Ursa Minor

Virgo

Vulpecula

Mag 0

Mag 1

Mag 2

Mag 3

Mag 4

Mag 5

90°80°

70°

60°

50°

40°

30°

20°340°

330°

320°

310°

300°

290°

280°

270°

260°250°

240°

230°

220°

210°200°

190° 180° 170°160°

150°

140°

130°

120°

110°

100°

N

NW

SE

NE

SW

W

E

43

CONCEPTRather 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.

SITEThe 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).

65

UNDER THE WATER TOWERSA 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.

OVERMININGThe 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.

87

MARINE LANDFILLSLarge-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.

IRON TOWERSSuggested 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.

109

MEDUSA MAZEClimate 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.

PARLIAMENT OF REFUGEESThe 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.

1211

ROBOT FISH COLONYDeepsea 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.

CLIMATE SANCTUARIESThe 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.

1413

CLASSIFIED SEDIMENTSAn 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.

INSTALLATION OVERVIEWThe 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.

1615

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.

1817

INSTALLATION OVERVIEW@Oslo Architectural Triennale: After BelongingNorsk design- og arkitektursenter

AIR

SEA

LEV

EL

-500

m

25O C

20OC

15OC

15O

C

15O

C

20OC

20O C

25OC

25O C

15OC

15O

C15

O C

CO

2

KIT

E-TU

RBIN

E

APA

RTM

ENT

CH

IMN

EY

BELO

W T

HE

WAT

ER T

OW

ERS

CO

2 PR

OC

ESS

PLA

NT

JELL

Y F

ISH

MA

ZE

HO

RIZO

N

ATMOSPHERE WATER SURFACE

GEOGRAPHIC LEVIATHAN

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.

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.

Bruno Latour, “There is no Terrestrial Globe,” in Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 216.

-500

m

-100

0m

-150

0m

-200

0m

-250

0m

-300

0m

-350

0m

-400

0m

-450

0m

15O C

10O C

10O C

10O C

10OC

10OC

10O C

10O

C

5O C

5OC

5OC

5 OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

3OC

3OC

3OC

3O C

3OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

5OC

4OC

4OC

4OC

4OC

4OC

4OC

40OC

35OC

-10O

C

-20O

C20

OC

2OC

2OC

2O C

5OC

5O C

5OC

5O C

5OC

2OC

2OC

2OC

I N T

E R

M E

D I

A T

E W

A T

E R

D E

E P

W A

T E

RFISH

CO

LON

Y

CLI

MAT

E SA

NC

TUA

RY

IRO

N T

OW

ER

JELL

Y F

ISH

MA

ZE

-450

0m

-500

0m

-550

0m

-600

0m

-650

0m

-700

0m

-750

0m

-800

0m

-450

0m

B O

T T

O M

W A

T E

R

2O C

0OC

0OC

0OC

0OC

0OC

OV

ER M

ININ

G

HA

NG

ING

GA

RDEN

LIM

ESTO

NE

0m -500

m

-100

0m

-150

0m

-200

0m

-250

0m