Overton Springs
Design Research Studio: Machinic Desert
University of Pennsylvania | Instructor: Ferda Kolatan | Partner: Dario Sabidussi | Spring 2022
Salt Field (left) / Brian Pool (middle) / Concentrated Solar Power Facility (right)
Anthropocene is a term first used by geologists to describe the detectable and irreversible global impact of technology on the upper crust of the earth. This discovery de facto renders the earth into a synthetic hybrid, part technology part nature. In recent years the term has been coopted by many of the social sciences and the arts to reflect and debate a large set of contemporary issues ranging from the environmental to the socio-political and the aesthetic.
The middle landscape, according to Leo Marx, was "a new, distinctively American, post-romantic, industrial version of the pastoral design". The middle landscape proposed fusing nature with civilization.
Lake Mead Aerial View (above)
Rethinking The Dessert Ecology
Taking understandings of the Anthropocene and the middle landscape and considering the desert as a living, metabolizing, and self-sustaining system, we developed our project to embody these understandings through the introduction of contemporary solar technology. When considering the context of the Nevada desert, we began to speculate how to use and create solar energy in a way that would not only be of use for humans, but for the overall ecology of the region.
Our project introduces a new desalination technology that is currently being explored by NEOM in Saudi Arabia called the Solar dome, in which heliostat reflectors surrounding a glass dome focus solar radiation around the dome. Right by the Lake Mead, the lake serves as a cooling facility for the main solar field. The electricity produced is used to produce purified water and brine, which are then utilized as resources for a new synthetic-nature habitat with a self-sustaining ecology.
Reshaping Exiting Texture and Topography / Synthetic Coloration
Our design takes advantage of the existing topography of the site by developing the eroded profiles of the lake perimeter to serve as a gravitational feature where brine and pure water can flow from the “cliff-side” perimeter deep within the desert landscape to form evaporation ponds, meadows, and marshes to promote a new ecology embedded within the landscape, distant from the water and brine source. The effects of brine and clean water forms a painterly landscape with color from brine water and desert landscape
Hybridize The Machinic Technology With Landscape Topography
At a macro scale, the brine transport and water distribution network begin to bound the existing profiles of the site. However, at a micro-scale, the drip irrigation system becomes more clearly embedded within the layering and stepping of the site, further emphasizing the existing topography shifts from the shoreline to the desert.
Synthetic Landscape As New Self-Sustainable Habitat
Reject brine has demonstrated success in enriching freshwater when mixed in certain quantities to irrigate -salt-tolerant plant species, known as halophyte plants, that can be used as a vegetable, in animal feed, and for biofuel production. Our facility attempts to take advantage of brine’s ability to promote plant life by designing offshore irrigation zones, fertilized with various levels of concentrated brine as a mechanism to provides resources for shelter and nourishment, in which native animal species can be monitored, bred, and treated in new conservation regions.
