Winning Entries
The following five entries from Australia, the USA, and New Zealand were declared winners by the LA+ IMAGINATION jury. Each winning entry receives $2,000 in prizemoney plus feature publication in LA+ Journal’s forthcoming LA+ IMAGINATION issue (out early Spring 2018).
“The winning entries tell us something about what’s lurking in the unfettered imagination of contemporary design culture:
we have monstrous ecological machines, places of melancholy, emergent digital natures,
and of course, those old curmudgeons, utopia and dystopia. It’s an amazing archipelago of ideas.”
Richard Weller (Jury Chair)
Pla-Kappa: A Cautionary Tale of Accumulation
Tei Carpenter, Arianna Deane + Ashely Kuo (Agency—Agency)
The floating island of Pla-Kappa shifts it shape slowly, constantly growing while consuming itself. Swirling clockwise within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, Pla-Kappa is coproduced between nature’s ocean currents, organic matter, and accumulations of human-made waste. Within the barely visible dispersed soup of micro-plastics and flotsam on the ocean surface covering 150,000 km2, Pla-Kappa began its coagulation with the rise of severe water temperatures. Captured at 35.625°N 144.105°W, it is the first and largest island amongst a vast archipelago, each new island an index of disposability. As humans expel more goods, Pla-Kappa grows taller, more entangled, and more buoyant. When icebergs became extinct, Pla-Kappa and its counterparts replaced them as inverted artificial likenesses, drifting through the ocean.
Some researchers refer to Pla-Kappa as the New Galapagos. An extreme ecosystem with endemic species, Pla-Kappa’s habitats include hybrid conditions of soft organics and hard plastics, chemical-rich ridges and escarpments. Years ago, the sea skater population swelled because of the explosion of waste substrates in the ocean. Marine food chains adapted and Pla-Kappa became a site for the emergence of new species. Along Pla-Kappa’s Blue Hole, plastic-eating bacteria and Styrofoam-eating mealworms metabolize parts of the island, thriving on discarded single-use food containers, space blankets, and half empty bottles of car oil. A mutation of caddisfly larvae that uses its silk to form protective cases out of loose waste particles burgeoned on Pla-Kappa, secreting a binding enzyme to produce the island’s new ground. Pla-Kappa simultaneously grows and deteriorates with the help of these new species, changing material states with exposure to the natural elements. Scientists probe, monitor, and try to manage Pla-Kappa. Speculators circle Pla-Kappa in helicopters, eager to extract its resources, looking for ways to continue the cycle of consumption, again.
Location coordinates: 35.625 N 144.105 W
The Island of Lost Objects
Jacky Bowring (Lincoln University, New Zealand)
I recently came across these documents during my research at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The papers detail the exploration of the enigmatic Island of Lost Objects. Located at 0.00°N 0.00°E, the Island marks the world’s geographical cipher, the null point. Uncannily, it seems that the island was not always at its current location. I was astonished to find that it had previously been located at the antipodal point, its geographical Other. At its former location it was known as Howland Island, and is still shown as such on some maps. It is a flat, uninhabited island, forlorn and windswept. Not only is the Island a kind of phantom, it is now non-existent Other persists as an after-image. There is an irresolvable sense of presence and absence, investing the Island with an aura of loss. The documents recounted a number of curious elements on the island. A well is mysteriously noted as being ͞of seemingly infinite depth,͟ perhaps an extreme type of a wishing well. An altar and a beacon were further signals of hope in the face of loss. Alongside these votive elements of hope, were various forms of searching: a lookout tower, an acoustic mirror, and a perimeter track worn into the ground from scouring the horizon. It struck me that these practices of hoping and searching were all futile rituals, unlikely to yield a result. Instead, I realized—however perverse this might be—that the island is a place for the love of loss, for the prolonging of longing. Its own absence from its origin amplifies this. The island is evidently for the contemplation of all lost objects: love, civilizations, innocence, missing persons, MH370, passenger pigeons, the Great Buddha of Bamiyan. The endless litany of lost objects, the gaping lacunae in our lives – extinctions, misplacements, destructions, death.
Location coordinates: 0.00, 0.00
Coastal Paradox
Bradley Cantrell (University of Virginia), Fionn Byrne (University of British Columbia) + Emma Mendel (Nelson Byrd Woltz)
How do we know when a plant has died? You yourself, will expire a last breath as neural activity comes to a halt and the heart discontinues the steady beating it began as you were born into this world. One would think there is no better metronome of vitality than the heart. As this restless muscle finally relents, death takes over. While certainly you understand life and death as a process, you will have no trouble distinguishing one from another. But the kingdom of fungi demonstrates a most odd hybrid of alive and dead; having no excretory organs, each cell in a fungus must deal with its own waste. With growth, they build up non-living material in vacuoles or cell walls. This slow accumulation of death is contradictory to one of our most important dualisms. No last breaths will punctuate the border between subjectivities of alive and dead.
What the fungi teaches us is that our representation of the world is limited, divisive, and subjective. Our sense organs act to constantly cleave things from an undifferentiated medium. Our powers of perception fumble to see the unmediated SpaceTimeEnergyMatter continuum through which we exist. Here, in the undifferentiated medium, there are no islands, no binaries, no edges, no objects, no beholders, no life, no death. At stake is our isolationism, at all levels and in all forms. The way we perceive and describe the natural world consequently effects how we understand our human society. To see differently allows us to think differently. Through increasing our vocabulary of edges and challenging the existence of an absolute island, we seek to question other binary divisions: racism, sexism, speciesism, isolationism. Boundaries blur and walls give way to gradients.
Location coordinates: 43.67, -79.40
United Plastic Nation
Noel Schardt + Bjoern Muendner (Freischaerler Architects)
Wars, poverty, environmental destruction – sounds like a recipe for Armageddon. What if we could take greed, ignorance, and violence and create something positive? The United Plastic Nation is the antipode – an ever-growing structure, floating through the ocean currents, slowly turning circles around the globe, feeding off a seemingly endless resource: our drive for self-destruction. On its way, it collects and recycles plastic from the oceans. Building material is produced, which is then 3D-printed by a swarm of robotic drones. Layer by layer, they build a completely self-sufficient city. Food is grown in vertical aquaponic farms, water and waste cycle through closed systems, and energy is produced by the waves. The island grows both horizontally and vertically along a New York-like grid, forming an unsinkable iceberg structure. Eventually a landmass of 1 km2 emerges with residential, industrial, recreational, and commercial zones – the first district of the United Plastic Nation.
While growing, the island passes by all continents, connecting regions of poverty and despair with regions of wealth and prosperity. It collects its inhabitants from the army of forgotten and dispossessed who are stuck in between. Buried deep below the surface in the belly of the island lie the servers which contain the squirreled-away fortunes of the world’s richest and greediest. Positioned in international waters, the United Plastic Nation is bound by no national laws, thus enabling it to function as a tax haven and generate revenue. The United Plastic Nation questions the concept of the nation state, which defines itself by exclusion of the outside via borders and citizenship. This island is instead, by default, inclusive; it has no boarders, is part of all continents, and anyone can be become citizen. A society of true urban nomads is born, not moving from city to city but moving their city themselves.
Location coordinates: -33.98550244004416, 121.77692413330078
The Dredge Islands
Neeraj Bhatia, Cesar Lopez + Jeremy Jacinth (The Open Workshop)
Approximately one-third of the overall dredged material from the Great Lakes Basin originates from the Maumee River near Toledo, Ohio. Due to increasing ship sizes and port activity, decreasing water levels, and challenges with upland sediment management, the dredging of the river will continue indefinitely. This proposal examines what to do with this large amount of dredge material and asks how it can do more for the city. Using a series of dredge processing islands, the project examines new ways to cohabit the riverfront with regional industry and public programming. Employing a series of geotubes to dewater the dredge material, these floating pontoons are fitted with temporary public programs. Located within close proximity to the city where they can be an asset, the continual dispatching of new islands offer an iterative form of public-space making within the geologics of dredge. Once dewatering has occurred, the geotubes are opened and hydro-seeded to remediate the sediment for open-lake placement. The geotubes are eventually tugged into the bay where the sediment is mixed with bentonite and water to form a slurry that suppresses and absorbs algae growth. Incrementally distributed throughout Lake Erie, over several years this process is anticipated to return the lake to its original nutrient composition. In the context of mid-sized cities where low land values, productive industry along the water, and an associated depravity of public space collide, a system of producing land in a malleable, temporal, transformable, and transportable logic enables the symbiotic cohabitation of industry, culture, and ecology. This positions land not as a commodity to capture and hold, but rather as a temporal material state that is iteratively deployed and used by locals and then redistributed to a territorial ecology.
Location coordinates: 41°38'50.6"N 83°31'41.9"W
SEE LIST OF HONORABLE MENTIONS
we have monstrous ecological machines, places of melancholy, emergent digital natures,
and of course, those old curmudgeons, utopia and dystopia. It’s an amazing archipelago of ideas.”
Richard Weller (Jury Chair)
Pla-Kappa: A Cautionary Tale of Accumulation
Tei Carpenter, Arianna Deane + Ashely Kuo (Agency—Agency)
The floating island of Pla-Kappa shifts it shape slowly, constantly growing while consuming itself. Swirling clockwise within the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, Pla-Kappa is coproduced between nature’s ocean currents, organic matter, and accumulations of human-made waste. Within the barely visible dispersed soup of micro-plastics and flotsam on the ocean surface covering 150,000 km2, Pla-Kappa began its coagulation with the rise of severe water temperatures. Captured at 35.625°N 144.105°W, it is the first and largest island amongst a vast archipelago, each new island an index of disposability. As humans expel more goods, Pla-Kappa grows taller, more entangled, and more buoyant. When icebergs became extinct, Pla-Kappa and its counterparts replaced them as inverted artificial likenesses, drifting through the ocean.
Some researchers refer to Pla-Kappa as the New Galapagos. An extreme ecosystem with endemic species, Pla-Kappa’s habitats include hybrid conditions of soft organics and hard plastics, chemical-rich ridges and escarpments. Years ago, the sea skater population swelled because of the explosion of waste substrates in the ocean. Marine food chains adapted and Pla-Kappa became a site for the emergence of new species. Along Pla-Kappa’s Blue Hole, plastic-eating bacteria and Styrofoam-eating mealworms metabolize parts of the island, thriving on discarded single-use food containers, space blankets, and half empty bottles of car oil. A mutation of caddisfly larvae that uses its silk to form protective cases out of loose waste particles burgeoned on Pla-Kappa, secreting a binding enzyme to produce the island’s new ground. Pla-Kappa simultaneously grows and deteriorates with the help of these new species, changing material states with exposure to the natural elements. Scientists probe, monitor, and try to manage Pla-Kappa. Speculators circle Pla-Kappa in helicopters, eager to extract its resources, looking for ways to continue the cycle of consumption, again.
Location coordinates: 35.625 N 144.105 W
The Island of Lost Objects
Jacky Bowring (Lincoln University, New Zealand)
I recently came across these documents during my research at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The papers detail the exploration of the enigmatic Island of Lost Objects. Located at 0.00°N 0.00°E, the Island marks the world’s geographical cipher, the null point. Uncannily, it seems that the island was not always at its current location. I was astonished to find that it had previously been located at the antipodal point, its geographical Other. At its former location it was known as Howland Island, and is still shown as such on some maps. It is a flat, uninhabited island, forlorn and windswept. Not only is the Island a kind of phantom, it is now non-existent Other persists as an after-image. There is an irresolvable sense of presence and absence, investing the Island with an aura of loss. The documents recounted a number of curious elements on the island. A well is mysteriously noted as being ͞of seemingly infinite depth,͟ perhaps an extreme type of a wishing well. An altar and a beacon were further signals of hope in the face of loss. Alongside these votive elements of hope, were various forms of searching: a lookout tower, an acoustic mirror, and a perimeter track worn into the ground from scouring the horizon. It struck me that these practices of hoping and searching were all futile rituals, unlikely to yield a result. Instead, I realized—however perverse this might be—that the island is a place for the love of loss, for the prolonging of longing. Its own absence from its origin amplifies this. The island is evidently for the contemplation of all lost objects: love, civilizations, innocence, missing persons, MH370, passenger pigeons, the Great Buddha of Bamiyan. The endless litany of lost objects, the gaping lacunae in our lives – extinctions, misplacements, destructions, death.
Location coordinates: 0.00, 0.00
Coastal Paradox
Bradley Cantrell (University of Virginia), Fionn Byrne (University of British Columbia) + Emma Mendel (Nelson Byrd Woltz)
How do we know when a plant has died? You yourself, will expire a last breath as neural activity comes to a halt and the heart discontinues the steady beating it began as you were born into this world. One would think there is no better metronome of vitality than the heart. As this restless muscle finally relents, death takes over. While certainly you understand life and death as a process, you will have no trouble distinguishing one from another. But the kingdom of fungi demonstrates a most odd hybrid of alive and dead; having no excretory organs, each cell in a fungus must deal with its own waste. With growth, they build up non-living material in vacuoles or cell walls. This slow accumulation of death is contradictory to one of our most important dualisms. No last breaths will punctuate the border between subjectivities of alive and dead.
What the fungi teaches us is that our representation of the world is limited, divisive, and subjective. Our sense organs act to constantly cleave things from an undifferentiated medium. Our powers of perception fumble to see the unmediated SpaceTimeEnergyMatter continuum through which we exist. Here, in the undifferentiated medium, there are no islands, no binaries, no edges, no objects, no beholders, no life, no death. At stake is our isolationism, at all levels and in all forms. The way we perceive and describe the natural world consequently effects how we understand our human society. To see differently allows us to think differently. Through increasing our vocabulary of edges and challenging the existence of an absolute island, we seek to question other binary divisions: racism, sexism, speciesism, isolationism. Boundaries blur and walls give way to gradients.
Location coordinates: 43.67, -79.40
United Plastic Nation
Noel Schardt + Bjoern Muendner (Freischaerler Architects)
Wars, poverty, environmental destruction – sounds like a recipe for Armageddon. What if we could take greed, ignorance, and violence and create something positive? The United Plastic Nation is the antipode – an ever-growing structure, floating through the ocean currents, slowly turning circles around the globe, feeding off a seemingly endless resource: our drive for self-destruction. On its way, it collects and recycles plastic from the oceans. Building material is produced, which is then 3D-printed by a swarm of robotic drones. Layer by layer, they build a completely self-sufficient city. Food is grown in vertical aquaponic farms, water and waste cycle through closed systems, and energy is produced by the waves. The island grows both horizontally and vertically along a New York-like grid, forming an unsinkable iceberg structure. Eventually a landmass of 1 km2 emerges with residential, industrial, recreational, and commercial zones – the first district of the United Plastic Nation.
While growing, the island passes by all continents, connecting regions of poverty and despair with regions of wealth and prosperity. It collects its inhabitants from the army of forgotten and dispossessed who are stuck in between. Buried deep below the surface in the belly of the island lie the servers which contain the squirreled-away fortunes of the world’s richest and greediest. Positioned in international waters, the United Plastic Nation is bound by no national laws, thus enabling it to function as a tax haven and generate revenue. The United Plastic Nation questions the concept of the nation state, which defines itself by exclusion of the outside via borders and citizenship. This island is instead, by default, inclusive; it has no boarders, is part of all continents, and anyone can be become citizen. A society of true urban nomads is born, not moving from city to city but moving their city themselves.
Location coordinates: -33.98550244004416, 121.77692413330078
The Dredge Islands
Neeraj Bhatia, Cesar Lopez + Jeremy Jacinth (The Open Workshop)
Approximately one-third of the overall dredged material from the Great Lakes Basin originates from the Maumee River near Toledo, Ohio. Due to increasing ship sizes and port activity, decreasing water levels, and challenges with upland sediment management, the dredging of the river will continue indefinitely. This proposal examines what to do with this large amount of dredge material and asks how it can do more for the city. Using a series of dredge processing islands, the project examines new ways to cohabit the riverfront with regional industry and public programming. Employing a series of geotubes to dewater the dredge material, these floating pontoons are fitted with temporary public programs. Located within close proximity to the city where they can be an asset, the continual dispatching of new islands offer an iterative form of public-space making within the geologics of dredge. Once dewatering has occurred, the geotubes are opened and hydro-seeded to remediate the sediment for open-lake placement. The geotubes are eventually tugged into the bay where the sediment is mixed with bentonite and water to form a slurry that suppresses and absorbs algae growth. Incrementally distributed throughout Lake Erie, over several years this process is anticipated to return the lake to its original nutrient composition. In the context of mid-sized cities where low land values, productive industry along the water, and an associated depravity of public space collide, a system of producing land in a malleable, temporal, transformable, and transportable logic enables the symbiotic cohabitation of industry, culture, and ecology. This positions land not as a commodity to capture and hold, but rather as a temporal material state that is iteratively deployed and used by locals and then redistributed to a territorial ecology.
Location coordinates: 41°38'50.6"N 83°31'41.9"W
SEE LIST OF HONORABLE MENTIONS
