Atomic Cities
Exhibitions KY + NL
SPRING 2012: ATOMIC CITIES STUDIO III
In this studio, students worked collaboratively to design two Atomic Cities exhibitions. By organizing, curating and evolving material generated in the first two semesters, the studio endeavored to tell the Plant’s story in two very different venues. The first was at the 2012 International Architectural Bienniale, themed ‘Making City’, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The second venue was at the 2012 National Citizens Advisory Board Meeting held in Paducah, attended by citizen board members from around the U.S., who serve their communities where the Department of Energy has remediation operations.
That discussion led to the initial River Cities Studio, where graduate architecture students explored ways that design could address the PGDP’s and Paducah’s challenges. The one semester studio grew into a much larger multi-year design research endeavor, leading to the formation of the Atomic Cities Research Group (ACRG).
The PGDP’s diverse issues became the focus of nine graduate design studios over six years. Scores of graduate and upper level architecture students considered everything from future-use scenarios for the plant, to autonomous remediation strategies, a ten-millennium strategic plan, and most recently, a public-facing online virtual museum that describes the plant’s once-top-secret past and speculates on it’s future.
The Atomic Cities Research Group rapidly expanded its work beyond graduate design studios. The group produced large scale sub-surface models, as well as multi-media exhibitions and other materials and tools to document and communicate the site and its subsurface conditions. This diverse collection of visual material communicated the plant’s complexity to US DOE’s stakeholders, local leaders, as well as the public, and were the subject of international scholarly publications and exhibited in Kentucky, the US, and abroad.
The ACRG’s wide ranging research endeavors were sponsored by the United States Department of Energy, through the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy, and led by Steve Hampson from the Kentucky Research Consortium on Energy and Environment, and Professors Anne Filson and Gary Rohrbacher from the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, School of Architecture. The sponsored project supported teams of full time graduate research and teaching assistants, giving them their first work experience as design professionals.
The ACRG produced exhibitions and multimedia assets over the course of it’s operations, and still works today to evolve communications of site history and possible futures. Perhaps equally significant to these tangible accomplishments, is the project’s unprecedented cross-disciplinary research and collaboration.
At any given moment in the course of the project, designers, engineers, and scientists—including hydrogeologists, nuclear physicists, and others—worked alongside the public to articulate a well-formed problem, from which possible solutions might emerge. At the same time, a generation of architecture students recognized that there may be as much creative problem solving required to decommission and decontaminate as is required to propose something new. And through collaboration, everyone learned to value different points of view, means of engagement, and kinds of agency, all focused on making the world a better place.
Objectives: Architects spend a considerable amount of time on communication. Whether it’s explaining complicated, technical issues to a client, or else presenting on behalf of a client to the public or zoning board, architects are increasingly challenged to clearly articulate complex information and to make a convincing case. The studio challenged students to develop concise and compelling exhibits that sensitively convey site’s history and to communicate complex remediation technologies, while conveying their optimism and imagination for Paducah’s future. The venues, one at the center of architecture and urban design culture in Europe, and the other closer to home to laypeople, compelled students to find ways to communicate through the things they make.
Outcomes: This studio produced numerous multi-media exhibition materials. For the Rotterdam exhibition, they produced an interactive physical model with writable surface and toolkit of useful parts, as well as a 250 year timeline marking progress from the plant’s construction in the nineteen fifties to a prosperous, healthy and clean future centuries from now. For the National DOE CAB Meeting in Paducah, the studio curated several Paducah+ models to articulate the future-use scenarios, including an exhibit of 3D printed ‘Remediation Seeds’ to demonstrate the kinds of products that could be developed at a future ‘Remediation-Lab’ on the PGDP site. These physical objects were accompanied by a series of large scale interpretive panels with drawings and diagrams. The exhibition returned to the University of Kentucky, at the Center for Applied Energy Research atrium for the remainder of 2012.
PROJECT TEAM
INSTRUCTOR / Co-PI:
Associate Prof. Gary Rohrbacher
Co-PI:
Associate Prof. Anne Filson
POST-GRAD RESEARCH ASSISTANTS:
Carolyn Parrish
Sydney Kidd
STUDENTS:
Mikaela Coston
Lauren Early
Lindsey Elza
Chris Hayse
Jennifer Jourdan
Joseph O’Toole
Nathan Owings
Josh Robinson
Michael Schenkenfelder
Taylor Steele
Katherine Vanhoose
