University of
Kentucky
Atomic Cities
Research Group
THE ATOMIC CITIES
RESEARCH GROUP
The Atomic Cities Research Group is an interdisciplinary collaboration between UK’s Center for Applied Energy Research and the College of Design. It emerged from a 2011 discussion between the CAER’s Director Rodney Andrews and the CoD’s Dean Michael Speaks, who was developing the River Cities Project. Dean Speaks sought opportunities for design to help address environmental, economic, and energy challenges of Kentucky’s Ohio River communities. The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was a perfect case study, and laboratory for demonstrating design’s capacity to do good.
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 its 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 was 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 Research, and led by Steve Hampson from the Kentucky Research Consortium for 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 its 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.
ARCHITECTURE STUDIOS &
DESIGN RESEARCH PROJECTS
The following pages describe the architecture studios and the multimedia assets produced by Atomic Cities Research Group from 2011 until today.
