Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
Museum of an In{dust{ry Chokehold
Phantom Network Transmission
Marize-Louise Viljoen
MArch 2022
Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Craig McClenaghan
Unit Tutor: Ruby Mungoshi
Unit Assistant: Azraa Gabru
UNIT 21
Phantom Cartographies
Awards
Unit 21 Prize
The Making Prize
Distinction
“Joburg is the most radioactive city on the planet, thanks to its gold-mining past” (Anna Cox, 2020). Many of Johannesburg’s residents have no choice but to live in the shadows of the city’s mine dump tailings. The research for this major design project investigates a site situated in the realm of these ether particles – where toxic dust brims with radiation and travels through the air infiltrating the lungs of this earth and its residents.
This project presents an alternative proposition to current reclamation strategies, in which the performance of mycelium becomes a testing ground for architectural design and programme development. With mycelium as the primary design tool and testing ground, the design is intended to capture carbon dioxide and radioactive particles within toxic dust in the form of a recreational cyber garden, a ‘museum’ of toxic dust. The purpose for this proposed structure is not to deliver a ‘net zero’ radiation or carbon footprint, but to lower and prolong the associated ether risks in the context of a particular site to mitigate – or even avoid, an environmental (and social) catastrophe. Could mycelium be deployed as a design tool to develop structures, programme and processes to (even partially) reclaim the lungs of the earth?
“There is a way this city was historically organised that anticipated the black death and created the conditions for precarity. Thinking about geological formation, the flow of air and how this air migrates particles of toxic dust to certain parts of the city. Even the air that we breathe is not the same.” (Mpho Matsipa. Black Magic Series. 2021,8:12)
This project presents an alternative proposition to current reclamation strategies, in which the performance of mycelium becomes a testing ground for architectural design and programme development. With mycelium as the primary design tool and testing ground, the design is intended to capture carbon dioxide and radioactive particles within toxic dust in the form of a recreational cyber garden, a ‘museum’ of toxic dust. The purpose for this proposed structure is not to deliver a ‘net zero’ radiation or carbon footprint, but to lower and prolong the associated ether risks in the context of a particular site to mitigate – or even avoid, an environmental (and social) catastrophe. Could mycelium be deployed as a design tool to develop structures, programme and processes to (even partially) reclaim the lungs of the earth?
“There is a way this city was historically organised that anticipated the black death and created the conditions for precarity. Thinking about geological formation, the flow of air and how this air migrates particles of toxic dust to certain parts of the city. Even the air that we breathe is not the same.” (Mpho Matsipa. Black Magic Series. 2021,8:12)
Copyright © 2022 Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. All Rights Reserved.