DIRT Studio: Turning Detritus Into Regenerative Landscapes
by Emily Pilloton, Chicago and San Francisco on 11. 3.06
Julie Bargmann, founding principal of DIRT Studio, knows how to turn trash into treasure. Literally. Her reclamation, decontamination, and development of urban landfill, manufacturing, and other industrial sites goes beyond superficial beautification to a transformation of these "undesirable" spaces into productive landscapes of economic, cultural, and environmental significance. A professor at the University of Virginia's Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Bargmann established DIRT ("Dump It Right There") with an interdisciplinary and optimistic commitment to "excavating the creative potential of disturbed landscapes." DIRT’s project portfolio includes a proposal for the reclamation of New York City’s High Line, a transformation of the Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, a collaboration with William McDonough, and a slew of other efforts that aim to turn two centuries of industrial remnants into truly productive and healthy landscapes.
Some of DIRT’s most interesting projects involve the decontamination and conversion of landfill sites into parks, such as the Antioch Community Park project in the small township of Antioch, Illinois. The location of an H.O.D. Landfill site in historic downtown provides an opportunity for commercial revitalization and community development. Using methane as energy to heat the local high school and storm water treatment to revitalize surrounding ecologies, the proposal turns an eyesore into a newly-fecund space. Playgrounds are constructed atop former landfill cells, trees are planted, and public spaces given back to a thriving downtown.
Other landfill conversion projects include Duisburg-Nord in Germany, now a large public park that integrates visual cues and artifacts of its former industrial state. This integration of a past sense of place into the transformation process is a key element in DIRT's design process. Instead of erasing any trace of the site’s past, DIRT's solutions incorporate the legacy of an industrial past into a landscape’s future as a regenerative space, emphasizing the lifecycle of the land.
What makes DIRT Studio special is a multi-faceted, holistic approach to sustainable development: one that transform crisis into opportunity, sculpts detritus into productivity, respects the past, present, and future of a site, and forges partnerships that go beyond the scope of the project and property lines.
100 Mile Diet: I Never Promised You a Tomato Garden
|
New NiMH Charger Juices Up Batteries in Just 15 Minutes
|
this reminds me of my childhood, in the winter we would go sledding on a hill in the north burbs of chicago called "mount trashmore" which may or may not have been the official name. it was an old landfill that had been covered in dirt and grass,and it was great fun. i dont kno if the burying of the landfill was environmentally sustainable, as i was just a small child. but at least they did something with it that contributed to the community, instead of it just sitting there.