Toxic Urbanism

Research by: Max Jarosz

In an increasingly toxic world where the average person’s body contains 29/35 of the toxins listed on the restricted and hazardous substance list, toxicity is unavoidable. There has always been a link between architecture and toxicity, starting with the earliest cave fires that traded oxygen for carbon monoxide in exchange for thermal comfort. That relationship has become increasingly complex as our material palette and production methods have evolved. This thesis aims to explore a methodology for understanding and representing the relationship between architecture and toxicity. The thesis re-imagines toxins to become active agents in design. Through the negotiation between hard and soft boundaries this work speculates on an architecture of gradients, densities, and velocities to produce temporal spaces of occupation. 

Looking through our history of toxicity, it is clear that our we are trending in an irreversible direction, yet we continue on. Each successive manufacturing wave produces a more toxic methodology of production that seems to be autonomously masked from its an increasing toxic waste. The project is structured through three stages hearth, heimatlosigkeit, and finally home. These three categories parallel the development of modern technical production. The early hearth that produced a cultural and technical center and ultimately becoming the metaphorical symbol of home.  As it continued to evolve, smelting and energy production followed its transformation.  As a result of modernization, a sense of homelessness that represents the feeling produced by the binary between our productive means and destructive methods of toxicity emerged.  This thesis argues that architecture will once again produce our sense of home once it accepts that there will be no post-toxic future.

The year is 2024. 

It’s clear now the Anthropocene fueled an unavoidable world of toxicity. But in fact, our history had always been tied to toxicity. Our early cave fires provided warmth in exchange for carbon monoxide. Yet ours hearths defined our homes, centered our culture, and fueled our evolution. As our legacy of toxicity continued humanity settled into a condition of toxic urbanism, contained by the toxic wastelands of the periphery. Our conception of our toxic landscapes were misled by constantly shifting metrics of toxicity provided by our various agencies, bureaus, and departments. Our remediation efforts were too slow, too costly, and failed to produce any agency in the age of toxicity. As we continued to produce superfund sites across the country, landscapes of toxic air, contaminated soil, and polluted water became our second nature. We went forward with new and more toxic production methods while we neglected our existing toxic release sites. Increasing autonomy disguised in the form of “environmental protection” and “controlled environments” continued to mask our growing exposure to a toxic world, while assuring there would be no post toxic future. Within the confines of toxic urbanism, people suit up day. They were protection more for peace of mind than protection of body. The controlled interior was perfected and promised limited exposure. Continuous halls, stuffed with life support, defined every day life, the mechanized interior of the no-stop city had been realized. Autonomous machines handled the most toxic tasks, seemingly limiting our exposure. We had cured sick building syndrome, but living within the perfectly artificial and controlled environments left a sense of homelessness. Heidegger had described this sensation as Heimatlosigkeit, the signification of our existential orientation in the era of Gestell. This condition was explicated by the dichotomy between our technological culture and its toxic landscapes of production. The search for a solution to this denaturalization questioned control. The mechanized world we produced removed exposure and created environments but at the cost of spatial experience. We had always been a risk adverse society, we needed more exposure, not the controlled bubbles of the early environmentalists. We wanted something more experiential and less material, a way to manipulate exposure and produce temporal spatiality. Looking through the history of our toxic typologies, construction methods, dimensions, and materiality were deprioritized in favor of concentration, density, and velocity allowed the manipulation of exposure. Channeling, flowing, and pooling allowed for the design of spatial qualities related to differences in exposure.  

In certain forms, decreasing velocity allowed an increase in concentration and the pooling of density, while in others an increase in velocity produced the same the same effect. Surfaces could be used to concentrate flow while producing areas of empty zones. The work became a mediation between hard surfaces and soft boundaries to produce gradients of occupiability. The result was a manifestation of gradient zones, defined by their concentrations and controlled by their surfaces.  The soft boundaries produced by the currents between these two flows constantly shift but stay in relative zones. The zones are based off toxicity metrics of the EPA such as Immediately Dangerous to Life and Safety Zone (IDHL), Short Term Exposure Limits (STEL), Recommended Exposure Limits (REL), and Permissible Exposure Limits (PEL). These types of exposure all have different time weighted averages and allowable occupation and therefor need an architecture that communicate the toxicity of these spaces by comfort and spatial quality.