Strange Works: Hybrid Military Landscapes and Infrastructural Opportunism

“The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.” - Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio (Terrain Vague)

My masters thesis, completed at UC Berkeley School of Environmental Design, looks at decommissioned military bases and the ecological, cultural, and planning opportunities they present.

Physical manifestations of America’s “war machine”, military landscapes present us with signs of the advanced engineering and complex systems of industrial production that made construction of these landscapes on such a large scale possible. America’s military, economy, and built landscape are inextricably linked. The infrastructures that supported these war systems are pure systems of utility, engineered for the movement, storage and production of energy and materials. They were the backbone for over a century of military production, but today they lay fallow in their contaminated landscapes. The challenge that we are presented with today is how these redundant infrastructures, with so much embodied energy and resources, can be adapted to create new infrastructural systems that address current and future economic and environmental milieus.

Military infrastructures present unique challenges in re-purposing for civilian use. The massive scale, unique functions, and contaminated nature require the imagination and creativity introduced by the practice of design. The way that we think about infrastructure, typically immune to formal debates, must be rethought. Coupling these infrastructures with spatial experiences creates the frame for a new type of city and ecology to fill in around them. Our approaches must address a new urbanism, one inextricably linked with ecology that deals with the contaminated nature of these sites. They must address environmental degradation and climate change. They must address future systems of de-industrialized production and global supply chains. These systems must address these fields while remaining flexible enough to deal with environmental, resource, and societal uncertainties. This thesis explores the potential for a new urbanism structured around the redundant military infrastructure that is so pervasive in America. It does this by introducing formal and spatial strategies into future infrastructural systems that are flexible and responsive. 

Maps and Infrastructures

Mare Island, a mostly artificial construction, is four years younger than the state of California. It has seen the evolution of ships from sail powered, to coal, fuel oil, and nuclear. Mare Island’s development was shaped by the base’s primary purpose of shipbuilding. Industrial activities, topography, circulation and accessibility also contributed in shaping the island’s landscape. The topography of the island influenced the locations of naval functions. Munitions were stored on the south end of the island, where natural bluffs protected the rest of the island from the volatile ordinances. The shipyard was the densest and most developed portion of the island, consisting of large industrial buildings and smaller work and tool shops. Rail lines initially dictated the internal circulation on the island. Major lines circled the island while shorter spurs connected industrial buildings to the main lines. The street grid was laid out to create connections between the shipyard along the eastern edge with industrial facilities to the west.

Conceptual Analysis

Early conceptual drawings exploring the scars left on the landscape from the island’s violent past.

“The ‘natural landscape’ has taken on an artificial patination. Alien materials interrupt the process of growth and decay. New and evolving features created by man are to an extent, absorbed by the fluid and yielding nature of our surroundings. What results is a hybrid environment, a utilitarian topography, a sustained artifice.” - Stan Allen (Augmented Landscapes)

Sequencing

My proposal for Mare Island is to create a scaffold for a new topography and urbanism. This scaffold, or infrastructure, is both precise and indeterminate at the same time. By specifying certain fixed nodes and introducing flexible armatures for natural growth, I am creating the blueprints for a new techno-nature. Subject to time and the natural processes of growth and decay, these armatures combine architectural ambition with natural habitat. My design proposal is never finished. It is like a parasite, always eating itself and producing new matter, taking itself apart and putting itself back together.

My proposal utilizes the network of contaminated grounds and structures as the backbone for a new topography. The process works like this: Modified manufacturing equipment and shipbuilding cranes are coupled with the existing 50 plus mile rail network connecting almost every structure on the island. These recycling machines traverse the island, disassembling abandoned and contaminated structures and transporting the pieces to a centralized sorting and cleaning facility. This recycling infrastructure works like an artificial ecology.

Programmed Growth + Decay

By intervening in specific nodes, and allowing the island to fill in around these nodes, I am avoiding the authoritarian, top-down approach of master planning. Rather than flattening the layers of history embedded in Mare Island, my proposal aims to create new layers of urban and natural spaces and connections. It aims to couple new spatial experiences with infrastructural systems, making inhabitants aware of the history and infrastructures of the site.

This site strategy utilizes the mistakes and problems of previous generations to solve utilitarian problems of current and future generations at a scale not previously addressed. It does so not by disrupting the natural processes of growth and decay, but by creating interventions in the environment that promote and augment these processes, while creating new spatial forms and experiences.

Infrastructural Opportunism

Military infrastructure presents unique challenges in re-purposing for civilian use. The massive scale, unique functions, and contaminated nature require the imagination and creativity introduced by the practice of design. The way that we think about infrastructure, typically immune to formal debates, must be rethought. Coupling these infrastructures with spatial experiences creates the frame for a new type of city and ecology to fill in around them.