Project Statement:
The St. Paul Ford Assembly Plant in Minnesota
has been in operation for the past 80 years. As the
Plant shutdown looms in the near future, this studio
was created to provoke the city of St. Paul to address
the economic, cultural, and environmental issues of
brownfield redevelopment. Remediation as Catalyst,
a collaborative approach between one landscape architecture
and two architecture students, proposes an innovative
strategy for reintroducing a highly contaminated industrial
site into the existing urban fabric using remediation
strategies as catalysts for design.
Project motivation and approach
The
term superfund, according the Environmental
Protection Agency, is the name given to the environmental
program established to address abandoned hazardous waste
sites. This term is important to understand and analyze,
as the latest list of superfund sites in the United
States reaches 1,500 in number. As superfund sites become
part of everyday redevelopment plans, we must begin
to question the role of contamination cleanup within
the process of planning and design. Remediation as Catalyst
was motivated by the potential for connecting research
to innovative processes of landscape and architectural
design; processes that capitalizes on the complexity
of contamination cleanup, traditional barriers between
industry and neighborhood, and the value of time sensitive
design strategies. Our research and design serves to
provoke neighborhoods and cities to question traditional
methods of re-introducing superfund sites back into
our everyday urban and rural fabrics.
Environmental, cultural and historical
data and analysis methods
The analysis and collection of data was essential to
our design process and planning strategies. The Ford
Assembly Plant was originally named an EPA superfund
site in the 1980’s, but taken off the list approximately
five years later [for purposes unexplained]. Therefore,
at the beginning of our research and design process,
the severity of this sites contamination was not fully
known by government or community members. It was only
through an intense process of collecting data from local
environmental agencies, newspaper articles, and government
mandated soil tests that our group, along with twenty-four
other landscape and architecture graduate students,
began to unfold the severity of contamination within
this 124 acre industrial site. The data collected by
each student was then analyzed through a series of diagramming
techniques that connect and interpret complicated scientific
data. After analyzing each data set, the collective
studio designed a template and method of organization
for the research to be put into a 138 page book. This
book served as the foundation for our design and planning
strategies and as assistance to city officials and neighbors
investigating the future of St. Paul’s Ford Assembly
Plant. Specifically, the book was organized into city,
region, nation and world and within each topic contained
environmental data on contamination and clean up methods
(chemical, natural, and mechanical), historical data
on the development of the Ford Assembly Plant and surrounding
neighborhood, and cultural data on the influence of
the automobile industry and the St. Paul site specifically.
Remediation as Catalyst focuses specifically on data,
such as bioremediation and phydoremediation techniques
for cleanup, as inspiration of a design and planning
strategy that is dynamic in its organization and form.
Imagine a place that slowly reveals itself to the surrounding
neighborhood and where everyday learning meets scientific
inquiry. This is where our project begins to grow and
expand our collective professions of landscape and architectural
into a world of creative systems analysis and network
integration.
Planning strategy/Design Process
After the final analysis presentation, the two studios
were asked to create three to four member groups that
had at least one person from a landscape studio and
one from an architecture studio. The three of us pared
together for this initial charrette. We were charged
with creating design strategies for the redevelopment
of the St. Paul Ford Assembly Plant, using the research
that had been accrued through both the landscape and
the architecture studios.
Our group started with the levels and
types of contamination and different ways it could be
remediated. This led to plans that focused on the progress
of time, and how stages of development could be phased
according to economic, social, and environmental factors.
For our initial presentation we set up a strategy around
the idea of touching the ground lightly versus permanent
fixture. We worked to integrate various temporary and
permanent infrastructures into closed loop cycles of
remediation. By researching various remediation strategies,
we created plans that incorporated phytoremediation
with biomass energy recovery and heavy metal extraction
from the plants. We studied the use of living machines
to treat area stormwater runoff and sewage waste along
with contaminated groundwater before it was allowed
to reach the Mississippi River. We also researched using
bioremediation to treat soil deep underground using
microbes and a mixture of oxygen to clean soil that
plant roots simply can not reach. With all of this remediation
we worked to create a viable pedestrian circulation
[and later road infrastructure] plan that included existing
rail lines, continuations of existing neighborhood grid
lines, and new pedestrian facilities to create a multi-layered
plan that would slowly integrate neighborhood amenities
over the course of time. These were the ideas that we
took to the initial charette review.
Each group presented their plans that
they had created and then the studios were given the
opportunity to switch groups, so that people could work
on plans that suited their individual interests. There
was no longer a requirement that a landscape student
had to work with an architecture student. However, our
group was so excited about our plans by the end of the
charette we didn’t even consider splitting up.
We were the only group that did stay the same throughout
the semester and only one of two groups that maintained
a mixture of both landscape architecture and architecture
students.
We took the focus of time, and how systems
thinking [connectivity between phasing contamination
and design implementation] could be integrated into
our overall planning strategies. From the charette forward
our main goal was to create a plan that fully integrated
our systems into as much of a closed loop as possible.
This meant changing some things that were initially
part of the charette plan, while at the same time adding
new concepts and research. The language of time morphed
into a series of planning sequences that we titled dig,
fill, seed, grow, and cultivate. This sequence helped
form the matrix for how we applied everything from circulation
to water treatment to the development of buildings.
It quickly became apparent that if our
strategy of time was to be effective we would have little
to no control over a series of ‘fixed’ or
‘final’ images. Through discussions and
research it was becoming clear to us that so often when
faced with contaminated land, the answer is often to
cap or to simply remove the contamination off site as
a ‘final’ answer. Our question to this was
why? Why can’t a more thoughtful and fluid development
take place? One that takes into account the industry
that has occurred for the past 80 years and the unknown
futures. We did not want this history hidden, but rather
we wanted a project that started to heal the wounds
that had been inflicted on the site, while re-introducing
the land to the surrounding neighborhood.
Project design
Our research in remediation techniques became catalysts
for our design. These in turn informed decisions we
made in terms of development phasing. Our final design
strategy focused around a research center that we placed
in the zone of highest contamination. When the Ford
Site was cleaned, the research facility would shift
its focus to a consulting climate lab that would facilitate
remediatation research for brownfield sites around the
world. The information gleaned from the research facility
would be disseminated to the public through a series
of kiosks that would be placed on the circulation system
that runs through the site. These would explain everything
from strategies for treating groundwater to biomass
collection, to the phytoremediation of creosote.
Along with the research component of our
plan was the phasing of infrastructure and building
development. We felt strongly that integrating people
in the site, as soon as contamination levels were safe,
was important to the success of the project. Therefore,
a typology of infrastructure [transformative infrastructures]
was designed based on projected needs for building and
circulation systems; which would transform in use and
form throughout the process of remediation and development.
We also explored higher density, sustainable development
that would allow for experimentation in orientation
and form. With this in mind, blocks of development were
planned around key planting sites that were initially
phytoremediation zones, and then, as they became clean
they shifted to community gardens and central catalysts
for future development and growth.
The final product was presented as a strategic
diagram for implementing remediation, building, research,
circulation, and water distribution. Discussions during
the review focused on the idea that perhaps the fields
of landscape architecture and architecture should not
be as different as they are currently perceived. Why
should architecture be presented as a final product
at the beginning, and then go into a state of decay
while landscape architecture is presented as a piece
of torn up earth that slowly grows into magnificence?
This project was our way of trying to address these
questions. It is perhaps only the first step, but one
that all three of us will continue to pursue for the
rest of our careers.
Implementation
Is this way of thinking, remediatation as catalyst for
physical and intellectual development, possible in today’s
fast paced economic and cultural market? To be honest
our group was not sure…until we got a chance to
present our project in front of the mayor of St. Paul,
Minnesota. He acknowledged the viability of a project
that not only looked at planning for today’s contaminated
sites, but also for tomorrow’s state of unknown
changes. And what better way to begin strategizing the
economics and development of a site but to use the problem
itself as a potential catalyst for redevelopment –
contamination. It is the energy and complexity within
existing strategies for contamination cleanup which
we saw in the research phase of the design and brought
forward into a collaboration between landscape and architecture.
Our group was not afraid to embrace the challenges of
contamination cleanup; rather, we used those challenges
to create a site that maintained economic viability
through phased development plans, researched initiatives
stretching beyond St. Paul, addressed the curiosity
of neighbors by reintroducing the site in safe and thoughtful
moves, and utilized existing methods of clean-up to
catalyze innovative typolologies of courtyard housing
and city infrastructure. Therefore, the implementation
of Remediation as Catalyst, although just an
idea on paper right now, has the potential to expand
the future of how we think, live, and play today within
the industrial landscapes of yesterday.
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