apocalyptic

ladygolem:

thok-ast-thok:

blacksquares:

In the next several years, the United States Depart­ment of Energy (DOE) will bury some 500,000 barrels of radioactive waste a third of a mile be­neath New Mexico’s shifting sand desert, in a geophysical-inert thick salt formation. The waste will remain dangerous for 10,000 years.

DOE wants to make a permanent warning at this burial site of its dangers, to help prevent inadvertent release of radioactivity into our descendant’s food chain, water supply, and air. The warning must endure, be found and un­der­stood.

There is no guaran­tee of U.S. gov­ernmen­tal control 100 years past intern­ment. No built plac­es have lasted for 10,000 years.

[…]

THE SEVEN TEST DESIGNS

1. Landscape of Thorns

A random forest of concrete thorns or oddly shaped claws, 50 feet high, the shapes of which suggest punctures, wounding of the body. These thorns all rise up from below and reach out like an uncon­trolled growth of something dangerous‑-perhaps mutations.

2. Menacing Earthworks

Immense lightning-shaped earthworks radiating from an open-centered Keep‑-emanations of danger seen best from the air, or from vantage points on top of the highest, 70-feet earthworks. At ground level, these massive earthworks crowd in, cutting off the horizon and making a loss of place. The square sandy Keep is vast and desolate, except for a walk-on map locating the many other radioactive waste sites in the world.

3. Black Hole

A dark masonry slab, evoking an enormous “black hole;” an immense no-thing; a void; land removed from use; worthless. Uninhabitable, and often ex­ceedingly hot because its blackness absorbs the sun’s heat and re-radiates it. The slab’s many joints have an irregular pattern, like the cracks in parched land.

4. Spikes Bursting Through Grid

A regular grid, about house-sized, inlaid in a ma­sonry slab that covers the Keep. The heavy, order­ing lid cannot stop the wounding energy from burst­ing up from below. The spikes/teeth/barbs first ripple in the Keep’s cover, then deform it, then puncture it; finally, the grid’s reliable and hu­man-imposed order is de­stroyed by a more power­ful force‑-chaos.

5. Rubble Landscape

Under the sand is a layer of stone. Its square outer rim is dynamited into boulders and bulldozed into a crude pile over the Keep, a cover different in height, material and vegeta­tion from the surround­ing desert. This rubble is an effort to keep some­thing dangerous in its lair‑-an inhospita­ble place that feels destroyed rather than created.

6. Forbidding Blocks

The stone under the sand is dyna­mit­ed and cast into black, house-sized, con­crete-and-stone blocks set in a deliberately irregular square grid, with a five-foot-wide “street” run­ning both ways. These streets go nowhere and are hot, omi­nous, and too nar­row to live or meet in. The scheme is a mas­sive effort to deny use. The land­scape is crudely or­dered, forbidding and uninhabit­able.

7. Spike Field

Stone spikes pierce the sand, pro­jecting from the Keep, uncon­trolled and cha­otic. The area is walled, with the spikes imprisoned and the outside safe.

– Michael Brill, art by Safdar Abidi

Ok but if you show me any of these I’m going in and exploring

that’s kinda the main problem they had with the project and why it hasnt been worked on in like twenty years

the ultimate human paradox of “the more you try to make it look unwelcoming, the cooler it looks and the more people will naturally want to check it out”