The World Machine
The modern infrastructural ideal
Reveling in infrastructure
Monumental structures
These disused gas cylinders occupy a site on the outskirts of Stockholm. For the first ten years after moving to London, the view west across the train tracks was of a similar pair of monumental structures, transfigured by every sunset. One has since been dismantled to make way for the expanding national and international railway stations.
Tracing Power Lines with the Pylon Appreciation Society
According to Emma Ailes of BBC News, the first pylons in the UK were designed by architect Sir Reginald Blomfield in 1928, with a “lattice” approach that “sought to be more delicate than the brutalist structures used in Europe and the United States.” Reportedly, he was “inspired by the root of the word pylon – meaning an Egyptian gateway to the sun.”
Architectural dark matter
Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason.
Savage, hostile, and cruel
Some may find puzzling or distasteful the parallel I am drawing between the study of nature and the study of technology. After all, nature is good and good for you, whereas everyone knows that technology is ugly, evil, and dangerous.
A few centuries ago—say, on the American western frontier—a quite different view prevailed. Nature was seen as savage, hostile, cruel. Mountains and forests were barriers, not refuges. The lights of civilization were a comforting sight. We took our charter from the book of Genesis, which grants mankind dominion over the beasts, and felt it was both our entitlement and our duty to tame the wilderness, fell the trees, plow the land, and dam the rivers.
Trompe l'oeil fantasies
In residential neighborhoods some sewage-pumping stations are trompe l'oeil fantasies, dressed up to look like the split-level or colonial houses that surround them. If you look closely, it's not hard to spot these disguised pumphouses: the heavy-duty power connections, the big ventilating fans, and the diesel generator in the backyard are all tip-offs. Furthermore, the windows are often fakes, with sash and shutters adorning a blank wall.
Creations of human artifice
In the twenty-first century, the question most of us ask when disaster strikes is not "How could God let that happen?" but "Who screwed up?" This is a salutary development: We take responsibility for the world we live in. Whether or not our world is the best of all possible worlds, it is a world we have made for ourselves. We live in an engineered landscape, on an engineered planet. Our cities and farms, our dwellings and vehicles, our power plans and communication networks—these are all creations of human artifice. If we don't like it here, we have only ourselves to blame.
Technological middle age
In the automobile's technological middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. Technical standardization of cars has occurred, and with it the elimination of the user's access to the machine itself. At the same time, the infrastructures that once served those who did not use automobiles atrophied and vanished. Some may say they were deliberately starved out. Railways gave way to more and more roadways. And thus a technology that had been perceived to liberate its users began to enslave them.
Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
A Book by Brian HayesThe Factory Photographs
A Book by David LynchI love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Bowellism
A DefinitionLloyd’s Building, London.
Bowellism is a modern architectural style heavily associated with Richard Rogers. The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.
The way we usually do infrastructure
A Fragment by Noah SmithThe bipartisan deal contains a pot of money to repair America’s roads and bridges, and build a few more besides. This is the way we usually do infrastructure in America. First we build a ton of roads and bridges that are highly expensive to maintain, especially with our ruinously high construction costs (see this recent article by Jerusalem Demsas). Then, because costs are so high, we wait for a long time to repair the roads and bridges, until civil engineers start screeching, roads get potholed, and there’s a bridge collapse or two. Then we muster up the political will to throw the requisite shit-ton of money at the problem, the potholes and weak bridges get repaired for twice the amount it would have cost had we done it on a regular schedule and three times the amount it would cost if we were a normal rich country. And the whole cycle begins again.
The Maintainers
A WebsiteThe Maintainers, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Our members come from a variety of backgrounds, including engineers and business leaders, academic historians and social scientists, government and non-profit agencies, artists, activists, coders, and more.
The Pylon Appreciation Society
A WebsiteIt's simple: the Pylon Appreciation Society is a club for people who appreciate electricity pylons.
Hints towards a non-extractive economy
An Article by Matt WebbThere’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”
A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:
- With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
- With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.
We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.
Introduction to Permaculture
The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
About Permaculture
The word Permaculture is taken from the Latin Permanens–meaning to endure of persist through time and cultura–referring to cultures–coming together. Permaculture is an interdisciplinary design science in the field of sustainable system design, with sustainable defined as:
a system which over its lifetime produces energy equivalent to or in excess of what it consumes.
Permaculture ethics
Permaculture operates on three:
- Care of Earth
- Care of Species
- Return of Surplus to the first two
Using akido on the landscape
I have spoken, on a more mundane level, of using akido on the landscape, of rolling with the blows, turning adversity into strength, and using everything positively. The other approach is to karate the landscape, to try to make it yield by using our strength, and striking many hard blows. But if we attack nature we attack (and ultimately destroy) ourselves.
Permaculture principles
There are two basic steps to good permaculture design. The first deals with laws and principles, while the second is more closely associated with practical techniques.
The principles are inherent in any permaculture design, in any climate, and at any scale. They are, briefly:
- Relative location: every element is placed in relationship to another so that they assist each other
- Each element performs many functions.
- Each important function is supported by many elements.
- Efficient energy planning for house and settlement.
- Emphasis on the use of biological resources over fossil fuel resources.
- Energy recycling on site.
- Using and accelerating natural plant succession to establish favourable sites and soils.
- Polyculture and diversity of beneficial species for a productive, interactive system.
- Use of edge and natural patterns for best effect.
Design is a connection between things
The core of permaculture is design. Design is a connection between things. It's not water, or a chicken, or the tree. It is how the water, the chicken and the tree are connected. It's the very opposite of what we are taught in school. Education takes everything and pulls it apart and makes no connections at all. Permaculture makes the connection, because as soon as you've got the connection you can feed the chicken from the tree.
To enable a design component to function efficiently, we must put it in the right place.
Inputs and outputs
For things to work properly, we must remember that:
- The inputs needed by one element are supplied by other elements in the system; and
- The outputs needed by one element are used by other elements (including ourselves).
Each element performs many functions
Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.
Each important function is supported by many elements
Important basic needs such as water, food, energy, and fire protection should be served in two or more ways.
The wild energies
Sectors deal with the wild energies, the elements of sun, light, wind, rain, wildfire, and water flow. These all comes from outside our system and pass through it. For these, we arrange a sector diagram based on the real site, usually a wedge-shaped area that radiates from a centre of activity.
Elements are placed according to intensity of use, control of external energies, and efficient energy flow.
Turn them into cycles
Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.
Time stacking
The British devised a system of farming in which pastures were broken up after the animals had been on them a few years. The pasture was plowed up and put into a high nutrient-demand crop, followed by a grain crop, followed by a root crop. One year it was left fallow to rest the soil. This was sustainable, but it took a long time to cycle.
Masanobu Fukuoka, that master strategist, deals with time stacking. He does not have to follow, because he never removes the main part of the crop from the soil. He starts the next crop before the last crop is finished.
The garden is a riot
In conventional agriculture, vegetation is kept at the weed or herb level using energy to keep it cut, weeded, tilled, fetilised, and even burnt; that is, we are constantly setting the system back and incurring work and energy-costs when we stop natural succession from occurring.
Instead of fighting this process, we can direct and accelerate it to build our own climax species in a shorter time.
There is no attempt to form the garden into strict neat rows; it is a riot of shrubs, vines, garden beds, flowers, herbs, a few small trees, and even a small pond. Paths are sinuous, and garden beds might be round, key-holed, raised, spiraled, or sunken.
We should not confuse order and tidiness
To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.
Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
The number of ways in which things work
The importance of diversity is not so much the number of elements in a system; rather it is the number of functional connections between these elements. It is not the number of things, but the number of ways in which things work.
Species guilds
Guilds are made up of a close association of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal). This assembly acts in relation to the element to assist its health, aid in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects.
An edge is an interface
An edge is an interface between two mediums. Edges are places of varied ecology. There is hardly a sustainable traditional human settlement that is not sited on those critical junctions of two natural economies. Successful and permanent settlements have always been able to draw from the resources of at least two environments.
An edge is a sieve
The edge (boundary) acts as a net or sieve: energies or materials accumulate at edges, e.g. soil and debris are blown by wind against a fence; seashells form a line at the tide-marks on a beach; leaves accumulate at kerbsides in a city.
Everything works both ways
Disadvantages can be viewed as "problems" and we can take an energy-expensive approach to "get rid of the problem", or we can think of everything as being a positive resources: it us up to us to work out just how we can make use of it.
"Problems" can be intractable weeds, huge boulders lying on the perfect house site, and animals eating garden and orchard produce. How can we turn these into useful components of our system? Boulders on the perfect house site, for example, can be incorporated into the house itself, for beauty and as a heat storage system.
The quality of thought
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
Let the goals suggest themselves
There are several ways to start the design process, depending on your nature and needs. You can start out by defining your goals, as precisely as possible, and then look at the site with these goals in mind. Or you can take the site with all its characteristics (both good and bad), and let goals suggest themselves. Of the two questions—"What can I make this land do?"—or—"What does this land have to give me?"—the first may lead to exploitation of the land without regard to long-term consequences, while the second to a sustained ecology guided by our intelligent control.
Maps and observation
Maps are useful only when they are used in combination with observation. Never try to design a site by just looking at a map, even if it is thoroughly detailed with contour lines, vegetation, erosion gullies, and so on marked in.
Maps are never representative of the complex reality of nature. Remember, "The map is not the territory."
Reading the landscape
As we walk about a site and talk to people, we can note our observations. At this stage, we try to store the information we gain in some accurate way, carry a notebook, or a camera and tape-recorder, and make small sketches. The notes we end up with can later be used to devise design strategies.
We do not just see and hear, smell and taste, but we sense heat and cold, pressure, stress from efforts of hill-climbing or prickly plants, and find compatible or incompatible sites in the landscape. We note good views, outlooks, soil colours and textures. In face, we use (consciously) all our many senses and become aware of our bodies and responses.
Beyond this, we can sit for a time and notice patterns and processes: how some trees prefer to grow in rocks, some in valleys, others in grasslands or clumps. We see how water flows on the site, where fires have left scars, winds have bent branches or deformed the shape of trees, how the sun and shadows move, and where we find signs of animals resting, moving, or feeding. The site is full of information on every natural subject, and we must learn to read it well.
The group of blind mullahs
In a natural landscape, each element is part of the greater whole, a sophisticated and intricate web of connections and energy flows. If we attempt to create landscapes using a strictly objective viewpoint, we will produce awkward and dysfunctional designs because all living systems are more than just a sum of their parts. Our culture has tried to define the landscape scientifically, by collecting extensive data about its parts.
These methods are much like the group of blind mullahs in the Sufi tale, who try to describe an elephant.
If you have to do tedious work
If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting.
The perverse arrangement of older houses
The main problem lies in the often perverse arrangement of older houses, which face the road rather than the sun, and in the mania for glass windows on all outside walls.
Always start at the doorstep
If you are having trouble knowing where to start, always start at the doorstep.
The American lawn
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. The American lawn could feed continents if people had more social responsibility.
Why should it be indecent to have anything useful in the front half of your property or around the house where people can see it? Why is it low-status to make that area productive? The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. It has become a cultural status symbol to present a non-productive facade. The lawn and its shrubbery is a forcing of nature and landscape into a salute to wealth and power, and has not other purpose or function.
The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled, menial, and meaningless toil.
From consumption to production
I see no other solution (political, economic) to the problems of mankind than the formation of small responsible communities involved in permaculture and appropriate technology. I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process.
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens.
People who force nature force themselves
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.
Eaves and sun