The Carcass and The Balloon: Reinterpreting the Hanford Landscape through Mapping and Measure.

Abstract

As a unique geography of irradiated space, the Hanford Reach in Washington State has been measured in every way conceived by modern science and bureaucracy. This former military site has been mapped in a variety of ways, in maps that tend to over specify and oversimplify at the same time, placing its entangled histories and futures of this landscape at odds with one another. The interpretation of the site currently relies on the articulation of the boundaries between things, contaminated and uncontaminated, natural and man-made, and future and past. This thesis argues for a more nuanced interpretation of the site employing mapping as a generative vehicle for designing and communicating within this context. The proposed design of architectural interventions, the Carcass and the Balloon, relies on the extraction of unseen spatial, material and formal measures of the site.