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Mahnmal
epidote
worship space / monastic community / monument
professor
jonas coersmeier
spring 2022
Mahnmal seeks to remediate the site through the process of phytoremediation, a passive strategy which uses local flora to extract the heavy metals in the soil from its past as a ash dump. The heavy metals move throughout the tree, into their leaves, and after 5 to 10 years, the concentration has reached a level that the leaves are considered toxic, requiring the tree to be cut down. The lumber then is used to construct Mahnmal, which becomes a ever skyward which grows as the site heals.
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Mahnmal seeks freedom from the anthropocentric ideals presented at 1964’s world’s fair and rather proposes a solution that recovers what was lost during the age of rapid industrialization, and introduces a prototype for healing, not only of site but that of humankind. Systems from our past must be investigated, healed, and reintroduced into our daily lives in order for us to move collectively past our current ecological crisis.
This is the valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimney and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Scott Fitzgerald wrote this in the Great Gatsby referring to the state of the pre-1939 world fairs site, the future flushing meadows corona park. Pre-industrializaiton the site was a flourishing wetlands with rich biodiversity, but in 1920 it became a landfill, primarily containing Brooklyn’s furnace ashes. The site was selected for the 1939 world’s fair, as a means of turning the ash dump into a future park, with the efforts being led by then park commissioner Robert Moses. In an effort to save money to prepare for the world’s fair, the ash dump was effectively flattened and filled over with soil and pavement, leaving behind heavy metals in the earth that exist to this day, polluting nearby bodies of water.
The wood recovered from the phytoremediation process is imbued with the history of the site, its troubled industrialized past, which acts as the Mahnmal itself. The user is forced to confront this past, as they experience the gravity of the space they find themselves in.
Each piece of lumber serves as a reminder that the present and past state of the world should not be repeated, and we must reconsider urgently our environmental practices. As the remediation process repeats every 5-10 years, the structure grows to serve as an extremely visible reminder of our harmful industrial past, but also serves as an example that solutions are possible, and in unexpected ways.
