Off the trailNumber 02Visual design

Mineral Palimpsest

A story about oysters, polluted coastlines, and towers cast from shells.

Kind: Narrative, illustration, fabrication
Made with: Drawing, CNC-milled reliefs, cast models
The premise: One oyster filters 50 gallons of water a day

Line drawing of tall cast towers on a coast, with cable cars, carts of shells, and fish and oysters below the waterline

Visual design

Drawings, renderings and stories from architecture school: speculative buildings and the worlds they sit in.

A speculative story in which architecture and the sea look after each other, and the oyster is the link between them.

An oyster is a filter. A single one draws about 50 gallons of water a day over its gills, trapping plankton and, with it, carbon and the nutrients that cause coastal dead zones. Its shell is mostly calcite, which can be milled and cast like concrete. Early Spanish settlers in Florida and the Carolinas burned oyster shells for lime and built with the result, a material called tabby.

So: deploy oyster colonies along coasts with heavy chemical runoff. Each oyster spends its life cleaning the water. When it dies, its shell is collected, burned to lime, and cast in layers into mineral pinnacles. The towers grow at the pace of the colony's lives and deaths, and stand as a record of the coast that was once damaged.

White line map of a coastline with city street grids, a river, and rings of circles radiating from points along the shore, on a dark ground — The coast, with the reach of each colony drawn as rings.

White contour lines of a mountainous shoreline with dotted areas along the water, on a dark ground — Contours of the shore.

A very wide, faint elevation drawing of a pier structure with a tower at one end — The pier in elevation.

Plan drawing of two irregular island forms in grey and pale blue, with small figures and carts, among circles of stippled texture

Axonometric line drawing of a layered tower with scaffolding, radiating lines around it

The chemistry is real. Heated to about 1,500°F, calcium carbonate breaks into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide. Calcium oxide is lime; mixed with water and left to dry it takes carbon dioxide back in and cures into a crystal lattice around the shell aggregate. An oyster lives about six years, so if one shell holds roughly an inch of calcite, the volume of a cast tells you how many oysters it took, and how long the colony needed to grow it.

A pale blue bulb-shaped form on a thin stem, like a buoy

The bulb with its top pinched into points

The bulb with an opening cut into its side

The bulb releasing a cloud of dots, drawn as a plume

The refugium: a floating chamber where copepods, the plankton oysters eat, are bred and released.

Copepods are tiny crustaceans, too weak to fight a current, so they drift. An oil derrick turns circular motion into a linear pump; the same mechanism here pumps oxygen into a refugium where the copepods breed, so the colony below always has something to eat.

Plan of an island-like form with stippled vegetation around it and a small jetty

Plan of the same form drawn in blue-grey layers, with a tower footprint

Plan of the form with a dark tower core and a pier reaching into blue water

Three plans of the pinnacle site.

A tall drawing of a tower in section, its layers getting thinner toward the top — The tower in section: each band is one generation of shells.

The physical work was the landscape and the towers themselves: CNC-milled reliefs of the coast, a model with masts and cables, and cast pinnacles whose surfaces keep the texture of the mold.

A CNC-milled relief of a coastline in pale wood, lit from the side on a dark ground

A white milled relief with fine contour lines, photographed close

A pale relief with a grid of pins and threads stretched across it

A dark model of a shoreline with three masts and cables rising from it

A cast tower fragment in pale stone-like material, lit against black

The edge of a cast block, its surface rough and layered