Exciting news, everyone! Today in my dreadful morning class I came up with a great idea, for thesis.
It sort of relates to my original idea, but I was never sold on the urban housing angle in that. Instead, I want to design the opposite of monuments. That is, instead of things that are of the past, things that are for the future.
A simple example: imagine an aqueduct built in some cold frozen part of Canada. It doesn’t work right now. But in X-hundred years, given predicted global climate change, water will flow, and the aqueduct can be put to use by future generations.
The idea is that things may change/deteriorate such that future generations do not have the capacity to construct such a thing, but would benefit from clean water. So we build them now, knowing they’ll be needed in the future.
The most apt precedent I can think of is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Related, methods of disposing of nuclear waste in “This is Not a Place of Honor,” The Long Now, ruin value theory, The World Without Us, and how Roman infrastructure was used during the Dark Ages.
