A Young Architect’s Designs for the Climate Apocalypse | Hacker News Reader

A Young Architect’s Designs for the Climate Apocalypse

newyorker.com

26 pointschapulin49 comments

Always bothers me when reading long articles about designers and artists with only a single image of any of their work!

Designing for the future and seeking new ways to be mindful of the climate is great, but this person has taken the concept several iterations too far. Once you start getting hesitant about using mealworms to consume plastic waste because it feels "very capitalistic", you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

> Hedström has proposed factory-like systems that would feed plastic waste to mealworms on an industrial scale, but he grapples with the ethical and practical problems in doing so. (It takes a colony of three to four thousand mealworms a week to digest a coffee cup.) “It’s very capitalistic or, like, it’s a very human way of thinking,” Hedström said. It doesn’t feel like symbiosis if one of you is being farmed.

This is a good example of ideology gone too far. Taken to the extremes, even good intentions start getting weirdly misaligned.

I agree, though it's consistent with the extremes to which non-harm gets taken in many Eastern religions, which according to the article were a strong influence on his ethics. Not eating root-vegetables, etc.

The only cure for this is to drop the person off 500km from civilization, preferably in northern Canada (with gear and a guide of course) and have them hike and bivouac their way back. After that experience all notions of negotiating equitable terms with meal worms will be forgotten.

> This is a good example of ideology gone too far.

What does "too far" mean here? What boundary exactly has been crossed? It's not as if he canned the idea - further, it's not as if anyone is actually building it anyway.

> What does "too far" mean here?

mealworms don't have feelings, and extrapolating "capitalism" out of that has little basis outside of a vaguely leftist geo-hippy reaction to capitalism.

edit: and to be clear, i'm not a huge fan of capital, but the idea that this is some ruthless capitalistic evil is straight laughable.

That doesn't answer my question.

> For his final presentation at architecture school, Hedström proposed Inxect Island, an apartment complex built around mealworm farming, sustained by ocean-borne plastic, on a decommissioned oil rig moored outside Tórshavn.

This sounds more like the set of a Balenciaga runway show than an a helpful vision for the future. Complete with a dash of "zey vill eat zee bugs", it's hard to tell whether or not this is satire.

Architecture school is all about the fanciful. Whether or not the proposals will work in real life are secondary to the creative process that gets you to them (aside from purposeful courses like Structures or Materials). That something like this was proposed for an architecture final crit doesn't surprise me. The real accomplishment here is this student getting his way into a New Yorker featured article.

Every once in a while, you'll hear something in a final crit like, "Uh, do you realize all your structural loads are coming down on to that one point?" Always good for a chuckle when someone brings up the practical failings of a design.

DERELICTE, Derek!

> it's hard to tell whether or not this is satire

I don't see anything about it that reads like satire. It sounds pretty smart for a small, sustainable community.

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