I think.... there... 4am: Remnants of the Biosphere

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Remnants of the Biosphere

via BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh on 1/6/10

Photographer Noah Sheldon got in touch with a beautiful series of photos documenting the decrepit state of Biosphere 2, a derelict sociobiological experiment in the Arizona desert.

[Image: Biosphere 2, photographed by Noah Sheldon].

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and falling somewhere between David Gissen's idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed "as a transgressive animated force against buildings"—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.

"The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure.

Scientists ridiculed it. Members of the support team resigned, charging publicly that the enterprise was awash in deception. And even some crew members living under the glass domes, gaunt after considerable loss of weight, tempers flaring, this winter threatened to mutiny if management did not repair a growing blot on the project's reputation.The entire site was sold to private developers in 2007, leaving the buildings still open for tours but rapidly falling apart.

[Image: Biosphere 2, photographed by Noah Sheldon].

Sheldon was originally inspired to visit and photograph the site after reading that "suburban sprawl" had come to surround the once-remote research site. Indeed, we read through that latter link, real estate development has "conquered vast swaths of the Sonoran Desert. The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart)."

[Images: Photographs by Noah Sheldon].

Now, like something straight out of J.G. Ballard, the site might someday be home to a development called Biosphere Estates.

[Images: Photographs by Noah Sheldon].

Sheldon's ima ges, reproduced here with permission, show the facility—the largest sealed space ever constructed—advancing into old age. A vast biological folly in the shadow of desert over-development, the project of Biosphere 2 seems particularly poignant in this unkempt state.

The fertile promise of the microcosm has been abandoned.

[Image: Noah Sheldon].

In this context, Biosphere 2 could be considered one of architect Francois Roche's "buildings that die," a term he used in a recent interview with Jeffrey Inaba. Indeed, in its current state Biosphere 2 is easily one of the ultimate candidates for Roche's idea of "corrupted biotopes"; the site's ongoing transformation into suburbia only makes this corruption all the more explicit.

[Images:Noah Sheldon].

Watching something originally built precisely as a simulation of the Earth—the "2" in "Biosphere 2" is meant to differentiate the complex from the Earth itself, i.e. Biosphere 1—slowly taken over by the very forces it was naively meant to model is philosophically extraordinary: the model taken over by the thing it represents. It is a replicant in its dying throes.