Cold War Blues: Coastal Restoration of Shikhov Beach In a Post Oil World
The oil industry is responsible for massive amounts of pollution across the world. A significant amount of this is due to the impact of large infrastructure created by drilling operations, which are hostile work environments and often damage the ecosystem they inhabit. Because Oil is one of the primary energy sources around the world its continued exploitation is guaranteed to happen for decades to come. As technological advancements facilitate new ways to obtain oil for the ever increasing demand, old facilities and their megastructures are abandoned with no plan for re-use.
This thesis is an exploration into architecture’s current role as a facilitator of offshore oil infrastructure. It explores the scale of investment for the multi-national corporations and how this investment is disposed of after there is no more oil in the well. More often than not there is little consideration as to what happens after the drilling and this causes a multitude of problems that push the area closer to the brink of ecological disaster.
The design project proposes deploying new machinery onto an architectural construction to develop a symbiotic relationship between the two. The way new machinery interacts with the architecture it inhabits is considered by discussing the life cycle of current technology and what future developments might hold for the sustainability of coastal regions.