9-08: Finished with design and fabrication of "steeple" for Rosemary Center!

8-22-2008: AIA Has interviewed me!

".... various efforts have been made to scrap the ships in the worst condition, including one endeavor which sent a number of the ships to a scrap yard in England, only to be denied entry and returned to the James River. Because of the toxic nature of the ships’ building materials—including asbestos, PCBs, oil, and other industrial contents—strict EPA regulations determine how the ships are to be dismantled, making it highly difficult for a shipyard to meet the requirements. This is where David Phillip Walen’s solution comes in.

Forming a floating village
Walen has proposed that the ships be remediated and restored to full functionality and linked together to form a floating village that could sustain human life offshore. “I think it would be a great way to take something that people only want to scrap and use this as the seed for something that would demonstrate a radically different way of human habitat,” Walen explains.

Walen first became interested in the idea after his father sent him an article on the Ghost Fleet, but Walen says that his inspiration to design a floating city comes from a sense of wanderlust. “I think a lot of people want to travel around the world and work and live,” he elaborates. “I’ve moved so many times myself in the past that thinking of a way to be a modern gypsy is kind of a path plan. How do you carry all those things that you need to engage your world? How do you transport, for example, a wood shop or a metal shop? You need a village, but how do you travel and still have a home is the dilemma that drove me to the fantasy where you’d be a gypsy with a city that you could walk with, a kind of Archigram walking city, but a floating city.”

Walen’s idea is to determine which ships are salvageable first and then “basically form a platform that would be used to recycle the ships,” tethering the ships together to create permanent islands capable of traveling around the world and potentially demonstrating a better way to live. Walen believes that retrofitting the ships to usability could employ and test a number of newer technologies like mycology remediation (using mushrooms to cleanse toxic debris), foam Asbestos containment and elimination, (potentially even used in the foam as future floatation or insulation), bacteria that eat waste, and perhaps nanotechnology.........

3-01-08: Working at my studio in the REDUX!!!