Fourth Year, Professor Gary Rohrbacher, University of Kentucky

Collaboration with Entire Studio

This graduate-level studio is part of a multi-year initiative by the University of Kentucky College of Design to present proposals for the future of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a now inactive Cold War Department of Defense facility suffering today from a leak of toxic chemicals slowly seeping toward the Ohio River. The studio works with a massive 30 square mile site to envision remediation strategies that are presented to the US Department of Energy. This semester proposed a landscape remediation technique envisioning possible forms to be constructed by heavy civil equiptment drones in order to manipulate the water table below and create conditions necessary for safe excavation of toxins below. Quick iterations on a CNC mill were used not just as representation of the landscape but as simulations of drone movements, proposing a workflow between Fusion 360, Rhino 3D, Grasshopper, RhinoCAM, and AutoCAD for the predictive or parametric control allowed by each.

Studio teammates: Eric Shockey, Barry Richardson, Christa Mueller, Jeremiah Hawkins, Jennifer Harris, Julie Sniadowski, Olivia Winn, Erin Engler, and Studio Research Assistant Chris Westfall