Wrestle with the earth forever
Botanists, satellites, and politicians
Dig, dry, destroy
The butterfly effect
Uncanny playspace
Turbine testing and wind on demand
Fluid dynamic domestication
So, is it beautiful?
Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring...
Moving the [atmospheric] river
Exhibition
Curatorial Conversation
Gallery
About
If you trace it backwards, almost everything that we are now concerned with at Owens Lake starts with either wind or water. The two primary fluid dynamic forces of our world.
Much is known about these two elements individually, but when they act together in combination as they so often do here, the results become exponentially more complicated. Yet complication always attracts us, doesn’t it? Owens Lake is an ongoing story of our very human impulse to overbuild and domesticate nature, and the chase of understanding how even to do so.
Through aerial overflight imagery, satellite cameras, and other forms of visual aerial survey, LADWP has been trying to decipher and isolate the wind-caused landscape disturbances from the water-caused. Indoors at model scale (though models can be the size of warehouses), research continues at the new Fluid Dynamic Research Center, rebuilt and improved when the longstanding research facility was ironically washed out by Sierra Nevada spring runoff during a heavy snow year.
Eventually, the hope is that these studies about fluid dynamic overlap will allow the construction of more “permanent” forms of mega infrastructure to harness or block wind and water impacts. Dam-like buildings that are half water processors, half wind guides. If they can get the design right, “controllers”, monumental concrete filters the size of a small town, might someday allow workers to step away.
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