The Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant

Martin Cox

Surrealist poet Paul �luard described the artist as a 'waking dreamer', an explorer of the territory where the world of dreams and that of the real overlap. The artist creates poetic meaning and beauty outp. The artist creates poetic meaning and beauty out of the banal through an exploitation of the competing rational and irrational forces underlying human experience.

With few exceptions, infrastructure projects are resolutely the domain of banality and the dogmas of 'cost-benefit' and 'value engineering'.. Even the word suggests something best concealed and forgotten : the entrails of our culture. However, the complex physical and social circumstances in which we build these projects will increasingly demand new approaches to their design. Architects may aalso dream in the manner of �luard's artist, and human experience being the architect's stock-in-trade, to public works projects architects can bring these human dimensions of the irrational and the intuitive to create new opportunities for space and habitation.

The Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant is to be built in a residential neighbourhood of New Haven, Connecticut. The site, close by the source Lake Whitney is historically significant for two reasons : the existing 1905 water treatment plant and the adjacent Eli Whitney Museum. Whitney (1765-1825) changed the course of American history with two inventions : the cotton gin, which mechanized the process of separating cotton fibre from its seed, and the concept of mass-production of interchangeable parts which Whitney developed to manufacture muskets for Jefferson's army. The Museum, on the site of his munitions factory, is an important destination for tour groups from surrounding schools while one of the old outbuildings is leased by the Water Authority as the Whitney Water Centre, an educational resource dedicated to the subject of water and its conservation.

Dating from 1905, the existing plant has the quality of being part-building, part-landscape. Sunken below the surface as a result of the requirementt that the water flow under gravity, it is a brick platform with a grassy roof protruding from the site as if pushed up by some mysterious tectonic movement. Hopelessly undersized relative to current demand and its sand filtration beds made obsolete by modern purification processes, the plant is to be decommissioned.

The replacement plant was originally conceived by the Water Authority and its consulting engineers in the strictly rational terms of a cost-benefit analysis : the site was a logical choice because of its proximity to the lake and dam ; the plant was to be arranged in a plan as closely resembling the flow-chart of purification processes as possible and the whole facility and its site was to be removed from the public realm in the manner of industrial installations everywhere. In deference to its neighbours, the plant was to be cloaked in an architectural shell, a polite housing for the mysterious tanks and pipes which form the true program of the facility. The architect would essentially only work in elevation, the plan and section being predetermined.This bodywork is the extent to which most infrastructure projects engage the architect, as a designer for a wrapper analagous to the plastic shell containing the circuitry of a computer � largely cosmetic and redundant. A psychological device, such a wrapper is intended to obfuscate the meaning of its contents rather than speaking of them.

These plans were abandoned following something like an architectural insurgency. The area around the site is resideential and houses many faculty members of nearby Yale University. A vocal residents' advocacy group expressed dismay at the potential loss of what had become a de-facto park in the centre of the neighbourhood, in addition to a lack of imagination and consideration for the historic significance of the site. Swayed by the pressure of public opinion, the Authority held public interviews for independent architects and landscape architects to be involved as consultants to the multinational engineering company designing the plant. Steven Holl Architects, in collaboration with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, were engaged on the basis of a proposal to create public space by treating the site and the plant as inseparable parts of a whole. The site would become a 'Waterworks Park' and the plant itself would be approached as a piece of architecture � inhabited space with public dimensions and programmes, rather than exclusively a container for a series of processes.

The design process began with two parallel research efforts : a thorough examination of the characteristics of the site and an investigation into the processes of modern water purification. The purification programme of the plant involves 6 basic elements : � Rapid Mix (high turbulence) � .Flocculation (gentle wave agitation with coagulants) � .Dissolved Air Flotation (floating/sinking) � Ozonation (bubbling) � .Deep Bed Granulagentle wave agitation with coagulants) � Dissolved Air Flotation (floating/sinking) Ozonation (bubbling) Deep Bed Granular Activated Filtration � Clear Water Storage

The seventh major programmatic element, human habitation, contains the control rooms and off of programmatic element, human habitation, contains the control rooms and oftation, contains the control rooms and offices for the staff of the plant. To this given brief we added the Whitney Water Center, which will move out of its leased space at the Eli Whitney Museum. With this move, the plant itself becomes a didactic tool and a piece of public architecture. There will be a circulation sequence through the plant's workings to be experienced by visitors, in addition to public spaces for exhibitions about water and the water-supply.

Like most infrastructure projects, the plant posed a problem of space at the scale off the landscape. The tanks containing the stages of purification must be positioned in space relative to each other and to the height of the water at its source, without regard for the surrounding ground. The landscape was mutable in plan and section while the tanks were fixed.

A conceptual framework for the site was established based on the realization that the plant had to operate across two extremes of scale : at the molecular level of chemistry and at the scale of a park. Inspired by aerial photos of the American West, a landscape of textures overlaid with a rigourous Cartesian geometry suggestive of the engineers' process diagrams, the site was divided into a series of 6 sectors. In proportion to the geometry of the existing plant's filtration beds, each sector is a landscape analogue to a process contained in the plant below. Gently sloping up in a spiral around the plant, from the busy thoroughfare to the east to the quieter residential street at the west, this landscape of water gardens is warped and folded to contain the plant below its surface.

'All landscape is painting', a graphic exploration of space with the possibility of a serendipitious discovery in a line or image. Searching for a way to bring a sense of the plant's molecular-scale activity iinto the experience of the park we experimented with images of microscopic forms. Using a computer modeling technique of displacement mapping, two-dimensional images were given three-dimensional presence, the z-dimension calculated from the qualities of light and shadow in the images. The 'landscapes' resulting from this micro to macro transformation were explored in perspective, provoking ideas about the shaping of the ground, its textures, colours and plantings. The GAF Filtration zone acquired a canopy of vines defining a garden of shadows and misted water while the Wetlands developed an archipelago of islands for bird life. Each sector has a different spatial and material quality due to the manipulation of the ground and the variety of native plantings. Programmatic activities such as dog walking, kite flying and picnicking are imagined. Water flows under gravity across the site, connecting the sectors and creating micro-programmes through its manipulation.

The sole element of the plant to protrude into the park from below is the building containing the administration, control and public spaces of the plant. A sliver in form, the building has a curved section, 27 fo wide by 350' long. In geometry and material, it is expressive both of the language of watebuilding has a curved section, 27-foot wide by 350-foot long. In geometry and material, it is expressive both of the language of water containment and the force causing it to emerge out of the ground. The structure of induction-bent steel CHS pipes will be clad externally with glass-bead blasted stainless steel, internally with acoustic sheet metal.

These experiments in irrational investigation were balanced by a design process of exhaustive rigour. One of a long list of subconsultants to the plant engineers, we learned to work with unfamiliar structures and terms including 'Value Engineering' : a practice whereby any element that cannot be defended to an independent panel of consultants as being essential to the operation of the plant is recommended to be deleted (the Value Engineers recommended that all curves be made square and the number of 'bubbles' in the bubbling field above the tanks be reduced). Following the initial design, the project went back into the drawer for a year while an extensive search and analysis was conducuted to determine if the plant could be built on an industrial site elsewhere at less expense. This proved not to be possible, the ongoing cost of pumping the water from Lake Whitney outweighing the expense of the park. For once, architecture was the route of least resistance.

Two decades before �luard, in A Dream Play (1901), August Strindberg writes 'What is poetry ? Not reality but more than reality, not dreams but waking dreams.' Indefensible in the purely objective terms of the real, beauty in poetry or design nonetheless depends on the support of reality, like Dali's watch on its crutch. Not only must the poettt be capable of dreaming while awake, he must simultaneously possess a heightened awareness of the real.

Increasingly the design problems of public works cannot be solved with pure engineered solutions. Environmental worries and the politics of development introduce variables that are spatial in nature, a volatile and indeterminate set of counter forces to the rational forces of science and engineering. The potential for design lies in the resolution of these forces, the paradoxical 'waking dream'.

[ The Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant is currently in design development. It will be operational by 2002 producing 15 million gallons of drinking water per day. ]

Martin Cox is an architect and associate at Steven Holl Architects, New York.