A beautiful series of photos documenting the decrepit state of Biosphere 2, a semi-derelict bio-architectural experiment in the Arizona desert.
The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen's idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed "as a transgressive animated force against buildings"—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.
"The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure.
Watching something originally built precisely as a simulation of the Earth—the 2 in "Biosphere 2" is meant to differentiate this place from the Earth itself, i.e. Biosphere 1—slowly taken over by the very forces it was naively meant to model is philosophically extraordinary: the model taken over by the thing it represents. It is a replicant in its dying throes.
Can't think of anything really to say, just found this interesting. I'd love to take a visit, seems like it would be like visiting an ancient ruin of a dead society.
Here's the orginal web site on the project:
Biosphere 2 - Where science lives.
