We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture....

This place is a message and part of a system of messages.

Sending this message was important to us.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture...

So is written the message to the year 12,000 intended to grace the US Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP): an experimental site intended to be the destination of dangerous waste from the nuclear industry. 

Beyond the obvious lessons planners just learn for how we deal with nuclear wast in future, the WIPP project also has something to say; strangely about the place making process. 

As planners, architects, designers; urbanists, we aim to design the most pleasant and welcoming places for people. The successes and failures toward this goal are the subject of endless debate in the literature and wider media. However, what would the results be of creating a place that is designed to be as perpetually unpleasant  and unwelcoming as possible?

This was just the challenge which confronted one WIPP working party on how to send an enduring message up to 10, 000 years into the future; the limit of the radioactivity of the site's dangerous repository. 

With personnel including those who had previously worked on the golden record designed to communicate some of earth's culture to alien civilisations, as attached to the Voyager space probes, the ideas put forward were bound to be highly conceptual. 

Most interesting among the proposals were the physical markers; the 'field of thorns' and 'menacing blocks' as shown in more detail on the project homepage at: 

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm

What does this say about the places we hope to leave for the future? What will whomever or whatever who encounters these markers in 12, 000 A.D make of our culture? I leave these questions up to the reader to consider....

Photo, “Vessels used for keeping the used radioactive waste.” is copyright (c) 2014 D5481026: User:OgreBot/Uploads by new users/2014 November 07 12:00 and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

By D5481026 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons