The Null Device

The long now: A paper looking at ways of marking nuclear waste dumps as dangerous in a way that can still be understood in 10,000 years' time, without reliance on common cultural meanings. (And no, it doesn't include establishing apocalyptic death cults around their periphery or spreading legends of evil spirits or anything.)

* Design of the entire site and its subelements should avoid those forms that humans regularly tend to use to represent the "ideal," "perfection," or "aspiration." Aspiring forms are sky-reaching verticals, the obelisk, for example. Ideal and perfect ones are the the perfect forms of symmetrical geometry (spheres, pyramids, hexagons) and of regular crystalline structures or polyhedrons. If such forms are used, we suggest their perfection be undermined through substantial and obviously meant "irregularity," as if its builders knew about the ideal and perfection, but asserted that this place is not about them. More appropriate types of forms to use are amorphic or jagged and horizontal, a deliberate shunning of the values of "perfection" or "aspiration."

(via Plastic)

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