bladeyard
Turbine Blade playscape
BladeYARD is a proposed sculptural playscape of recycled wind turbine blades submerged in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada for BurningMan 2021 by Michael Mannhard Workshop. Designed as a ruin, BladeYard re-contextualizes these enormous streamlined symbols of our renewable future to serve as a warning for the consequences of waste and shortsightedness in how we imagine the end-of-use of our built world. Participants can feel the physical reminder of this warning as they climb on, seek shelter under, and wander through this ominous forest of immense sculptural blades.
Growing up in the Midwest, I remember the awe I felt gazing out the car window at the massive turbines, giants gathered in the grasslands, their arms turning slow circles into the sky. The blades themselves are designed with overwhelming sculptural efficiency, biomimetic beauty and spacial presence, some blades now reaching sizes of 100m in length. They are iconic as one of the most important symbols of our sustainable future. In their immensity is the paired sense of optimism that we are both up to the challenge and unafraid to use our collective brainpower to design and engineer extraordinary things to right our world, similar in spirit to The Space Race.
It was recently reported in Bloomberg News that wind turbine blades can't be recycled and are piling up at rate of nearly eight thousand blades per year in our landfills.
Photographer: Benjamin Rasmussen for Bloomberg Green
What does it mean when this symbol of hope fails us so greatly?
How is it that the most prominent symbol of our sustainable future was designed in such a way as to simply be buried in the ground at the end of its working life as a blade?
These objects are now layered in new meaning as symbols of our shortsightedness in how we approach our built world and the incredible challenge of designing for the whole life cycle of products.
BladeYARD reckons with these questions and the symbolic duality of these objects.
After Burningman 2021, BladeYARD would be dismantled in search for a more permanent home.
project updates
BladeYARD was recently featured on the popular design site DEZEEN. A link to the article can be found here.
BladeYARD also took part in the digital 2020 BURNINGMAN FESTIVAL as an immersive virtual sculpture in the BRCvr Multiverse. The project can be experienced on ALTSPACEVR.
For inquiries please contact Michael Mannhard at mmannhard@gmail.com.
All images by Michael Mannhard Workshop unless otherwise noted.