Industrial Fung Shui and the Art of Pollution
July 22nd, 2009
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The sky is your canvas and on a clear day, a clean cerulean slate with which to work. Every decision affects the chi of your factory within its frame: a valley cut by a river, sandwiched between rolling hills. Smokestacks should be spread apart for maximum coverage and staggered, allowing the roiling gray clouds, each on a unique trajectory and column of air, to facilitate collisions in unexpected ways, whipping up a black dragon to swallow the sky, the setting sun an opaque disk in its throat, its tail reaching beyond the horizon carried by a breeze. Allowing soot, the moss of progress, to gather from ashen rain on the leeward sides of the stacks.
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Your complex must have access to a body of water, preferably a river, one with a ponderous current, almost stagnant, not diluting but churning your chemical soup, allowing it to seeping into the water table, perhaps even leaving ochreous rings in the sinks of the local village. Shimmering eddies of heavy metals swirl along the shore, the stain glass on your cathedral to production, fish scales, metallic green and aubergine, ideas for the color of next year’s most popular cars.
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Your plant must also find itself in calm, settling air, a valley perhaps where wind will not dissipate so quickly your contribution to the sky. Fog and mist rising from the warm water, air heavy with vapor and smoke, must meet in the middle, must join, must fuse as though your valley, like the Smokey Mountains, cups in its hands, the fruits of production. For an alternative approach:
“Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.” –Frank Lloyd Wright.
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