Civil Engineering

So, I've always been interested in civil engineering. The kind that you find behind the grocery store, or underneath bridges. Only, I didn't realize that it was civil engineering, or that it was an interest that could be pursued like an interest in film, or stamp collecting. Bridges are an obvious example. Everybody loves bridges, so you can understand this fascination. If you think about it, you can probably name off at least 5 bridges without trying very hard, Golden Gate, London Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, Puente Centenario, um, the bridge over the river Kwai. But this isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Frankly, my feelings for bridges are at the same end of a ten foot stick as my feelings for lighthouses and porcelain dolls (although I've always felt a strong attraction to the 360 bridge in Austin, most intensely during the depths of my high school depression where the bridge figured centrally in my plot to bring about the destruction of the world with a giant electromagnet, but those details are for another post). I mean ordinary bridges. I'm also talking about the most mundane civil engineering. Not that I believe communist architecture should dominate, but there is an ambiance to concrete construction that I find particularly appealing.
Some notable examples are the architecture in Stanley Kubrick's movies, and the LBJ Library on the UT campus. But these are just figures to illustrate the feeling that I get just from standing under a highway overpass. I can remember being a child and thinking that these places looked especially suitable for exploring, and that hermits and trolls had it made getting to live under there. Vast and airy, the great faces of the slopes which might run into one another in dizzying complication, and above all, the supreme logic of it all, the extreme utilitarianism, that somehow conjures fantasy, the exact opposite of those principals. If I wasn't able to play underneath the highway overpass, I definitely made my way to as many sewer exposures as possible. Drainage ditches in suburbs were a beautiful blighted contrast to the orderly, precious organizations above where people bought their homes. In there was domesticity, but here, where trash flowed in heavy rain was the possibility of adventure. The primary school mythology of these places flourished. Gangs conducted their secret rites here by campfire at night, and in the day time the only sign they left was their cryptic calligraphic handwriting in bright colors on the walls that, try as I might, I could never make out.

So there was the seed that would in later adolescence lead me to break into abandoned and under construction buildings, not to smoke pot, or even to have sex (although I can't really say that was my choice), but to see these forms stripped bare, down to their concrete skeletons, which isn't all that different from civil engineering. I still spend a lot of time in sewage ways, maybe not quite admiring, but still looking for that sense of adventure, and doing a bit of fantasizing in the process. My last house had a large ditch behind it. It had a concrete bottom, sealing any water that might make its way there above the ground, and a terrace of rock filled chain length cubes about 20 feet high. I think was the site of a former creek. I was thinking about that today. There was always water running through that area, but it was nasty. This was, after all, the area where all of the trash and slime on the ground that could move as runoff was deposited before flowing into our wonderful lake. Is there anything that could be done about this? An annual sweep through to clean out all of the tires and litter would be a good first step. But was there anything to do about that water? I've read on the internet before about constructing artificial wetlands, and that, if done correctly, these can purify contaminated water.

Would it be possible to construct one of these in a drainage ditch? The benifit would be multiple fold. First there would be less contaminated water flowing downstream, the construction of a wetland would mean the creation of a habitat and thus a strengthening of the natural ecosystem. I would have to read more about the purposes and design principles of these spillways before I implemented any kind of system to make sure that I wasn't contradicting their purpose. One consideration is that these artificial wetlands would need some maintenance. The immediate purpose of these constructions is to move water out of the streets and downstream to avoid flooding. Any impediment to the flow of water would be a contradiction of that purpose. These areas are designed to be barren so that water may flow as easily from one place to another as possible. My wetland idea would be a snag in that, because for a wetland to function, it must retain some water. To remedy this, my wetlands would have a spillway system that, after a certain amount of rain has fallen, water passes easily over them and flows unheeded downstream. Also, rather than filling an entire drainage area with artificial wetlands, I would build them at intervals. There would be a maximum width to the wetlands, and a proscribed space between, with flora downstream of earlier intervals differing based on the amount of water that would reach it. This would keep the flora from growing too wildly out of control and tangling and diminishing the drainage capacity of the ditch. Another benefit of this design method would be to limit the habitation of some fauna. In most suburbs people enjoy their wildlife at a distance, where they can choose to visit it when they want. A wild outgrowth of artificial wetland could mean a boom in pest population. If the wetlands were built in small strips as I have outlined, this would limit the potential habitat for some of these animals, with some specific modifications made to suit individual circumstances. Although, with the development of an ecosystem, natural predators would return to keep these populations in check.

Some maintenance would be necessary. Trash and other inorganic compounds would end up caught up in the artificial wetlands. These would naturally have to be removed by hand to maintain habitat health and aesthetic quality.

One of my other fantasies as a child was to see the overpasses turned into great hanging gardens. That was one of the ancient wonders of the world. It could be possible in the modern world. Otherwise, it will remain a wonder, but who wants to claim a system of superhighways as their pyramids?