THE MARKER PROJECT

COMMUNICATOR OF RADIOACTIVE DANGER TO THE FUTURE, 1991

MICHAEL BRILL AND SAFDAR ABIDI (US & PK)

Human language has a 2,000 year cycle of survival, after which it dies. So how do you communicate the danger of a radiocative waste facility to people who come upon this facility, buried under a desert, 10,000 years from now? The U.S Department of Energy explored this challenge in the early 1990s by inviting a team of designers, architects, linguists, material engineers and anthropologists to design a method of communicating with the future.

Michael Brill and Safdar Abidi, both architects, had investigated Mike's thesis that physical form communicates to people without the use of language or symbols. This thesis speculates that human beings have a primal reaction to physical form based on a number of aspects including scale, texture, lightness, darkness, enclosure, and expanse. For example, for centuries people have visited Stonehenge, though it does not have language, symbols or other legible messages. The Marker Project explores a few designs to communicate peril and danger to future inhabitants of the planet.

BIO

Safdar Abidi is an architect who lives and works in Canada. Originally from Pakistan, Safdar has always been fascinated by the role of culture in human experience, and the connections to place and people that culture provides. While studying architecture at the University of Buffalo, Safdar met and became friends with Michael Brill. Mike used to lead a design studio called The Natural Language of Form once every few years. Safdar took part in this studio, and investigated the design of a place that communicated the feelings of connectedness to a place and the loss of such place, without the use of any symbols or language. The Marker Project was a collaboration between Mike and Safdar as part of this ongoing investigation. Mike authored the concepts in collaboration with Safdar, and the artwork was developed by Safdar.