An artistic bend to the Los Angeles River (Recessed Space)

https://recessed.space/00135-Lauren-Bon-and-the-Los-Angeles-River

"The artifice of things affirms that things, for the simple reason that they are made, can also be unmade and remade accordingly."
Mahmoud Keshavarz[1]

Stubbornly myopic, painfully dense, and agonisingly self-assured, the masculine engineer’s conquest of the built environment is plain as day when standing in the most desolate portions of the Los Angeles River.

Following a flood in 1938, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plastered the river with more than 3.5 million barrels of cement, transforming what had once been the primary water source for the region into a 51-mile-long risk management system.

While it does, in fact, prevent flooding across the Los Angeles basin, its ushering of the city’s water and waste into the Pacific Ocean has reduced a river that was once the lifeblood of Los Angeles into a monumental environmental hazard.

The blurred boundaries between land and river were engineered into a ruthless binary.

 The office and three-acre grounds of Metabolic Studio, an interdisciplinary art and research hub directed by artist Lauren Bon, are perched above the Eastern edge of the Los Angeles River on a former parking lot that has since been named the Moon for its previously lifeless surface.

Since 2015, Farmlab, a subset of artists and ecologists within Metabolic Studio, has replaced the tarmac with salvaged floodplain material that had lain dormant beneath the Los Angeles River, blurring the distinction between the two sites following decades of separation.

Walkways are determined by the growth of native plant seeds scattered between the pavers with continually unexpected results.

A happy black cat named Luna (Spanish for moon) unwittingly spreads seeds across the site.

Several times a week, a van transports visitors from the Moon to the base of the Los Angeles River to explore the construction site of Bending the River, an adaptive reuse project devised by Metabolic Studio to redirect a small portion of the river’s water to irrigate the nearby Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Following more than “75 permits across varying levels of government within the city, county, state, and federal jurisdictions and the first private water right in the city of Los Angeles,” the project website reads, “this work will be completely off-grid, using solar, gravity, and salvaged floodplain to cultivate and regenerate the web of life.”
Bending the River is an artificial tributary that might be the first of many.

Before reaching its destination, the water will be cleansed in a treatment facility at Metabolic Studio via clay pipes.
As opposed to PVC pipes, which are typically used in contemporary hydro-engineering projects for their cost effectiveness, the clay pipes will not shed contaminants into the water, but will instead soften the boundaries between the Los Angeles River, Metabolic Studio, and the Los Angeles State Historic Park.

The placement of the clay pipes beneath the river required the excision of concrete triangles of a standard size, each of which weighs the equivalent of a truck.
They are currently resting amid the plant life and salvaged wood at Metabolic Studio, awaiting their next function as a sculpture whose site and scale will be determined in the near future.
It is an arduous task in line with the studio’s motto: “Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy.”

 The hurdles of bureaucracy that were put in place to support engineering feats like the Los Angeles River also hinder engineering feats like Bending the River.

What other hurdles must be overcome to undo the engineering blunders of the past?

What other hurdles must be overcome to undo the false divisions of things?

What other hurdles must be overcome?