"The Second Coming of the silos will be abstract mysterious"

By at 6:54 am Saturday, May 2

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

If you've never given much thought to all the cool things you could do with an abandoned silo, well...you didn't grow up in Kansas, did you? Personally, I had a great plan for a scuba-through aquarium (with whales!) that really could have gotten off the ground if someone had ponied up the seed money back when I was 5.

With a recent architectural design contest to revamp a couple of former sewage treatment plan silos into cultural landmarks, the Amsterdam City Council seems to be going for something a bit more practical than my old grain silo dreams. The ArchiCentral blog has some great renderings of the entry by NL Architects, which includes a "Cultural Silo" (with theaters, gallery space, and a restaurant), and a "Climbing Silo" (with a 40-meter/131-foot-high artificial cave for rock-wall climbing enthusiasts...of which, apparently, Amsterdam has many).

BTW: The headline here, a quote from the NL Architects spokesman, roughly translates from architect-speak into English as, "This project is going to be kick-ass!"



What would you do with a retired silo? I still think the aquarium idea would be "abstract mysterious" as all hell.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

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