Environmental Art at Carnegie Mellon

Carnegie Mellon goes through approximately 11,500 boxes of printer paper a year. Bill Cravis' Printing to the Sky, pictured here, used discarded paper boxes to construct a tower up the University's flagpole for two days in April 2006. Cravis' sculpture represents but a fraction of Carnegie Mellon's yearly printer paper consumption.

Junior Asa Watten was frustrated both by how difficult it was for him to communicate the urgency of stopping global warming, and by how unaware many are of their responsibility and impact on the earths climate. Carbon dioxide, the gas primarily responsible for global warming, is transparent, odorless, and tasteless. Simply, it is hard to appreciate what you cannot see.

So, in May of 2006 Asa Watten installed 5 stereoscopic (3d) viewers throughout campus that showed a 3d view of a giant cube on the CFA lawn. The cube represented the average volume of carbon dioxide emissions due to Carnegie Mellon’s electricity use alone every 12 hours (the cube’s volume would double if steam heating from coal were included).

Asa estimated the cost of buying 100% green electricity, making the cube disappear, would be $91.44 per student per year.



(2000, 2002)
As an outgrowth of the Nine Mile Run Greenway Project, John Buck, a soil scientist of Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc., invited Professor Bob Bingham's advanced sculpture students to collaborate on the slag site. Since the slope in question had a very public face across the Monongahela River in Homestead, Buck proposed a collaboration with the class to treat the slope as a canvas for aesthetic assistance on vegetating the site. The support of state funds from a Growing Greener grant culminated in creating five 30’ triangular plantings, using a reconfigured plastic confinement system anchored to the acute slope with guy wires.

In the next course offering, the students chose to soften the previous geometric design. With support from Carnegie Mellon’s interdisciplinary course fund, straw bales were reincarnated into a tributary design running up from the base of the slope, where students had carved out a 30’ diameter shaded garden, to the previous triangular plantings and a natural plateau of wetland. Filled burlap coffee bags were alternated with bales strapped and nailed down to the slope to shore up and contain seeded soil.