THEORY

Salt unbalnced

Changes in the production of salt affect the ecosystem balance

Water is more salty

Salt on the roads ends up in the soil and water

Salt ponds are losing color

20 million tons of salt are being used for the roads every year

Poor education on the impact of salt in the enviroment

Salt is a common ingredient that we have in our home and that can go unnoticed, or at least for me.I didn’t think of salt of nothing more than a condiment for food.

When we had to pick a material i was most interest in salt, because in the first lesson we learned that in France the Salin d’Aigues-Mortes were losing their pink color because the production of the salt wasn't the same and the lakes were getting saltier so the microscopic algae that gave the lakes their pink color couldn’t live in the water.
I thought this was really interesting, because of the change of one thing the whole ecosystem was unbalanced.

And it got me thinking for what else was salt responsible for, or how salt could be used.The first research i started doing was the uses of salt, one of the uses i found interesting was the rock salt used of deicing roads, as the Salin d’Aigues-Mortes the use of rock salt on the roads was having an impact in the ecosystem, since the salt was elevating the water and soil salinity near the area.
In both examples a change in the salt had an impact in something bigger than what it was being used for.So at first i was just seeing salt as one element not as in Linda Booth Sweeney “System Thinking” - “see how the relationships between the elements system influence the patterns of behavior and events to which we react;”.

After this i did further research of salt balance in the ecosystem and alternatives ways to use the salt.
I found two videos of how salt could be used in architecture the first was “The Siwa Oasis”, where houses were made out of Karsheef- salt crusts as a result of high salinity in the water.People were taking advantage of the material they had around them.
The other video was about Salar de Atacama, it was a project of building with salt as a way of utilizing materials that were local.
The third project i found really interesting was “Saltygloo” an experiment in 3-D printing using locally harvested salt from the San Francisco Bay to produce a large-scale, lightweight, additive manufactured structures.

What i like about this projects was that they all obtain the materials with what was around them and find alternatives in how to use it.
For my idea i wanted to use salt as an alternative material to create or build something.
Afterwards i did some experiments with what i had around me in this case salt from my kitchen and cornstarch, at first i was trying to create a material similar to clay but i ended up with a translucent material that hardened like an eggshell.

I ended up with some sketches of this material could be used for plates , but if i had more time to work on the project i would have like to make a real prototype of how could the plates look like. And do further research of what you could create with salt.



References

Linda Booth Sweeney – Systems thinking: a means to understanding our complex world
http://scpsystem.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/3/3/21333498/linda_booth_sweeney_-_systems_thinking_a_means_to_understanding_our_complex_world.pdf

Emerging Objects (2013). Saltygloo, Retreived from http://www.emergingobjects.com/project/saltygloo/

H,Jeremy(2018).How Road Salts affect the environment.Retrieved from https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/12/11/road-salt-harms-environment/

Ma7sool Productions. (2015, March 25). The Siwa Oasis: A Culture Built on Salt. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5D17XmZrOM

ARCHITECTURE AND EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS. (2020, February 2). AEE, THE ATACAMA: BUILDING WITH SALT. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-hRuw0Szx4