Salton Sea – Images Set One
January 3rd, 2006
The first set of images that describe a place of time lost in an architectural sense has been placed in my online gallery. The importance of this set once it is completed, will serve as the setting to an unbuilt experimental project that continues in development to this day.
Salton Sea is a treasure trove of architectural intrigue, recovery, and seemingly quasi-ancient site of human civilization of 50 years past.
Salton Sea is a wonderful place of accidental civilization of middle 20th century. Salton Sea is located in southern California just past Palm Springs on your way to Los Angeles. It is the largest body of water in the state of California. It is 227 feet below seal level and was formed by runoff from the Colorado River a hundred years ago. It is in the 1950s that the sea began to be seen as a possible potential site for game fishing, leisure, and water sport activities.
In the 1960s, Albert Frey builds the famous North Shore Yacht Club which can now be seen in ruins due to devastation from a tropical storm in 1976 and then a cascade of seven years’ worth of rising precipitation and runoff which eventually flooded a great deal of the North Shore and Yacht Club Estates. Sometime thereafter, the salinity levels of the sea increase to the point that a major die-off of fish and birds happens in 1992. The number is staggering, as 150,000 fish and some 20,000 birds are found littered all over the beaches. But nothing in comparison to the numbers that die in 1998, as 7.6 million tilapia and croakers perish from lack of oxygen because of overproduction of algae. You can find their bones all over the North Shore beach area. Yet in all this natural devastation, there is this sense of a time lost as you travel about seeing odd moments from the 1950s. There are efforts to turn the environmental situation around for Salton Sea.
The complete history of the Salton Sea can be read by clicking below:
The gallery for Salton Sea Image Set One can be viewed by clicking below:
—-> Click To View < ----
A portion of work on this subject is in progress and will be posted as soon as I get it archieved and ready for presentation.