If you can imagine the dark spaces which resemble "the lair of a James Bond villain," then you already have a vague idea of architecture critic Mark Lamster's latest exhibition, “The Island That Nobody Knows," according to the show's press release. Opening today at Boston's Pinkcomma Gallery, the photography show captures the industrial architecture of the city's Deer Island Wastewater Management Plant while exploring the machinery and underground “labyrinthine galleries” of the plant.
Lamster, who writes for the Dallas Morning News and is a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington's School of Architecture, took the photos over the course of the past year while studying as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Deer Island, which has served as a concentration camp for Native Americans and a women’s prison, among other things, is today home to the plant, which treats around 350 million gallons of sewage each day and pumps treated water into the Massachusetts Bay. From the exterior, the site is distinguished by twelve 130-foot-tall egg-shaped digesters, which function to thicken sludge in order to turn it into fertilizer.
The exhibition will be on display at the Pinkcomma Gallery through Oct. 27.
