Abstract:

How might we contend with the cast-off (infra)structures of a petroculture that has an uncertain future? Just off the shore of the Island of Montreal, the community of Nuns' Island was urbanized by Chicago-based Metropolitan Structures in the 1960s. As part of the petroculturalization of what had up to that point been a pastoral landscape, Imperial Oil commissioned the Office of Mies van der Rohe to produce an Esso gas station. Renovated in 2011 by Les architectes fabg as an intergenerational community center La Station's heating and cooling is accomplished by means of geothermal wells in a design that materially and symbolically reclaims gas pumps as ventilation structures.

Borrowing a concept from psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott by way of art historian Caroline van Eck, this article interprets La Station as a transitional object that is oriented toward degrowth even while it remains inscribed within an urban landscape that is still utterly dependent upon the automobile. By reconfiguring the structure of La Station, another kind of infrastructure is implied, or even demanded, which would revise the Nuns' Island territory as a whole. But what would this revision be? The gas station is a transitional object that begins to make present a fully post-carbon—albeit subjunctive—future that is rooted in a different past.

摘要：

我们如何应对未来不确定的石油文化的废弃（基础设施）结构？就在蒙特利尔岛海岸附近，修女岛社区在 1960 年代被总部位于芝加哥的 Metropolitan Structures 城市化。作为迄今为止一直是田园风光的石油文化化的一部分，帝国石油委托密斯凡德罗办公室建造埃索加油站。2011 年由 Les architectes fabg 翻新为代际社区中心 La Station 的供暖和制冷是通过地热井在设计中实现的，该设计在物质上和象征性地回收气泵作为通风结构。

本文借用艺术史学家 Caroline van Eck 的精神分析学家唐纳德温尼科特的概念，将 La Station 解释为一个过渡对象，即使它仍然铭刻在仍然完全依赖于汽车的城市景观中。通过重新配置La Station的结构，暗示甚至要求另一种基础设施，这将修改整个修女岛的领土。但这次修订会是什么？加油站是一个过渡对象，它开始呈现一个完全后碳的未来——尽管是虚拟的——植根于不同的过去。