Metropolis - by Douglas Page - Jan 1998

Dr. Prueitt, a guest physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has designed a convection tower to reduce air pollution by washing smoggy air. Dr. Prueitt says that about 100 of his patented structures, each the size of a 60-story skyscraper and costing about $10 million, could clean half the air in a place like Los Angeles, where it rarely rains between spring and fall.

Made of Teflon-coated fiberglass stretched around frames of steel masts, the towers would take in air at the top, wash it with pumped-in seawater, then blow clean, cool air from their fluted skirts. The wind in the tower turns turbines at ground level that generate energy to pump the water, with several megawatts of electricity left over. The water is treated to restore it to normal salinity, then returned to its source.

Dumping polluted water into the sea is sure to raise a few eyebrows — some critics see the towers as a scheme to sweep pollution under a different rug and instead emphasize preventing it. Even Dr. Prueitt doesn't think his idea is a panacea for pollution.

But Charles Lave, professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, points out that while campaigns to get people to drive less have failed, emission control and fuel efficiency technologies have succeeded.

"I tend to like engineering solutions because it's a lot easier to reduce the consequences of people's behavior than to change the behavior itself."

Also receptive is Steven Moore, professor of architecture at Texas A&M. He says the visually intrusive towers would "make the conditions of our lives powerfully present in the landscape. The message that we need to take such action to clean the air and generate power is something that you could no longer avoid."