Project: Water Proving Ground
Location: New York, New York
Firm: LTL Architects
Year: 2010
Competition: Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, MoMA
Website: http://ltlarchitects.com/water-proving-ground/

Project Description:  What if the projected inundation of the urban edge by rising sea levels catalyzed a rethinking of the productive interplay between land and water? LTL addressed this question as one of five firms selected by the Museum of Modern Art to participate in the workshop and exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. The show examined the anticipated impact of global warming and the rising sea level on New York Harbor through a series of speculative design proposals for five sites on the water’s edge. LTL was charged with the zone located in the northwest quadrant of the harbor, including Liberty State Park and New York City’s iconic Liberty and Ellis Islands.

Created between 1880 and 1920 by extensive landfill operations associated with the arrival of the railroad, the site did not exist as land until the end of the nineteenth century. According to even the most conservative predictions of rising sea levels, it is currently destined to all but disappear underwater in the next fifty to seventy-five years. In response to these dire predictions, our proposal maintains the zone’s public use by allowing for selective infiltration of the site by the harbor. By tactically adjusting the historic fill through subtle topographic shifts, Water Proving Ground envisions a vibrant new amphibious landscape continually activated by rising tides.

Traditional defensive approaches, such as high sea walls, attempt to minimize the water’s edge. However, LTL’s design multiplies the length of the coastline by a factor of ten, to forty-four miles, sculpting the site into a series of four raised landscape piers, each crenellated to generate a sawtooth interlocking of land and water. While it renders the site a more resilient buffer to storm surge and flood events, the project also maximizes the intertidal zone’s capacity to serve as a testing ground for new uses and inhabitations based on the dynamic exchange between sea and land. Employing a wide range of boundary types, from hard-edge separations that isolate remediation zones to gradual sloping fields of estuarial interchange, the design actively engages tidal fluctuations, integrating water as a performative element rather than exclusively as a picturesque feature.

Structured as a series of petri dishes, the plan incorporates a diversity of programs and multiple ecologies—from experimental agriculture to aquatic recreation, from tidal flats to constructed wetlands—to combine productive landscape and urban park. Further drawing public activity into the site, each of the four land piers terminates in a programmatic anchor: an aquaculture research and development center, an amphitheater and tidal park, a water lodge, and a regional produce market. Enhanced systems of aquatic- and land-based transportation link the site to both the surrounding urban context and the harbor itself, reestablishing it as a vital point of exchange within the region. In testing the opportunistic and productive exchanges created by water levels linked to global climate change, the project explores modes of coastal occupation that will become pertinent for millions of the world’s citizens in the not-so-distant future.

Petri dishes are isolated environments for culturing cells to facilitate tests and studies. Premised on the maximization of biodiversity, Water Proving Ground adopts the logic of the petri dish to accommodate a multiplicity of landscapes, habitats, and programs that juxtapose natural and artificial, productive and recreational, land- and water-based uses. These wedge-shaped zones comprise distinct areas, ranging in their degree of containment from the highly compartmentalized (in, for example, bioremediation areas) to the very permeable (aquaculture zones). Within each wedge, the terrain slopes from higher to lower, harnessing the dynamics of water flow and tidal change.

Project Credits

Project team:  Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, David J. Lewis; Aaron Forrest, Megan Griscom, Perla Dís Kristindóttir, Yasmin Vobis; Laura Cheung, John Morrison, Hye-Young Chung, Deric Mizokami, Cody Fithian, Mia Lorenzetti Lee, Jason Dannenbring, Clark Manning, Luke Smith, Yu-Cheng Koh, Amanda Kronk, Paul Landon, Phillip Chang, project assistants

Curator:  Barry Bergdoll, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

Project: Hydrofutures
Location: Lower Connecticut River, USA
Designer: Swarnabh Ghosh
Year: 2013
Program: Yale School of Architecture
Faculty Advisor: Greg Lynn with Brennan Buck
Website: http://www.swarnabhghosh.com/Hydrofutures

Project Description: This project explores the legacy and the future of hydroelectric power in the Northeastern United States. By tracing the history of dam construction in the US, this project calls into question the role of dams in the 21^st century and proposes an alternative to the thousands of inefficient and obsolete dams that disrupt American river systems. By studying the potential application of inflatables in flood control and power generation, this project proposes a form of hydroelectric power generation that utilizes inflatables and extant hydrokinetic turbine technology to decentralize electricity production in river systems while producing an entirely new type of riverine urbanism.

This soft water-based infrastructure can be distributed along river systems in various configurations to perform a variety of functions in addition to power generation. Using a system of inflatable tubes, rings and pads held together by ‘clips’ in the form of barges, the project is rapidly deployable and utilizes hydrokinetic turbines to generate electricity from the kinetic energy of flowing water.

Over the last decade, governmental agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers as well as turbine manufacturers like Verdant and General Electric have shown increasing interest in the potential of hydrokinetic energy as a viable alternative to conventional hydroelectric power generation. A 2012 study by the Electric Power Research Institute posits that the ‘theoretically available’ hydrokinetic resource for the continental US is in excess of 1380 TWh/Yr [1]. Current annual hydroelectric output in the United States is in the region of 280 TWh.

While the technology to extract kinetic energy exists and continues to evolve, this project inserts/embeds a spatial variable to the mix. By embedding civic program in these otherwise submerged and invisible machines, the project performs like a radically expandable and configurable energy landscape, recasting infrastructure in a civic and cultural role. Moreover, by decentralizing power generation and dispersing it at the scale of a region, this form of energy production is more responsive and provides opportunities for multiple scales and timeframes of application without disrupting fragile fluvial ecologies.

The early stages involved the study of inflatables and their potential application in flood control and power generation. With the help of dynamic physics engines, studies were conducted to control and design the deflation and inflation of elastic objects. The second stage of the project involved the design of the spatial components of the hydrokinetic system and the analysis of efficiencies of possible configurations with the help of computational fluid dynamics. The components of the system consist of hydrokinetic turbines (~45 MW) suspended from barge ‘clips’ which, in turn hold together the programmatic rings and pads. The inflatable ‘tubes’ which control the flow of water are held together by the rings and an underwater system of cable ties. Grouping the system in different configurations such as dispersed arrays or tight packs or (dispersed array vs. tightly packed) could potentially modulate the flow velocity of river water to (i) help increase the productivity of the turbines as well as (ii) mitigate flooding.

The scalability and adaptability of this approach allows for careful scrutiny of the inherent geographical and political implications of hydropower production. Hydrofutures asserts the possibility of large-scale infrastructure as a productive civic undertaking by inserting a series of spatial variables into a predominantly technological mix. In this manner, it attempts to redefine the relationship between contemporary society and the increasingly vast infrastructural landscapes it inhabits.

Notes:

[1] For more, see “Assessment and Mapping of Riverine Hydrokinetic Resource in the Continental United States”, EPRI, Palo Alto, CA:2012. The EPRI is a non-profit organization based in Palo Alto, CA funded by the electrical utility industry of the United States.

Project: Infrasurface
Location: Keelung River, Taipei, Taiwan
Designer: Jonathan Reyes
Program: Yale University School of Architecture
Faculty Advisor: Heneghan-Peng Architects

Project Description: A city situated at the bottom of a flood basin, Taipei’s urban dynamics are direct consequences of infrastructural systems and urban forms that enable to city to function throughout regular inundation and inclement weather.  Typically, flood-resistant infrastructure employs strategies of resistance, most evident in the enormous floodwalls along .  Unsurprisingly, the urban spaces adjacent to these walls are frequently devoid of activity beyond parking and storage.

This design for a research campus near the meeting point of the Damsui and Keelung Rivers adapts conventional urban logics to produce an integrated system of infrastructure and architecture.  Through the manipulation of the floodwall on the south bank of the Keelung, the resultant terrain simultaneously resists and embraces floodwater inundation to establish two distinct programmatic functions.  By pinching and stretching this wall into alternating positive and negative incursions, or inlets, into the site, the formerly vertical flood barrier becomes a compound, contoured, and traversable surface.

Negative depressions serve as inlets for floodwater retention, appropriately contoured to accommodate external laboratories, wet agricultural fields, recreational landscapes and other outdoor programming for the campus.

Positive extrusions become building masses and inlets for the infiltration of the city into the site and campus.  This topographic infrastructure serves as a series urban frames that protect the zones of infiltration from inundation while cultivating Taipei’s informal urban character within them.A site-wide contour logic serves as a physical demarcation of flood levels and event boundaries. The contours and the density of spacing between them establish a parametric system of slopes and modules employed across the campus.

A site-wide contour logic serves as a physical demarcation of flood levels and event boundaries. The contours and the density of spacing between them establish a parametric system of slopes and modules employed across the campus.

Project: Carbon T.A.P. (Tunnel Algae Park)
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Firm: PORT Urbanism
Year: 2009
Competition: Winning Entry, UCLA/CityLAB WPA 2.0 Design Competition
Website: http://porturbanism.com/work/carbon-t-a-p/

Project Description:  As Federal, state and local governments undertake consideration of large-scale investments in the renovation and replacement of urban infrastructures, we see a unique opportunity to reconsider the role of these systemic networks and their effect on our contemporary urban landscapes.

In the scenario outlined herein, a new type of ‘green’ infrastructure is deployed at urban locations comprising concentrated sources of CO2 production. This new infrastructure utilizes a proprietary system of industrial scale algal agriculture to sequester and consume greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit their introduction into the atmosphere, while simultaneously creating a new economic resource through the production of oxygen, biofuels, bioplastics, nutraceuticals and/or agricultural feeds. In the scenario shown above, this new infrastructure manifests itself as a series of pier-like armatures linked to the ventilation system for the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel.

What is unique about this proposition is not just the introduction of large-scale urban green infrastructure, but rather the use of infrastructural armatures to create an exceptional public realm amenity for the city. Rather than considering urban infrastructures as a necessary evil to be hidden or mitigated, we view the renovation and re-imagination of these systems as opportunities to create new forms of civic and social domain that have the capacity to positively transform the American urban landscape.

Our proposal for a new infrastructural typology is one part climate action; one part agricultural production; one part ecological preserve; one part public realm; and one part economic catalyst represents what should be the aspiration for all newly deployed urban infrastructures—the ability to fundamentally improve the economic and social quality of a city, as well as the associated lives of its current and future residents.

Project: Living Breakwaters
Location: Staten Island, NY
Firm: SCAPE / Landscape Architecture
Year: 2013
Competition: Rebuild by Design
Website: Rebuild by Design – Living Breakwaters 

Project Description: The Living Breakwaters concept design was developed by the SCAPE / Landscape Architecture team for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design Initiative, and was one of six winning proposals in the global competition. The proposal was awarded to New York State and will be implemented by the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery with $60 million of CDBG-DR funding allocated specifically for this project. (Read more here and here).

The Living Breakwaters project reduces risk, revives ecologies, and connects educators to the shoreline, inspiring a new generation of harbor stewards and a more resilient region over time. Staten Island sits at the mouth of the New York Bight, and is vulnerable to wave action and erosion. Rather than create a wall between people and water, the project embraces the water, increases awareness of risk, and steps down that risk with a necklace of breakwaters to buffer against wave damage, flooding and erosion.

The SCAPE team designed “reef street” micro-pockets of habitat complexity to host finfish, shellfish, and lobsters, and also modeled the breakwater system at a macro scale to understand how and where they can most effectively protect communities. This living infrastructure will be paired with social resiliency frameworks in adjacent neighborhoods. Through the Billion Oyster Project and an associated network of programmed water hubs, local schools will be empowered with science, recreation, education, and access.

The layered approach is especially suited to Staten Island’s south shore, but it is also replicable in other waterfront communities faced with the similar duality of risk and opportunity presented by their connection to the water. Tottenville, the site of our proposed Phase One pilot, was once known as “the Town the Oyster Built.” During Sandy, lives were tragically lost, and homes and parks were severely damaged. Moving forward, we can foster a vibrant water-based culture, invest in our students, shoreline ecologies and economies, and Tottenville can claim the mantle as the Town the reef re-built.

Project Video: 

Living Breakwaters from Rebuild by Design on Vimeo.

The SCAPE Team:
SCAPE Landscape Architecture
Parsons Brinckerhoff
Dr. Philip Orton / Stevens Institute of Technology
Ocean and Coastal Consultants
SeArc Ecological Marine Consulting
The New York Harbor School
LOT-EK
MTWTF
Paul Greenberg