Terreform ONE has released the brief for this year's ONE Prize Competition, challenging entrants to envision urban design strategies for coping with present and future “severe climate dynamism.”
How can cities adapt to the future challenges of extreme weather? The ONE Prize is a call to deploy sophisticated design to alleviate storm impact through various urban interventions such as: protective green spaces, barrier shorelines, alternative housing, waterproofing technology, and public space solutions. We wish to reinvigorate infrastructure and repurpose spaces towards environmental adaptation in order to put design in the service of the community.
Perhaps a network of smart dikes snaking through daylighted marshes and mangroves wherein retreating villages of soft pavilions inhabited by Ethel Mermans and Fred Astaires perpetually cycle through periods of colonization and diaspora? A city of a thousand and one artificial mesas?
The deadline is 31 August 2013, meaning you have plenty of time to develop your submission or multiple entries. There is also no registration fee.
A couple of years ago, Arquine magazine sponsored an ideas competition challenging entrants to design a flood observatory located on a flood plain of the Usumacinta River, near the town of Tenosique in south-eastern Mexico. The program also called for a museum and community center, a shelter and refuge, and a hostel.
For their entry, Taller Veinticuatro presented two structures. Hosting most of the program is a triangular tower measuring 48m tall. The second is a water basin in the form of a conical ziggurat, which is inverted and driven deep into ground, its upturned base measuring 40m in diameter. Alluding to the limestone geology of this part of Mexico, the designers refer to it as an artificial cenote.
This artificial cenote is, simply put, a rain gauge, with full capacity designed for a major storm event. It's also a rainwater harvester, which provides water to the tower.
While it's meant to observe terrestrial phenomena, the designers suggest that it could be used as an astronomical observatory.
One wishes the complex wasn't meant to serve so many functions; so many programs, so little supporting infrastructure. They only diminish the whole project. Cure it of its pestilential horror vacui, and we are left with a marvelous landscape instrument.
Macheted out of the jungle by archaeologists, these structures appear like ruins from a crypto-civilization, taking measurements of the terrain. However fruitless the endeavor is, they're constantly mapping that blurred boundary between solid ground and wet earth. A lost Jantar Mantar instrument, they stand in rigid opposition to all that softness, suppleness and ambiguity, getting inundated, stained and corroded. Soon enough, they become not just a flood observatory but a flood archive, the history coated on surfaces and accumulated in cracks, patinas which you can catalog and read.
For many, it's been an unrelenting period of record drought, suffocating high temperatures and epic wildfires. As a sort of salve for the end of another superheated week, and as an escape option for the weeks ahead, below is a video of scuba divers at Austria's Green Lake park.
“During the winter,” to quote the ever reliable Wikipedia, “the lake is only 1–2 m deep and the surrounding area is used as a county park. However, during the spring, when the temperature rises and the water melts, the basin of land below the mountains fill with water. The lake reaches its maximum depth of around 12 m from mid-May to June.” Seeing all that amazingly crystal-clear water and that submerged meadow freshly efflorescent, there's no wonder why it's a popular diving spot.
While that's hardly in an urban setting, I am nevertheless reminded of a festival in Rome once held during the city's sweltering summer. It's one my ultimate favorite spatial stories, and it involved blocking the drains of the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi at Piazza Navona and letting the waters overflow and create a mini-lake. Crowded with all manner of vehicles, it was a sort of reincarnation of antique naumachiae, or mock naval battles, that may have been staged on that very same piazza, inside the former Stadium of Domitian, more than a thousand years previously.
This is how the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described this urban cryo-spectacle:
Every Saturday afternoon in the sultry month of August, this spacious square is converted into a lake, by stopping the conduit-pipes which carry off the water of the fountains. Vehicles of every description, axle-deep, drive to and fro across the mimic lake; a dense crowd gathers around its margin, and a thousand tricks excite the loud laughter of the idle populace. Here is a fellow groping with a stick after his seafaring hat; there another splashing in the water in pursuit of a mischievous spaniel, who is swimming away with his show; while from a neighbouring balcony a noisy burst of military music fills the air, and gives fresh animation to the scene of mirth. This is one of the popular festivals of midsummer in Rome, and the merriest of them all.”
This temporary, theatrical reemergence of the marshy landscape on which the Eternal City was built, unfortunately, was last staged in 1866.
Setting aside concerns over peak-water (“It's the heat, I tell you!”), a city hollows out one of its parks into a crater (or an archipelago of parks, not just one; or maybe add quarries into its park system). When the temperatures are forecast to hit above 100°F for more than a day, the dams are uncorked. Along the shallow periphery, children frolic, while on deeper waters, scuba divers slither over and under park benches and swing sets, round public art installations in the round, and cool down next to drowned fountains. For the more adventurous, there are artificial cenotes filigreed with tunnels. Forget roof gardens and depaving asphalts, this is how cities should cool themselves.
Another city, gripped with delirium, decides to gouge its glacier-flattened grid with deep canyons, which are then plastered with meadows and planted with flowering orchards. Ur-dreams of fjords come true. At the start of its Midsummer Festival, the locks lining its Great Lake are raised, and this irrational exuberance in topography is transformed into a micro Marianas Trench, hosting mock sea battles, flotillas, pop-up aquariums and James Cameron.
A newly stumbled term, which we quite like, is flood hunting, or the act of traveling to sites of inundation. What compel flood hunters are probably the same as what compel other disaster tourists: curiosity, adventure, the thrill of the sublime, Nielsen ratings points. But we like to think that they partake in such a dangerous pastime for their own edification as well, i.e., to witness hydrological and geological processes previously only experienced second-hand and to gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure. So besides the rare desert floods and the Mississippi spilling over its banks, one could add to the agenda Los Angeles' concretized river filling up, acqua alta, the formation of quake lakes and the creeping high waters behind the Three Gorges Dams.
We also like to think that flood hunting could be a subgenre of tactical tourism, a critical activity that looks at spatio-cultural conditions largely invisible or ignored during dry periods but pronounced during flood events, e.g., New Orleans' socioeconomic inequity spatially demarcated by Hurricane Katrina and levee failures.
How about bulwarking, the act of rambling through monumental flood protection infrastructure? Should be popular recreation in our future climate changed coastlines.
While writing our earlier post on Rome, we remembered that the city is pockmarked with stone markers accurately recording the dates and high water marks of historic flood events. Most are embedded on the sides of buildings, and their inscriptions read something like this:
ANNO DOMINI MCDXXII IN DIE SANCTI ANDREE CREVIT AQUA TIBERIS USQUE AD SUMITATEM ISTIUS LAPIDIS TEMPORE DOMINI MARTINI PAPE V ANNO VI.
Or:
In the year of the Lord 1422 on the day of Saint Andrew the water of the Tiber rose as far as to top of this stone, in the time of Pope Martin V, his sixth year.
In many markers, a finger, from which a swirl of lovely, frothy curlicues swooshes out, points instead to the upper limit of inundation.
According to Aquae Urbis Romae, “nearly one hundred flood markers still exist,” with the earliest dating to the 13th century. None from earlier eras are extant, but presumably there were many, a collective testament to a watery past.
When it wasn't being ravaged by veritable dry disasters such as barbarian invasions, plagues and fires, Rome drowned.
Mapping the Ecotone, Ashley Kelly and Rikako Wakabayashi's winning entry in the design competition Envisioning Gateway, is one of those things that we have been meaning to post for months.
Having earlier attempted to communicate our fascination with coastal interventions and our belief that by merely being sited on such tenuous terrain, they are by default the most interesting type of project there is, we think that the duo's project will be a good postcript to our previous post.
Their proposal is certainly among the best that we have encountered last year, and it definitely deserved its First Prize.
Kelly and Wakabayashi had a two-fold task. First, they had to develop a master plan that unifies the separate units of the Gateway National Recreation Area scattered all over the New York-New Jersey harbor. Second, within this larger scale, they had to design a new park at Floyd Bennet Field in Jamaica Bay, the result of which are seen in the images accompanying this post.
A major element of their proposal is a series of jetties and piers, rigid infrastructure in an otherwise shifting landscape. It's the urban edge intersecting with the natural landscape. From above, they look like the runways of the now defunct airport, here realigned not to direct people off to distant locales but to the site itself.
It's a simple design but a fantastically genius one. It allows park visitors to come “into direct contact with marshlands, tides and fluctuating sea levels” but, in keeping with the natural condition of the park, a place in “necessary flux,” this infrastructure vacillates between accessibility and inaccessibility.
In other words, during low water levels, you can throw around a frisbee, have a picnic or take a hike on dry ground; you can do most anything what you can at a national park or an urban park. however, when the waters come and inundate the site, there will certainly be some things that you won't be able to do. But you would then be able to fish from the jetties, do some kayaking and more — until, of course, the site reverts back to drier conditions.
The great deluge may have come but there's no reason to panic. The design being as resilient as it is, the infrastructure hasn't collapsed. The symbiotic relation between the varying ecological and cultural systems hasn't deteriorated.
This is disaster, designed.
There is an important lesson here for coastal cities threatened by sea level rise, especially cities like New Orleans. The prevailing paradigm is to separate urban settlements from the waters, to fortify against attacks from the elements. But it's a catastrophic mistake to think that one can contain something as eternally mutable as the landscape. You cannot freeze the outline of the shores or the riverbanks forever in time and place.
What Kelly and Wakabayashi are saying is open up the city to the waters. Give it a zone of transition — an ecotone — where both land and water can be occupied simultaneously.
In the abstract, replace classical notions of formal clarity and structural stability with an orthodoxy of flexibility and adaptibility.
Meanwhile, it must be mentioned that in addition to being points of access, the jetties and piers are pedagogical tools as well. As the landscape changes around them, they provide a backdrop with which one may be able to discern the various habitats, the disappearance and reemergence of landforms, and fluctuating sea levels.
One may even possibly detect the creeping effects of global warming.
Of course, when London gets flooded for real by the middle of this century, the city will not look quite as charming. No Lonely Planet devotee would want to go there during his gap year. Instead, it would most certainly become a pestilential swamp, ridden with malaria and mutagenic superviruses, a methanous bog slowly digesting St. Paul's.
And behind every crumbling facade, a coven of sub-humans patiently waits for the night when they can continue their hunt for Will Smith.
Preservationists and Modernists certainly must be agonizing over these photos.
Iconoclasts, on the other hand, must be praying for yet more torrential downpours.
One regular Pruned reader, an avowed anti-Modernist, sarcastically asked us if this is what “they” meant by “architecture engaging with the landscape”? He was wondering, or so we assume, whether architectural historians, critics and students--in overpraising the house (and Philip Johnson's Glass House and Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water) for harmoniously intertwining with nature--are simply full of shit, as what they think of as a harmonious engagement (or the idea of those high priests of Modernism “designing with nature”, or at the very least acknowledging context beyond formal and material concerns) is an illusion.
“Nature has been subjugated. There, it is expected to be static, as structured as the building. That or it must act within a prescribed set of parameters. Abnormal hydrology is frowned upon, for instance. So harmonyschmarmony. But thankfully, when things like this happen, architecture is laughingly displayed as impotent.” Too harsh.
In its defense, however, the house does look beautiful and quite striking in its state of quasi-failure.
Meanwhile, we are eagerly waiting to hear, hopefully accompanying other reports of Brad Pitt's generous donation to architecture, that proposals are underway for a levee system to protect the Farnsworth, millions of dollars worth of flood protection that most assuredly will fail in order to further sustain the illusion. We're waiting, because it will be hilarious to hear them.
POSTSCRIPT #1: The Farnsworth Flood of 2008: Blair Kamin, architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, reports here, here and here — the comments are worth a read. Meanwhile, we wonder how many postscripts bearing this sort of news will we add in the future.
Originally, we thought what great news this must be to mothers (and fathers), to the aged and to the simply incontinent, because this new material is classed in the same group of super absorbent polymers that also includes gels found in diapers. It turns out, however, that the substance was designed not for consumers but rather primarily for industrial applications, for instance, to suck up leftover waste chemicals in brownfields and absorb oil spills about to wipe out an entire ecosystem.
Having now brought up the subject of super absorbent polymers (SAP), we would now like to quote a rather generous portion of Deena DeNaro's report for Core77 on the 2nd Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale, curated by Adriaan Geuze of West 8.
It concerns a radical reconsideration of SAPs as a landscape application. Presently, they are used mostly to increase the water reserve of soils and to mitigate erosion.
In SPONGEcity, sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Transportation, Public Works and Water Management, and designed by Niall Kirkwood [and 15 landscape architecture graduate students from] the Harvard Graduate School of Design, floodwaters are captured by a dual sponge system both soft and structural. Elbows, or man-made oxbows, are built along the river Waal expanding the floodplain. Within each floodplain, canals are dug out to hold some of the floodwater. Cellular networks of Super Absorbent Polymers (SAP's) are placed in these elbows and when the dikes close to the river are breached a new absorbent sponge landscape is created along the entire river. The sponges create a dramatic new terrain as they swell to a height of up to 20 meters. This sponge matrix radically re-imagines the traditional Dutch city by proposing a hybrid structure that contains water and constructs space for urbanization. Capable of holding 100 times its own weight in water, the structural sponge is realized by adding a hardening agent to the SAP, which creates a shell on the surface for development. The soft sponge is a fluctuating system of undulating hills that rise and fall according to seasonal floods. As mean water levels rise, soft sponge is converted to structural sponge and a new band of soft sponge is established on the periphery. The overall sponge matrix allows development to exist within a floodplain. The urban conditions benefit from the framework of sponge elbows by structuring newfound ground within the floodplain.
This one paragraph seems to be the most extensive description of the project found online, with the possible exception of this terragram. In that Niall Kirkwood interview, we hear more about the project and learn that he was tasked to challenge the mentality of defense — of instinctively spending billions and billions of euros to build sea walls and dykes, to raise an entire country, and then subjecting the population to equally costly mass migration when the concrete crumbles — by speculating on ways to open up the landscape to disaster but not to catastrophe.
Did New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers receive this terragram? The relevant part starts at 46:12 and ends roughly around 54:30.
Meanwhile, we cannot help but wonder why the Netherlandses and the New Orleanses of the world should have all the speculative fun with super absorbent polymers.
Give us tons of the stuff and Pruned will drive out to the glacier-flattened terrain of the Illinois prairie. And using vertical drain installation rigs, we'll inject (infect?) a whole township with the gel so that when the rain comes, the landscape balloons with Himalayan peaks and Alpine valleys, an entire state county positively giddy with heretofore unknown contour lines. Instant topography.
The Flood is the title for the 2nd International Architecture Biennale (May 26 - June 26) in Rotterdam, chosen by curator Andriaan Geuze. Though water and flooding is a particular local concern, they are imporant themes outside the Netherlands, too.
“Climate change means that the whole world must address the issue. Around the world cities are situated on low-lying coastal zones and in delta regions where rivers enter the sea. These are amongst the most fertile areas and are well linked by sea and land to the world. But these are also cities with populations in the millions that are now highly vulnerable because of the threat of flooding.”
