lunch 5: flux

fl ux

lunch volume 5: fl uxUniversity of Virginia School of Architecture

Campbell HallP.O. Box 400122

lunch volume 5: fl uxUniversity of Virginia School of Architecture

Campbell HallP.O. Box 400122

volume 5

lun

ch

vo

lum

e 5

: flux

volume 5

University of Virginia School of Architecture

flux

For future volumes, lunch is accepting submissions from alumni, students, former and current faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Digital materials and submission inquiries should be sent to the lunchbox at [email protected].

The editors would like to thank the students, faculty, and alumni who submitted their work for publication, and the twenty wonderful copy editors who helped construct the narrative of the journal. We are grateful to Ellen Cathey, Elizabeth Fortune, Erica Spangler, Dean Kim Tanzer, Kimberly Wong, the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and the School of Architecture Foundation for their support and dedication that make lunch possible each year.

lunch vol. 5 was supported by the University of Virginia Council for the Arts.

Special thanks to the UVa School of Architecture Class of 1983 for their generous support of this year’s journal.

Finally, many thanks to our faculty advisor Beth Meyer.

To support lunch, please contact:School of Architecture Foundation PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122 434.924.7149 http://www.arch.virginia.edu/alumni/giving

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number is available.ISBN-13: 978-0-9843671-0-8ISSN: 1931-7786

lunchUniversity of Virginia School of ArchitectureCampbell HallPO Box 400122Charlottesville VA 22904-4122

Find us on the web: www.arch.virginia.edu/lunch

Copyright © 2010 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VAAll rights reserved.

Editors: Jenny Jones, Suzanne Mathew, and Renee Pean

Cover image by Jana Vandergoot

Printed in the United States by Carter Printing, Richmond, VA

lunch volume 5: flux

LUNCH TEAM:AJ ArtemalBeth BaileyJack CochranJoey HaysLauren HackneyMaggie HansenRyan Ives

flux

Flux connotes change, temporality, instability, flow, uncertainty, and renewal. In this fifth volume of lunch, we explore the ways in which designers respond to conditions of flux, be they social, environmental, economic, or political. We celebrate and engage the dynamism of natural and cultural systems as they influence urban, public, infrastructural and material investigations. We recognize the need to amplify, engage, or temper flux, as it is not what we design, but the state in which we design.

lunch represents a larger dialogue within and between the disciplines of architecture, architectural history, landscape architecture, and urban and environmental planning. As a school, our multidisciplinary approach reflects a desire to understand and harness the potential of constant change. We seek to challenge stagnant modes of thought, to create new models that are adaptive and agile, and to permit our own conceptions of design, culture and environment to shift, settle, and shift again.

Charlottesville, Virginia

March 29, 2010

EDITORS:

Jenny Jones / Suzanne Mathew / Renee Pean

Han JinDan LaRossaJen LynchPete MalandraBen MeguiraMarna MichaelKirsten Ostenburg

Mike PerryAnnelise PittsErik de los ReyesAlex SmithCharles SparkmanSarah Turner

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ENERGETIC ORGANIZATIONS:FRAMEWORKS FOR URBAN FLOW AND FORM William Sherman / Lauren Hackney

HYPERDENSITY IN MANHATTAN Vishaan Chakrabarti

SIMPLIFYINGTHE URBAN COMPLEXITY ETHIC Jenny Jones

WILD FOOD, WATER WELLS, LOCATION MARKERS Jana Vandergoot

NIGHT Ryan Ives

PUBLIC REALM AS THEATERRenee Pean

CHIAROSCURO IN THE PUBLIC REALM Suzanne Mathew

FLOW HOUSEJose Atienza

CONSTRUCTING A JEWISH IDENTITY IN ARCHITECTURENoah Bolton

FOSTERING INNOVATIONAlexandre Garrison / Ryan McEnroe

DIURNAL/DIALECTICLauren Hackney

CRAFT, PROCESS, AND TACTILE FLUX Hana Kim

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FABRIC[ATED] ATMOSPHERES Jie Huang / Kurt Marsh / Erin Root

TAKING A DIP: DIVERSIFYING THE URBAN EXPERIENCE OF WATER Emily Rogers

A CASE FOR RUINSDanielle Willkens

DISRUPTIVE INLAYC. Thomas Hogge / David Malda

RENEGOTIATED INFRASTRUCTUREDavid Malda

UNCERTAINTY IS THE GRIEVANCEAllegra Churchill

ADAPTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE Kristina Hill

PARADOXCITY: NEW ORLEANS Jorg Sieweke

AFTER THE STORM: SOCIAL SPACE AS FLEXIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE Elizabeth Bailey

THE BIG LEAK: ADAPTIVE METHODS FOR RECHARGING NOLA’S GROUNDWATER David Wooden

FROM SEWAGE TO SWAMP: CREATING MARSHWAYS IN THE LOWER NINTH WARD Andrea Parker / Julia Price

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ENERGETIC ORGANIZATIONS

WILLIAM SHERMAN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR IN ARCHITECTURE LAUREN HACKNEY MLA 2010 / M.ARCH 2011

FRAMEWORKS FOR URBAN FLOW AND FORM

A city is an intensification of human interaction, made possible by a concentration of energy flows. The means by which this intensification takes place forms a shared mental construct which is a powerful catalyst for urban form and cultural expression. The forms of cities and buildings that emerge from these mental constructs have common foundations in the means by which the flows of energy are gathered into a place. This brief essay posits in text and diagram that architecture’s mediation between the body and world explicitly articulates these mental models. The flows of energy that form the city are expressed in urban space and form, as well as the nature of the constructed boundaries. The flows include radiant, chemical and mechanical energy, as well as nutrients, material goods and information, each a means of sustaining life and transforming human relationships.

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Each individual work within an urban design framework proposes a model of the larger conceptual organization. The patterns of inhabitation that manifest themselves in distinct urban systems and structures reflect underlying cultural processes that ultimately reveal the flow of energy from the sun to human use. The contemporary city is predicated on a predictable flow of energy through an infrastructure that both stabilizes the dynamic variability of nature and distances us from it. As that infrastructure grows in its mechanical and thermal capacity, it also increasingly distances people from each other – supplanting interdependence with a debilitating dependence. The minimal framework of the American grid, designed to connect vast territories of individual and collective enterprise, has been replaced by centrally-managed, concentrated flows, with relationships to nature and between people mediated both literally and metaphorically by its intervening cables and pipes.

These forms and technology that determine the flows of information and energy on which modern life depends are both corridors and barriers, enabling distant connections, sometimes at the expense of the person next door. Just as we might burn a million year old barrel of oil rather than open a window, the ease of access to distant times and spaces forms an unconscious wall to direct experience. The local relationships wither as we each have plugged in to an increasingly encompassing infrastructure.

The current rise of the networked, integrated city in which connectivity transforms everything from urban form to building fabrics will lead to some radical rethinking of the way buildings and landscapes are conceived and constructed, perceived and valued. Over time, it will percolate deeply enough into the consciousness to influence even the most simple decisions. As society develops from the modern paradigm of a unidirectional infrastructure-dependent society to one of mutual engagement, everyone becomes both producers and consumers.

The opportunity afforded by the emerging ideas for a changed concept of infrastructure provides a chance to reinforce local relationships. A multi-directional infrastructure depends on local, dense lateral connections as well as the global concentrated networks. At the most basic level a community of people construct for themselves a relationship to the world. In that relationship, a set of values are represented, ideas shared and resources harvested. If the infrastructure figures too strongly or the dynamic conditions of nature are too extreme, the lateral connections between people, and between people and the world collapse. The radical realignment of energy flows that has constituted modernity has been reflected in the polarization between wealth coupled with

alienation at the points of concentration and the ever present backdrop of poverty and social dysfunction. The emerging concept of a networked infrastructure, which, like the internet, is made of many discrete flows, suggests a way of thinking that is not about representing the infrastructure in the form familiarly known as a concentrated system, but instead places a premium on the lateral connections that bind us locally.

Design, literature, art and film have wrestled with the paradoxes and uncertainties of the modern experience for over a century. At its best, this struggle is a critical counterpart to another cultural reaction—backward looking, romanticized versions of an imaginary pre-industrial golden age that is limited and not helpful in understanding the world and its structuring relationships. The contemporary challenge for architecture is to go beyond critique or romantic retreat: to offer a model of a built ecology that redefines the relationship between the local and the distant, creating new frameworks for healthy, energetic communities.

A complex web of lateral connections reflects a mental map that deliberately runs counter to a dominant organizing strategy of much contemporary building practice. Instead of forming mechanically linear or hierarchical sequences, spaces may be conceived as overlapping ecosystems; the flows are more complex, and the connections are both local and distant. These multi-dimensional connections engage all the senses at the scale of the body and multiple scales of community organization through direct, physical engagement. Communities may form through a set of common experiences of place, in spaces designed to be shared, connecting the inhabitants to the phenomena of a dynamic environment, and to each other.

Even a very small work can explore the multiple dimensions of this idea: making material connections to the geology of the place and framing a view to survey its limits, engaging its innate social, cultural, environmental, technological ecologies, mediating historical and future dimensions of the embedded communities, drawing on its climatic cycles of air and water, tracking the movement of the sun both virtually and directly in space and materials. These many dimensions of intent are essential. The intellectual life of the community requires this anchored but continually self-renewing stimulation as a foundation.

As emerging models of urban organization and energy flow take hold as cultural frameworks with the compelling force of the earlier models, the new paradigms of


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IMAGE SOURCES:

All in public domain; information from BP, 2007, via BBC UK; Oil and Gas Journal via The Guardian.

design practice are manifest in developing patterns at a broad range of scales. At the core of the latest model is a shift from the literal and metaphorical reliance on a one-way energy infrastructure anchored in eighteenth century mechanics and nineteenth century thermodynamics to one that organizes energy flows as a robust, laterally connected ecology, a complex system of both local and remote production, distribution and consumption. Sustained growth has been the primary motivation behind the past half-millennium of human development; the ecological city challenges that imperative with redefined measures of progress. Amidst all the dimensions of growth that may be measured quantitatively, its most important will be a qualitative one: the richness of the interactions in the community it has enabled.

A healthy ecology is dynamic, incorporating space for new patterns, historical forms and diverse flows. In the emerging networked urban model, the cumulative overlay of urban concepts remains vital to the complexity of the system as the underlying cultural forces driving these flows persist. This is in the character of a robust city – not frozen in a singular organization of flows, but a rich overlap of the local and the mechanical, the thermodynamic infrastructure incorporated into the ecological web. Energy flows are not objects that can be conceived to exist in a singular ideal state. Their constant dynamism and continuing solar renewal denies the possibility of an end state.

The flow of wealth and power that structures the relationships in any community parallels the energy flows, with human consequences resulting from one’s position in the stream – enriching those who can capture their share of the stream, impoverishing those who are bypassed. From local to imperial land-based organizations, through mechanical and thermodynamic organizations to local/global interactive networks, each characteristic organization reflects a distinct understanding of the world, an underlying model that is reflected in architectural and urban decision making at all scales. While one can associate the emergence of these characteristic organizations with particular historical periods, their cumulative nature renders them visible in the complexity of urban patterns, none precisely succeeding another, but incorporating, engaging and modifying prior energy flows. The correspondences between the energy flows and the urban forms pervade works from the scale of vast landscapes to intimate details at a human dimension. Distinct characteristics of urban order may be read in some overt, vestigial or emergent form in the construction of the contemporary city. Each reflects a particular process, and a dimension of space modifying the flow of energy from its solar origins to the point where it is put to use for human purposes, with its capture, storage, distribution and consumption, with an inescapable environmental impact.

1) LOCAL/CHTHONIC CITY

The urban construct and its surrounding landscape in which local energy runs its course from capture (typically through agriculture) through consumption (heat and food) and waste (compost and carbon dioxide) form an intimate bond in a cycle that is contained in time and space. The agricultural settlement and medieval city remain the romantic paradigms of this form of urbanization to which many subsequent movements refer. In material terms, these cities construct a chthonic relationship between the earth and

street fabric is variegated, shaped by topography and scaled to local commerce and exchange

world is a series of discrete, self-sustaining nodes energy of city is local: bounded by

walls, agricultural fields that provide safety and livelihood


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the building in the transformation of locally available material into ordered constructs. The city and its surrounding landscape are inextricably linked by the centripetal flow of food, fuel, materials and wealth. Territorial boundaries are linked by the limits of the usable flows and limitations of terrain that define arable land, watersheds, woodlots and defensible space.

street expands and contracts as an accumulation of inhabitation

human figure is not idealized; instead, motion and work structure its geometries

public realm is decentralized

2) HIERARCHICAL/CLASSICAL CITY

As energy-bearing flows concentrate in a singular place, the classical city (the word classical, at its root meaning a hierarchical ordering) reiterates the dimension of its reordering of energy through its spatial and formal representational schemes. The wealth gathered by imperial extension across great distances is achieved through the construction of unidirectional flows from the outlying territories to find its appropriate hierarchical expression at the center. It is the product of the work of bodies, energy extracted from the earth by hands, transported by water and wind, transforming the

colonial empires displace energy from local to global, shifting from decentralization of local city

imperial avenues cut through medieval fabric, energy of center radiates to countryside

flows are directional, radiating outward from the center of the city to the world


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classical elements – earth, air, water and fire – into the treasury of emperors, kings, the state, and other concentrations of power. In addition to (at times) literally constructing itself of the material of its dominion, the primary task of this architecture is representational. Thus Alberti begins his treatise with the separation of material and design consideration, as the representational program, like the dimensions of its redirected flows, may no longer be limited by the material accidents of geology or terrain.

order and symmetry [centrality] construct the classical street

representation of Man is idealized, central and dynamic, shifting and reaching out to engage a larger territory

3) MECHANICAL/MERCANTILE CITY

Based on a model of nature as a Newtonian orrery or Cartesian field, rational in its order and constant in time, this is the city conceived as a machine. It behaves like a clock in relation to cyclical astronomical and mechanical forces, the landscape of mills, gears and wheels, where the understanding of physical laws transforms potential energy into kinetic energy. Movement is freed from the dimension of the body – the world is mapped as a field rather than a collection of hierarchical figures. The territorial relationships are not necessarily centralized; wealth is gathered like rack at the chokepoints, the places of exchange between one mode of transportation and

city as machine: network of flows, production of goods

land ordinance grid structures land mass inhabitation, exchange, and value

orrery represents mechanics of the earth and moon around the sun city as machine:

population organized in work/production matrix


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another. Wealth is therefore transient within the ranks of traders rather than being accumulated within bloodlines. In gridded cities, buildings measuring the regularized property boundaries front the routes of trade and exchange. The resultant street is the manifestation of the public realm as information follows the flows of energy across these measured landscapes. The buildings that give it form are conceived as the material of a spatial matrix rather than free-standing figures, a continuous fabric of pragmatic, mechanical reproduction, housing the inhabitants in units, organizing work to feed the productivity of the machine.

human figure mapped on cartesian grid, stable and tethered in its interactions and production

mills and workers’ housing shape local energy/production flows through their proximity

live/work street

4) THERMODYNAMIC CITY OF COMBUSTION

The city broaches its temporal limitations as the energy of eons contained within hydrocarbons extends the cultural tentacles through space and time. The energy thus extracted from the earth and released into the atmosphere is sufficient to begin the liberation from mechanical cyclical processes and the orrery of solar time. The infrastructure of modernity that frees the city and buildings from the limiting dynamic vagaries of climate and site originates from this exosomatic surplus of transmillenial stores of energy in coal, oil and ultimately the atomic bonds of uranium. The city becomes animate, rendered monstrous by the choking by-products of its productive capacity. The global infrastructure that extracts and transports the concentrated flows has become a substitute for nature, the organs of the monster on which its life depends. Global relationships trump the local as this infrastructural network of flows across vast dimensions of space and time replace the sun’s continuous energy input.

world defined by hydrocarbon extraction and exchange, facilitating and beget by massive infrastructure

city as consumer: sprawl + demand fuel oil trade


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If the mechanical city is the timeless product of Newton’s first law of thermodynamics —that energy is conserved as it translates across its various forms—then this is the city of the second law: the inexorable progress from embodied energy to waste with obedience to the forces of entropy. The city is formed in relation to sources of heat: the industrial hearths that fuel its economy and infrastructure. Its materials are those that have been transformed chemically through the application of heat – steel, glass and reinforced concrete – or those that escape the limitations of space through the new economy of combustion-driven transportation. Its buildings, now powered from within, are freed in plan from the proximity to daylight, freed in section from thermal obligations. The city of production, transparency and horizontal space extends itself globally as a universal paradigm across a landscape metered by the logic of industrial production – categorized and striated according to discrete functional flows.

center is dispersed to edges; hand of man becomes center

thermal boundary mediated by mechanical means

economics and exchange define street, public realm

building as machine for living

5) ECOLOGICAL/WEB CITY

In the conception of an energy flow as an intensified ecology, in which a complex network of energy flows form a robust, interactive field, another model has emerged to counter the linear directionality of thermodynamic extraction and combustion. Each member of the community is both producer and consumer of multiple forms of energy liberated by new technologies—electromagnetic (photovoltaic materials), thermal (radiant solar collectors and geothermal systems) and kinetic (turbines for harnessing the wind and the tides)—and fundamental design relationships, translating localized and dispersed energy sources into usable resources through a multidirectional web. In this model, the flow of energy shifts from a directional stream into a field of intense, dynamic lateral connections. In the highly productive ecosystem, enriched by the intersection of diverse sources of energy and materials, architecture performs its catalytic role in the structuring of communities. The spatial dimension of physical

cities are interconnected by natural, digital and social ecologies

internet facilitates multidirectional global flows of energy and information

energy flows have dynamic and liminal nodes of intersection


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human interaction echoes the matrix of site relationships and becomes the critical counterpoint to the virtual space of the web.

From the choice of materials to the relationship with the institutions that it houses and represents, the architecture, the city and its inhabitants flourish in their adaptive capacity, incorporating and embedding historical knowledge and new behavior in their cultural, if not biological, genetic structure. Creative intelligence is the paramount skill required for success, as the system is driven by the constant reinvention of its organizing logic, the emergent system behaviors triggering new opportunities for invention and adaptation. Site relationships sustain the dynamic interactions between constructed and inherited contexts, while global connectivity is essential to the ongoing renewal of intellectual capital, transformative materials and a diversified energy supply.

thermal envelope utilizes and negotiates climatic flows and energy locally

built form draws less energy from thermodynamic infrastructure

human form engages multiscalar networks

human interactions understood individually and collectively through biological, social sciences

For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than rural areas. Today, over 50% of the world’s population lives in cities of over 5 million inhabitants, and by 2050, the United Nations estimates that 85% of the world’s population will live in cities of over 5 million. Most of this urbanization is taking place in the cities of the major emerging economies: the combined GDP of the “BRIC” (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) nations are projected to exceed the combined GDP of the G-7 nations by mid-century.

The studio is based on the premise that this extraordinary urban growth – spurred by rural-urban migration, economic advancement, free flow of global capital and trade, and the availability of broadband worldwide – presents the most significant challenge faced by the disciplines concerned with the built environment. While extraordinary attention, capital and marketing pours into “green buildings” and sustainable technologies, the questions of scalability, accessibility, and affordability of these technologies remain. By contrast, time tested strategies of hyperdense urban territories, characterized by large-scale party wall construction, and served by intense transportation infrastructure, have a far better track record at lowering per capita energy use and carbon emissions. Hybrid strategies, combining both hyperdensity and high

HYPERDENSITY IN MANHATTAN

VISHAAN CHAKRABARTIJAQUELIN T. ROBERTSON VISITING PROFESSORSHIP IN ARCHITECTURE

source:

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performance technology, hold tremendous promise for enhancing the performative qualities of urban environments including sustainability, livability, and affordability.

Massive global urbanization is inevitable but not dispositive – it is the morphology of that urbanization that will determine the fate of the planet. Will the new cities that emerge globally be built like sprawling, gluttonous, failing Phoenix, or will they take on the form of dense, transit-rich, prosperous Hong Kong? How will we discourage, without condescension, the terrifying embrace by China and India’s two billion people of America’s most lethal export: the suburb? Will America, often still the arbiter of cultural desire, lead by example by building the hyperdense environment of the future?

The Hudson Yards, a 26-acre open rail storage yard in western Manhattan, represents precisely this opportunity. Now zoned for 13 million square feet of mixed use development and 10 acres of open space, questions remain about the fate of this much contested territory given a distressed New York real estate market and a need to finance and build a $1.5 billion platform over the rail yards in order to realize any of the plan as currently envisioned. This is therefore a prime opportunity to take stock of the site and consider its physical potential both within and outside of the approved plan.

Eleven graduate architecture, landscape architecture, and planning students dedicated themselves to these projects in an intensive two week period. Working in interdisciplinary groups of two or three, the students tackled a proposed design, program, zoning, and landscape for the site. The program calls for a total of 13.5 million square feet spread out over the site’s 26 acres, comprised of mostly residential and office space (fig. 2), with additional space for retail, hotel, a cultural institution, a school, and 10 acres of public open space. Program shifts between rail yards and other uses desired by the students were welcomed so long as the overall site density was at least 10-11 FAR.

It is with pride and honor that I shepherded this group of students through their studio travails in the cold, solitary days and nights of early January. What they taught themselves was extraordinary by any measure. What they can teach the rest of us is profound.

Fig. 1 Program Distribution

office 2,000,000 sf

housing 4,000,000 sf

hotel 200,000 sf

retail 100,000 sf

cultural 0 sf

parks 5 acres

school 200,000 sf

Western Rail Yards Eastern Rail Yards

office 4,000,000 sf

housing 1,000,000 sf

hotel 500,000 sf

retail 500,000 sf

cultural 500,000 sf

parks 5 acres

PERFORATION FOR CIRCULATIONSUSAN ELLIOTT MUEP 2010ANDREA PARKER MLA 2011RENEE PEAN M.ARCH/MUEP 2010

The ground of the Perforation for Circulation proposal at Hudson Yards can be read as two conditions: the Plinth and Terra Firma. The Plinth is a constructed platform atop the existing railyards, while the Terra Firma constitutes the earth surrounding the Plinth.

Density is confined to and extruded from the Plinth while the gardens sink into the Terra Firma, as a release. On the Plinth, the building towers are strategically perforated and oriented to allow movement of light and air through staggered building footprints and height. Large openings are punctuated by courtyards and winter gardens. The towers enclose a dense urban spine of circulation that approaches the Hudson River and ends in an expansive view towards the water.

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PERFORATION FOR CIRCULATIONSUSAN ELLIOTT MUEP 2010ANDREA PARKER MLA 2011RENEE PEAN M.ARCH/MUEP 2010

supertalls: residential branches

supertalls: office core

supertalls: open basepublic and retail space joined by bridges

bookends: atrium and cutural centera diagonal axis punctuated by public spaces

platform of ribbonsribbons generate landform and pocket spaces

existing site

#7 subway line extension

subway station

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The Urban Watershed imagines a four-acre park amidst 15 million ft2 of development, thereby allowing the site to manage and treat water for a dense urban condition as well as cultivate interaction and experience across the site. By shifting the entire program to the east, we opened the waterfront and created a system of water remediation that circulates through a public open space and cultural center.

The park lessens the toll of development on the city, educates the public on the necessity of water in the urban environment, creates a vibrant open riverfront space for the city, and protects the Hudson River. This idea extends to the building by creating a vertical bioswale system thas captures rain water and treats graywater in a series of remediation areas throughout the skin of the structure. Natural systems parallel human circulation and interaction, as the buildings offer several areas of shared retail, park, and elevated park space.

Ultimately, we generated a design that focused on lessening the footprint of hyperdensity by concentrating the building in a way that reacts to the juncture of city and natural system to create a higher, denser settlement while enhancing its context.

URBAN WATERSHEDJEFF HERLITZ MUEP 2010CATHERINE REDFEARN MUEP 2010CHARLES SPARKMAN M.ARCH 2012

New York City is embedded in a landscape shaped by glaciers. The Wisconsin Ice Sheet, which grew up to 1,000 feet thick over Manhattan, retreated 12,000 years ago, leaving behind a variegated ground of moraines, outcroppings, and river valleys. 10.Till.12 proposes to introduce a constructed piece of till, a new ground at Hudson Yards. This distinct ground is thick with the infrastructure needed to sustain 13 million ft2 of mixed-use development. The ground lifts and bends in response to the existing conditions of the rail yards below, also rising to meet the highline at key locations. It folds up to allow for energy and material flows between ground and building. Solar energy-gathering facades and greywater collection systems connect into the grid of energy and water infrastructure within the constructed ground. The ground and buildings are inextricably tied together at 10.Till.12.

site plan

N0’ 200’ 400’ 800’

10.TILL.12JONATHAN COBLE M.ARCH/MUEP 2011JENNY JONES MLA/MUEP 2010

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Outdoor and indoor spaces complement one another as plazas stretch into lobbies, and as fissures in the ground create space for building program. From the diverse topographic condition rises diverse building and landscape types, making for a rich array of public and private spaces.

THE VERTICAL CITYSTUART ANDREASON MUEP 2010JACK COCHRAN M.ARCH/MUEP 2013SILAS HASLAM M.ARCH 2012

The scale of program to be met at Hudson Yards demands a redefinition of the tall building. Instead of an object plugged into a largely two-dimensional urban network, it perhaps becomes more useful to imagine the skyscraper as a portion of the “horizontal” city flipped vertically, thereby retaining and reinterpreting the relationships and systems through which cities have thrived for millennia and extending them to meet severe increases in population levels.

Some of the systems on which the city depends include: the hierarchies of streets, from broad streets/highways to alleyways serving only local residents; the mixing of residential, commercial, and other uses for a diverse and activated urban fabric; and interstitial spaces for wind movement and solar access.

At Hudson Yards, these systems are reimagined for vertical application: a variety of vertical and horizontal street systems, which provide high and low-speed access throughout the supertalls, including a raised horizontal monorail/street system; a mix of uses vertically to avoid stacking of program types, which instead encourages the creation of diverse neighborhoods in the sky through raised public parks and other areas for interaction; and supertall massing loosely derived from the organization of buildings on a city block, which allows large perforations through the structures for sunlight and air access.

These systems are proposed for two 2,000 ft. tall structures, which are situated among medium-rise structures to activate the existing street level and contain vertical farms sufficient to meet basic nutritional needs for 50,000 people. To ensure Manhattan’s capacity to accommodate further increases in population in the future, the transfer of development rights that would enable the construction of the supertalls would be regained in future years, allowing a further increase in density and continuing the establishment of a three-dimensional urban network.

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INS - Institutional

MU-R - Mixed Use Commercial

OPEN - Open and Public Space

MU-C - Mixed Use Commercial

N-MU - Neighborhood Mixed Use

1 2 3

MU-R

MU-C

N-MU

OPEN

N-MU

N-MUN-MU

INS

INS

INSINS

A transfer of development rights to the supertalls (1-2) is regained in later years to accommodate additional program (3).

A variety of degrees of access allow for main elevators, a raised monorail/street, and staircases/escalators serving a mixed program. Large perforations in the structure allow for sunlight and air movement through the building.

“From cells to cities, culture, and cosmology, theories are converging on the same universal principles of development and codevelopment, characterized by dynamic webs of interdependencies, and the inextricability of people, nature, and technology.”

-Nan Ellin1

INTRODUCTION

For those concerned with the design and planning of cities, a paradigm shift has surfaced within the past decade or two that seeks to overturn traditional methods of studying and designing the urban condition. Many urban planners, architects, and landscape architects are eager to move away from modernist methods of control, prediction, and objectification, as well as from “shallow” postmodern historicism and pastiche.2 There is a general eagerness to find new ways of seeing the city, which has manifested in a variety of movements and lenses: integral urbanism, landscape urbanism, and recombinant urbanism, among others. Integral Urbanism, a term coined by Nan Ellin, “emphasizes connection, communication, and celebration,” as opposed to “the master planned functionally-zoned city with separates, isolates, alienates, and retreats.”3 It emphasizes flow, achieved through hybridity, connectivity, porosity, authenticity, and vulnerability. Landscape Urbanism, led by designers and writers such as James Corner and Charles Waldheim, places emphasis on process, open-ended systems, emergence, relationships, and complexity. Landscape Urbanism sees the built environment and the culture of humans as inextricably tied to the process and flows of the natural world.4 Lastly, Recombinant Urbanism, defined by David Graham Shane, sees cities as the result of “urban actors” constantly recombining basic elements in order to make sense of the complexities of the urban condition. While Integral Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism are more normative, Recombinant Urbanism is more descriptive in nature; yet, these three visions of the city and how we relate to it have much in common.

These multiple “urbanisms” have one underlying theme informing their diverse readings and recommendations: complex, networked systems. For Integral Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, we see complexity theory manifest as an emphasis on networks,

SIMPLIFYING THE URBAN COMPLEXITY ETHIC

JENNY JONESMLA / MUEP 2010

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process, relationships, emergence, and uncertainty. In Recombinant Urbanism, Shane taps into the agent-based side of complexity theory when he highlights the importance of the collective actions of actors in shaping the city. These are only three of many other writings and theories on the city in recent years that have a strong basis in complexity theory. Yet, it has remained fuzzy as to how the “complexity ethic,” as I call this greater paradigm shift, translates into practice for landscape architects, planners, and architects. There are, however, a few models of urban landscape organization that articulate how complexity theory translates into design work on the city. This paper will compare and contrast Forman’s Patch-Corrdior-Matrix model, Shane’s Enclave-Armature-Heterotopia model, and Juval and Portugali’s Urban Codes model, which collectively provide us with a vision for how to design for urban complexity.

COMPLEXITY THEORY

Before going any further, it is necessary to briefly discuss the basic principles of complexity theory. The theory is understood to have grown out of several disciplines, including ecology, computing, biology, sociology, and physics, as well as the general shift towards postmodern thought. Complexity can be defined in many ways, but the most basic tenets are that complex systems: have interconnected parts whose relationships are more important than the parts themselves, have non-linear relationships, and are dynamic. Another aspect of complex adaptive systems, as they are often called, is that they learn over time through the collective intelligence of individual agents responding to each other and to their environment. This adaptation is also seen as self-organization, and leads to emergence, another important concept of complexity. Emergence occurs when a distinct and complex pattern appears out of an array of individual actions. Lastly, self-organization, adaptation, and social learning occur at the edge of chaos (or under dynamic and uncertain conditions). 5,6,7

While Jane Jacobs was one of the first to describe cities as having “organized complexity,” there has been a surge in writings about cities as complex systems in the past few decades.8 One example include Steven Johnson’s popular science book, Emergence in which he argues that complexity is the key paradigm of our time, using a broad discussion of cities, ant colonies, brains, and computers to prove his argument.9

Complexity theory as applied to urbanism has suffered from being polarized; it either manifests as too abstract or too precise. Many writers emphasize the metaphorical value of complexity theory as a lens through which to see the city, while their critics respond that this lens is too nebulous and unhelpful.10,11 Other writers employ concepts of complexity theory in computer modeling of urban scenarios, such as Michael Batty. Yet, Batty himself recognizes that these models are as of yet impractical for direct application to real urban situations because they are too simple and do not account for truly thorny

human behaviors.12

In between the metaphorical/abstract and the mathematical/modeled lies a framework that might help designers realistically apply concepts of complexity to their urban work. Operating under the assumption that we cannot design or plan complex systems, but rather, can only act on the setting in which they emerge, we need a helpful model for creating the background environment in which self-organizing systems can thrive.13 Many cite relationships and connections as the ideal focus of designers and planners working on the complexity of cities.

THREE MODELS FOR URBAN COMPLEXITY

Three similar models exist that might help designers prepare a productive surface for self-organizing urban systems: Forman’s “patch-corridor-matrix” model, Shane’s “armature-enclave-heterotopia” model, and Alfasi and Portugali’s “urban codes” model.These models all provide general categories of elements that help to simplify and unify complex systems. A comparison of these three models reveals a general mode of thinking about complex urban systems that seeks to understand the relationships between individual elements. It is this comprehension, of relationships and interactions, that has great potential to help designers and planners shape productive and intelligent self-organizing systems in the city.

Richard T.T. Forman, a prominent landscape ecologist, has developed the patch-corridor-matrix model as a way to understand the elements we see in landscapes and the relationships between them. Forman writes that “the arrangement or structural pattern of patches, corridors, and a matrix that constitute a landscape is a major determinant of functional flows and movements through the landscape, and of changes in its pattern and process over time.”14 A patch is a nonlinear surface that differs in structure and function from its surroundings, such as an island of trees within a larger landscape of agricultural land; a corridor is a linear element often used for transportation of matter and energy, such as a river corridor or a hedgerow; and a matrix is the area surrounding patches and corridors that has a different structure and function. The combined network of patches, corridors, and matrices is termed the land mosaic.15

These basic elements do more than just describe the physical makeup of landscapes. They serve as the basis for a greater understanding of the relationships and flows that shape landscapes over time. In Landscape Ecology, Forman and Godron lay the foundation of the structural elements before discussing the dynamics that occur between and across their boundaries. They use patches, corridors, and matrices to describe any possible array of scenarios in which flows of matter and energy occur. The patch-corridor-matrix model (PCM) seeks to simplify the complexity of landscapes without merely breaking

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the whole down into constituent parts. The PCM model helps those studying natural and built environments to grasp a diverse array of relationships through a studying elements in the landscape and how they interact. While the PCM model originated in landscape ecology, many designers and planners use its principles to describe urban and suburban built conditions. For example, Field Operation’s winning design for the Fresh Kills site in New York reinterprets PCM as threads, islands, and mats that collectively make up the new landscape of Staten Island. The design uses these elements to create a framework for how dynamic processes in the landscape unfold over time.16

Another model akin to patch-corridor-matrix is that of David Graham Shane’s elements found in Recombinant Urbanism. Shane taps into several theories from multiple disciplines to describe how our understanding of the city has changed. He hints at complexity theory, writing that since the 1980s and 1990s, postmodern discussions of bottom-up organization, agent-based understanding of systems, and emergent urban patterns have overturned the notion that cities can be controlled through singular plans. Throughout his thorough study of urban models and theories over time, he uses three basic components to describe how cities emerge. The armature, the enclave, and the heterotopia are what Shane sees as the fundamental elements of any city, “constantly combined and recombined in different cultures, places, and periods”.17 Shane describes the enclave as a patch or a self-centering device; the armature as a linear organizing device; and the heterotopias as special places of exceptional activities and persons. He writes that the endless interaction of these three basic elements, armature, enclave, and heterotopia (AEH), can explain all dynamic urban conditions.

Enclave has a clear analogy to patch, and armature to corridor, but heterotopias is markedly different from matrix. Heteretopia seems to describe more of a force than an element, and though he writes that the recombination of enclaves, armatures, and heterotopias are what drive the dynamics of the city, he gives heterotopias the utmost importance for stimulating overall urban evolution.

Lastly, a model developed by planners Nurti Alfasi and Juval Portugali bears striking similarity to these previous two models, with more resemblance to Forman’s than to Shane’s. Alfasi and Portugali write explicitly in the context of complexity theory, as part of a larger conversation within the world of planning about how the theory enters the profession. They argue for integrating ideas of space back into planning, and they emphasize that spatial order in a city is generated by the interaction between plans and actors/entities—in other words, that cities self-organize. Understanding interactions between built elements is crucial for a planner, and they “expect the relations between elements to provide the material core for public discourse on planning.”18 In order to “theorize a planning system that reflects the bottom-up dynamics of planning,” they

propose urban or spatial codes that direct the individual actions of actors participating in urban space-making.19

Juval and Portugali’s urban code model defines three essential types: singular elements, linear elements, and district elements. From these three elements, relationships are gleaned which might steer the creation of planning guidelines. They intend this framework to help planners develop their own parameters given localized conditions. While the parallel to Forman and Shane’s work is clear, their definitions differ slightly. They define singular elements as things like buildings rather than patches of structure and function. Linear elements are defined in a similar way to corridors and armatures, but district elements are defined as large places like parks, airports, or reserves. Thus, the urban codes model is more about size than about structure and function, on which the patch-corridor-matrix model is based. Because of its ability to move away from static typologies such as building, park, or mall, and its avoidance of using size to define elements, the PCM model might be more helpful for planners and designers seeking to study and work with the relationships between elements in the city.

However, a valuable aspect of Juval and Portugali’s urban codes model is the explicit emphasis placed on the relationships between the elements they define. While the PCM model has been employed by designers with this in mind, it is helpful to compare PCM to the urban codes model because of this weight given to relationships. In fact, these three models of envisioning elements in the complex urban environment, taken together, provide a general sense of how planners and designers might best approach working on the context in which self-organizing urban systems arise. The emphasis on elements by all three models does not break down wholes into constituent parts; rather, these models convey the importance of introducing simple descriptions for complex relationships. It is impossible to describe every interaction that occurs between actors in a complex adaptive system such as a city, but seeing broad categories of spatial and functional relation can help us make decisions without being overwhelmed by the complexity we see. The patch-corridor-matrix model, the enclave-armature-heterotopia model, and the urban codes model collectively help us to approach constructing frameworks that might foster productive relationships and thriving emergent systems.

CONCLUSION: TRANSLATING COMPLEXITY THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Much of this work on urban codes and elements refers back to Christopher Alexander, who is often regarded as one of the forerunners in the study of complex and bottom-up urban systems. His seminal work, “A City is Not a Tree,” where he describes cities as having semi-latticed as opposed to hierarchical structures, is cited by many as an important first foray into applying complexity to cities.20 Decades later, he now writes that though many in the urban design fields look to complexity theory as a model for

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how to know and work on cities, we have no framework for how to actually achieve the characteristics of complexity in the urban setting through our designs. We observe complex adaptive systems in all environments, both constructed by humans and not, but we have yet to create physical complex systems through architecture, landscape, and planning. While some writers argue for the utility of complexity theory as metaphor only, Alexander argues that architecture can actually push complexity theory by demanding that we achieve complex adaptive systems through design. In fact, he argues that the aesthetic side of design must be elevated to the scientific side, and that the understanding of complexity in design will actually lead to a sort of scientific revolution, on par with Steven Wolfram’s New Kind of Science.21, 22

These elemental and relational models might spur such a revolution, if planners and designers can begin to move away from merely adopting the jargon of complexity theory into their work and can move towards designing robust contexts for self-organizing complex systems to evolve within.

NOTES

1. Ellin, Nan. Integral Urbanism. (New York: Routledge, 2006).

2. Allmendinger, Philip. Planning in Postmodern Times (London: Routledge, 2001).

3. Ellin: précis.

4. Waldheim, Charles. The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

5. Alfasi, Nurit and Portugali, Juval. “Planning Rules for a Self-Planned City.” Planning Theory 6.164 (2007): 164-182.

6. Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).

7. McAdams, Michael. “Complexity Theory and Urban Planning.” Urbana: Urban Affairs and Polıcy Vol. 9 (Sprıng-Fall 2008).

8. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House,1961).

9. Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).

10. McAdams.

11. Chettiparamb, Angelique. “Metaphors in Complexity Theory and Planning.” Planning Theory. 5.71(2006): 71-91.

12. Batty, Michael. Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

13. Levinthal, Daniel A. and Warglien, Massimo. “Landscape Design: Designing for Local Action in Complex Worlds.” Organization Science 10.3 (May-June 1999): 342-357.

14. Forman, Richard T. T. “Some General Principles of Landscape and Regional Ecology.” Landscape Ecology 10.3 (1995):133-142.

15. Forman, Richard T. T. and Godron, Michel. Landscape Ecology (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1986).

16. Czerniak, Julia. Case: Downsview Park Toronto (Munich: Prestel, 2001).

17. Shane, David Graham. Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory (Wiley and Sons: West Sussex, 2005): 13.

18. Alfasi and Portugali:171.

19. Ibid.:170.

20. Alexander, Christopher. “A City is Not A Tree.” Architectural Forum 122 (April 1965): 58-62.

21. McAdams.

22. Alexander, Christopher. “New Concepts in Complexity Theory (Arising from Studies in the Field of Architecture): An Overview of the Four Books of The Nature of Order, with Emphasis on the Scientific Problems Which are Raised.” (Berkeley: Center for Environmental Structure, 2003).

Food Volvelle 38 Latitude | autumn

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WILD FOODWATER WELLS

LOCATION MARKERS

JANA VANDERGOOTM. ARCH 2010

STUDIES OF THE BODY, ENVIRONMENT, AND ART IN A LANDSCAPE OF FOOD

“[The city] is a place where natural forces pulse and millions of people live —thinking, feeling, dreaming, doing. An aesthetic of urban design must therefore be rooted in the normal processes of nature and of living. It should link function, feeling, and meaning and should engage the senses and the mind.” -Anne Whiston Spirn, The Poetics of City and Nature: Towards a New Aesthetic for Urban Design

The notion that natural processes be made visible and human beings be perceived as an integral part of those processes plays a primary role in the effort to unite art and science. The incorporation of design and environmental concerns has been the focus of work by architects, urban planners, and landscape architects like Lawrence Halprin, Anne Whiston Spirn, and James Corner in the last half century. As a continuation of a communal body of design work that addresses how humans might live with the land and celebrate it, Wild Food | Water Wells | Location Markers attempts to address the question: How can the process of eating food from the land be described and how is the human body deeply evolved to work within the complexities of this process?

wild foodUnmaintained, uncultivated, invasive, or medicinal and food plants.

wellA designed element that engages the shifting cycles of the earth and water. A well has the potential to reveal hidden, deeply embedded characteristics of the landscape on which it is sited; wells tell the story of bedrock, soils, and ground water.

location markerA designed element that serves as a point of reference, a way-finding device, or a signal of ecological and cultural site-systems at play. Markers can be both physical and virtual (keyed to digital network).

CHARLOTTESVILLE: SITESCharlottesville, home to a University that was conceived of by the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, exists as a small city with close ties to food of the Blue Ridge Mountain region. In fact, Charlottesville is one of the leading cities in Virginia’s local food movement. In this study of Charlottesville’s food, a look at a sampling of sites in and around the University of Virginia, downtown, and historic neighborhoods through the eyes of a food forager is treated as way to understand complex natural histories that unfold over time as well as the potential role each site might play as re-envisioned food nodes for a community of people.

TWO CITIES, TWO LANDSCAPES OF FOODTwo cities, Charlottesville, Virginia and Rome, Italy come together as a proposed study of the body, environment, and art in a living landscape of food. The study of Charlottesville is ongoing and was initiated as part of a Master of Architecture Thesis. The Study of Rome is proposed and will be carried out as the Rieger Graham Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in the Fall of 2010.

Forager’s Map of Charlottesville

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CHARLOTTESVILLE: WILD FOODWild Food | Water Wells | Location Markers explores the idea that a prospective building or site should not only be approached by means of conventional, quantifiable land survey protocol, but also with non-conventional methods of site analysis co-opted from a range of cultural practices and professional disciplines. During research, wild food foraging and mapping were used to both understand terrain as something that extends into our bodies as we eat and drink and to assess American cultural understanding of food and water systems.

Foraging tactics involved the creation of a catalogue of wild foods and their preparations as well as the creation of hybrid tactics that drew upon the philosophy of embodied knowledge. The primary means of developing the hybrid tactics was to co-opt tools used by ecologists, botanists, food trackers, and archaeologists and loosely translate their methods into visual devices that were appropriate catalysts for architectural design. The result of the translation was the making of a series of “olfactory circulation routes” and “paint color stratigraphy” (maps of foraging and olfactory sense), “psychrometric scoping” (maps of foraging and microclimates), “botanical rubbings” (plant material maps), and “word-of-mouth systems” (maps of a communal foraging conversation) in order to address sites that shift through time and are not easily quantified.

OLFACTORY CIRCULATION ROUTEForaging with long-term memory: A walk by a pond of water in the morning reveals the smell of sweetbay, pungent white pine resin, juniper berries, and wild persimmons thawing after a frost. Passing through these smells is like passing through clouds that are drawn out as a series of misty rooms; each olfactory cloud has its own volume, its own intensity, its own focal point. Skin cools as the body reacts to floral and salty aromas. At the same moment astringent notes heat the soft insides of the lips and nose. Refreshing heat and warming cool unfold together.

Unraveled Olfactory Map | The Dell564 paces at 2’ each = 1,128’ pathDrawing size = 38” long

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Psychrometric Scoping Neighborhood Map

PSYCHROMETRIC SCOPINGForaging by microclimate: Hydrology creates a new kind of topography as it slides into valleys and percolates through landforms. A painting and a model were developed to explore wild food plants in relation to the microclimates formed by varying hydrological conditions. The topography of water is read as a reflected mirror image of the topography of the land. Psychrometric scoping suggests that humans, because of bodies that sense and respond to moisture, shade, heat, and light, have innate skills which allow us to recognize and discover edible plants in their xeric, mesic, and hydric habitats.

NEIGHBORHOOD MAPForager’s view of urban ecology: ‘Neighborhood Map’ considers a scenario where neighborhoods are not defined by street names, property lines, and business addresses but instead by a series of ecosystem corridors and patches created by footsteps, homebases, and wild food. In the world of squirrels, easements and right-of-ways are not as important as finding a good chestnut oak and knowing how to get to it from the buried stash of acorns near the nest. What does this say about the squirrel’s life and worldview? ‘Forager’s Map’, a vision of an urban railroad landscape bound by wild food plant communities and walking paths, is a counter to the ubiquitous google map.

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These hybrid mapping tactics were the first part of a two-part thesis project. Intentions for architectural design in the spring semester will draw from the hybrid maps and attempt to highlight physical artifacts (wells and markers) that engage the body in a landscape of wild food.

Jana will continue these investigations in Rome in the Fall of 2010 as the recipient of the prestigious ICACA Rieger Graham Prize fellowship at the American Academy of Rome. She is grateful to Bill Sherman, her primary thesis advisor.

Shared stories of food foraging become communal conversations with threads that are woven over time.

WORD OF MOUTH SYSTEMSEnvisioning a communal foraging conversation: ‘Word of Mouth’ depicts the inscape of the creative mind. The intention of the painting and analytical model was to conceptualize the process of finding food, eating it, and remembering the event as a story to be passed on verbally and embodied by the next hungry person.

NIGHTRYAN IVESMLA 2011

These images, all made at night, register movement and change over time with a single still image. Created with a tripod mounted camera using black and white film, the exposures range from a few seconds up to 20 minutes. A typical photograph made in daylight records about 1/100th of a second of light.

When I first began making these images ten years ago, I immediately enjoyed the adventure of going out to work at night, often trespassing. and a little bit scared of the dark. It takes time for your eyes to adjust to low light, and at times it was difficult to predict the resulting image of light in what appeared as murky blackness. During periods when I was photographing rapidly at events for newspapers during the daytime, these nighttime images were by contrast a slow and considered process.

These images are a record of a longer period of time, sort of an averaging of all the information for that period as opposed to a sequence of still images like in a movie. They are in effect an averaging of the movement and light of that period condensed into a static image. Registering movement at the time of day when the world may seem most still.

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Factory, Rochester, NY

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Moonrise and Clouds over Ridge, Near Sorata, Boivia

Logan Airport, Boston, MA

Soccer Fog, Ithaca, NY

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Trees and Light. Ithaca, NY

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Late Night Fog, Chester, CT

The public realm is where “one participate[s] in a theatrical continuity before an audience of strangers” and gives the city dweller a venue to act as part of larger community outside the domestic realm.1 The public realm is the aspect of urban fabric where private life and government are mediated while also acting as a forum for social interaction and discourse. A place for the exchange of ideas, the establishment of “self ” in relation to others, display, and activism. Social interactions that occur in public spaces and other physical contexts of the public realm are often described as unscripted “performances” where the roles of actor and audience are abstracted. These kinds of scripted and unscripted performances are crucial to the life of a city.

In observing the streets and plazas of Paris, intially theatrical spaces like the Garnier Opera, and its adjacent plaza, and the Place Georges Pompidou, including its adjacent building, one can begin to identify the elements of theatrical space in both. The sectional and perspectival studies of the Garnier Opera demonstrate the relationship of section,

PUBLIC REALM AS THEATER

RENEE PEANM.ARCH / MUEP 2010

2009 SARAH MCARTHUR NIX FELLOW

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photo of model from Musee d’Orsay

theater lobby

[Opera Garnier, Charles Garnier Paris. France 1863]

The size and detailed layout of these public spaces suggest that unscripted performance of social interaction outside the theater is equally as important as scripted drama inside the designated theater space.

actors

proscenium archframes performance by establishing distance from audience and actor

seating allows views to other audience members, making them part of the performance

Grand Escalier acts as a stage for opera attendants with balconies overhead

audience

galleries for promenading allow views from and to adjoining rooms

re-engaging the city through views

steps + plazaact as a stage for the public realm

edge, and spectacle, where the distance making elements of the proscenium arch are replicated through forms that emphasize forced perspectives, as well as direct and framed views, towards other users of the theater. In the city, the ground plane is the stage for those relationships on a shared surface. The boundaries of this plane and the conditions of its edges begin to influence the perceived zone of performance and interaction. A street, fairly narrow in section, a medieval street for example, shifts views up - due to the proximity of the built walls, while a wider more horizontal section of a plaza shifts views lower on a wider viewshed and volume.

Those boundary and ground plane elements were studied over time at Place Pompidou and adjacent streets. The condition of these boundaries proved to be what induces performance in the end. Boundaries have the power to separate and connect, and can be visible or invisible. A shift in ground plane, the intersection of vertical and horizontal planes, and the separation between one and the sky are physical manifestations of those edges. Climatic change creates space, while people themselves create space through psychological and cultural boundaries.

I continue to use these studies to aid in the development of an analytical tool that could be used to investigate urban sites. This tool would be used to further the discussion of conditions and implications of performance in the public realm.

NOTES

1. Livesey, Graham. Passages: Explorations of the Contemporary City. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004

front steps act as an elevated stage and viewing platform for pathways intersecting the public realm

promenade extends into the city, even underground to the adjacent metro stop

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Opera Garnier Drawings, Renee Pean, 2009

compression of entry gallery

expansion of entry gallery and sectional movement through grand stair marks the beginning of an area of heightened performance

forced perspectives emphasize the drama of the promenade space

apertures in the facade adjacent to the colonade frame views that are then expanded from the balcony

sectional change and tall space allows for views of stair users from multiple perspectives

Karl Fichot. Nouvel Opera, 1875. Lithograph section

re-engaging with the city and its users through balcony views and facade apertures

sectional change creates an edge condition that acts as a viewing balcony to the performances below

small outdoor room defined by three edge conditions: the building facade, bollards, and balcony

sloping ground provides a comfortable seating plane for stasis to create an audience

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facade permeability extends performance plane

multiple facade apertures allow for multiple viewpoints to scripted and unscripted performance of the street

a transparent facade allows for the visual extension of performance

edge can act as viewing balcony; aperture in facade as frame

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The contrast of light and shadow is used in drawing as a convention for describing form, depth and space. This same contrast, or chiaroscuro, defines the public spaces of Rome as a series of animate figures that shift over the course of a day and connect the public and private realms of the city. Modeling these figures using the gradients of light and shadow reveals the temporal dimensions of the public realm. Inverting the figure/ground relationship between solid form and space, we begin to understand the public realm as spatial and temporal zones of transition where elements such as light, water and pedestrian movement create animate spatial figures that transgress the edges between architecture and landscape.

Through the Carlo Pelliccia Fellowship I was given the opportunity to document the liminal spaces created by the contrast of light and shadow in the public spaces of Rome. In the bright sun and oppressive heat of Rome’s summer, the cool volumes of shadow that shift over the course of a day create palpable edges between areas of movement and areas of congregation. The drawings shown here are representative of three sites of study: the Pantheon, Porta Ottavia and the Campidoglio, and try to capture the volumetric qualities of the public realm as they are made animate through the dynamic qualities of light and movement.

CHIAROSCURO IN THE PUBLIC REALM

SUZANNE MATHEWM.ARCH / MLA 2010

2008 CARLO PELLICCIA TRAVEL FELLOW

Porta Ottavlia is uniquely situated within the dense neighborhood fabric of the Jewish Ghetto and shares adjacencies with local cafes, residences, and a synagogue. The base of the portico is revealed as a cut eight feet below the public ground plane. As shadows rake across the space during the day, they move between contemporary and ancient ground, connecting the two realms volumetrically. In this way the ground of the Portico itself is intrinsicly embedded within the neighborhood and acts as a threshold between ancient and contemporary culture. (see images on preceeding page as well)

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These studies of the Pantheon express the dimension of public space as a volume of shadow that moves between the interior of the rotunda, portico and the outer plaza. As the figures cast by the surrounding buildings and the Pantheon move across Piazza della` Rotunda during the day, they create a temporal edge between spaces of movement and spaces of occupation.

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Piazza del Campidoglio is framed by public porticos that create a transitional threshold between the public plaza and the interior courtyards of the adjacent palaces. As the sun moves over the plaza, shadows cast by the palaces create a figural volume that projects the and expands the threshold beyond the liminal edge of the buildings.

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Designed as a prototype duplex for the Make It Right Foundation, Flow House is Flow House is conceived as a series of outdoor rooms that extend and expand interior living while orchestrating and celebrating the movement of light, shade, air, and water. The house is connective and responsive, fostering and making visible human patterns and the rituals of daily living while engaging in the evolution of local culture and tradition. Flow House aligns architectural form and the various flows of nature (energy, air, water, light) – rendering this confluence visible through spatial relationships that respond to individual needs. The design re-imagines and combines local architectural typologies such as the ‘shotgun’, ‘camelback’, and ‘dogtrot’. The primary residence at the street and a secondary rental or ‘granny’ unit with an independent entrance towards the rear create a generous open landscape and rain garden while minimizing the overall building footprint. Deep overhangs and a southward ‘shift’ on the upper floor bedroom mass dually provides access to daylight for adjacent neighbors and shade for the lower living floor. An open exterior ‘dogtrot’ separates each unit while also providing effective natural ventilation and accommodating flexible expansion space to meet the requirements of diverse situations, family structures, and living arrangements over time.

FLOW HOUSE

JOSE ATIENZASENIOR DESIGNER, WILLIAM MCDONOUGH + PARTNERSLECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE

BECOMING NATIVE TO PLACE

Promoting and nurturing connections between human and natural communities, Flow House looks to natural systems for inspiration and relies on the belief that all design decisions should support the creation of community and family. Embodying the ideas and ideals of the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans, the Flow House strives to create a safe and healthy environment, both natural and built, with all material nutrients returning safely to biological or technical cycles – manifesting true Cradle to CradleTM nutrient flows.

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The experience of the house begins at a Live Oak tree. With a simple wood bench that becomes the entry stairs, a gathering space underneath the tree canopy defines the first step into the house. With the elevated front porch, this becomes a dynamic area of interchange between the public and private lives of the house. Defined by an open living space, the interior of the primary unit spatially and visually connects the front porch through to the ‘dogtrot’ or ‘shade’ deck. Framed by generous sliding doors, the living room fully extends to the front porch, allowing views up and down the street to promote a more secure and connected community. On the upper floor, the master bedroom suite opens onto the ‘view’ deck which accommodates rooftop gardens, private family gatherings, and sleeping under the night sky. Roof surfaces are photosynthetic, generating energy through building-integrated photovoltaic panels and hot water through solar thermal hot water tubes; green roof systems filter water, support biodiversity, and provide habitat while slowing storm water runoff. Water is visibly celebrated and collected through an integrated system of scuppers and cisterns.

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NUTRIENT FLOWS

Composed of three 16’-0”-wide modular living units that are constructed offsite, Flow House aspires to be Cradle to CradleTM (C2C) with component parts that can be safely disassembled and returned to the Earth within biological cycles or to industry within technical cycles. With the goal of encouraging and supporting adaptation in the marketplace, our vision is to inspire positive change in the design, construction, and building products industries, where the limitations of current manufacturing practices and the lack of readily available materials in true biological and technical cycles makes it unfeasible to build C2C houses using only certified products. To address this, we minimized the number of materials to a few key components that are safe and healthy for ecological and human health and are either Cradle to Cradle inspired or are Cradle to Cradle Certified. Wall and roof assemblies are conceived as metal structurally insulated (SIPS) panels (technical nutrients) while foundations, exterior cladding, and millwork are specified as wood (biological nutrients). Wood will either be FSC certified, formaldehyde-free and responsibly harvested for millwork or (non-toxic) acetalyzed for exterior cladding, structural columns, and foundation piles. Interior walls will be finished with gypsum-free, mold-resistant, and low VOC drywall (biological nutrient). Window elements are products of service–manufacturer owned products that are assembled from multiple nutrients and are designed to be returned to the manufacturer after their useful lives to be reconstituted into new products.

MAXIMIZE THE VALUE OF THE MATERIALS

• Sourcing locally or regionally to support the local economy and reduce transportation

• Using long lasting, durable materials

• Designing with standard sizes to decrease trim waste

• Using salvaged materials when feasible, provided they have been screend for effects on human health

• Giving preference to rapidly renewable, recyclable and high recycled content materials

SUPPORT HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH

• Screening all materials for effects on human and environmental health and specifying those with neutral or positive effects

• Avoiding materials that are known for netatively affecting health (e.g. PVC, Brominated Fire Retardants, Teflon, Mercury, and Cadmium)

MAINTAIN MATERIAL NUTRIENT CYCLES

• Using materials and products which are either compostable or are recyclable at the same level of quality

• Giving preference to products made from materials with an established market for their reuse or recycling

• Avoiding products comprised of many elements that are not easily separated

• Considering “products of service,” which encourage manufacturers to design products for recapture

•

PLAN FOR BUILDING EVOLUTION OVER TIME

• Designing buildings for easy disassembly to encourage material reuse and recapture

• Providing a flexible structural layout and designing building systems to facilitate change over time

• Planning for adoption of emerging technologies e.g. designing roofts to facilitate future photovoltaic installations)

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Jose Atienza’s design studios, professional work, and personal research focus on the operative intersections be-tween the constructed and the native through the instrumentalization of data flows into adaptive, specific, and responsive form. Through rigorous investigation of local and global processes and systems, the architectural project materializes at the fluent seams between the inherent and the invented - defining emergent sustaining relationships between ecology, capital, and culture.

William McDonough+Partners is a 40-person design firm that executes a diverse international array of projects from our studios in Charlottesville, Virginia, San Francisco, California, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are architects, planners, and leaders in sustainable design. With designs that integrate environmentally-intelligent strate-gies, we practice a positive, principled design approach that draws inspiration from living systems and processes. At its heart, this unique approach celebrates the abundance of nature.

FLOW HOUSE DESIGN TEAM

William McDonough, Kevin Burke, Jose Atienza, Katherine Grove, Alexander Jack, Dolores O’ Connor,

Alastair Reilly, Matthew Wagner

“What is most missing from explorations into Jewish space by American architects are the actual experiences within spaces created by and for Jewish-Americans.”

-David Gissen1

As in other art forms, architecture is a place in which cultural identities such as religion, race and sexuality have been and continue to be explored and examined through the manifestation of space. Included in these cultural investigations through architecture are Jewish architects who have both expressed and examined their self-identification as Jews. What does it mean to be a Jewish architect? One also must ask: “What constitutes a Jewish space?” Is it a universal idea of a sacred space, akin to Eliade’s idea of a break from the profane space, the crossing a transformative threshold into the sacred? Or is it like that of contemporary practitioners such as Eisenman or Libeskind, who have “relied on notions of Jewishness – associated with chaos, absence, wandering, etc,” in order to justify or explain their architectural moves?

“Architecture,” however, is not missing from Judaism. Conceptions and ideas about space are found throughout the Jewish religion; from the tabernacle built in the desert to the temple in Jerusalem, there are specific parameters and descriptions about these spaces and their dimensions. Aside from these spaces, there are ritual buildings and constructions that are very much a part of the Jewish experience of today. Sukkot is a holiday which centers on the ritual construction of a small shelter in which one is to spend time in a sleep-in for a week in autumn. What can the examination of this and other ritual spaces that exist within Jewish daily life reveal about Jewish identity in architecture?

CONSTRUCTING A JEWISH IDENTITY IN ARCHITECTURE

NOAH BOLTONLECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE

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Top: space for oneAbove: frontal perspective of the Center

Through the examination of Jewish architectural archetypes, such as the tabernacle, temple, and the synagogue, along with contemporary case studies of religious and Jewish spaces, I want to begin to decipher the elements that constitute an idea of contemporary Jewish architecture. Furthermore, what are the spatial dimensions of Jewish ritual? What can the seasonal construction of the Sukkah expose about ideas of Jewish space? These elements will be both phenomenological and formal. The hope is that these elements could then be applied to the design and construction of new Jewish spaces while providing a lens through which to view all architecture.

Constructing the SukkahLeft to right: exterior, building process, and ceiling

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A Student Center for Jewish Life on CampusLocated somewhere between…Between Mount Sinai (Lewis Mountain) and Jerusalem (The Lawn)Between the tops of oak trees and the water beneath our feetA dialogue between diaspora and belongingThe hillel is a building brought to life by students and JewsIt exists in a tension that is truly American, between the sacred and the secularIt is “both|and” not “either|or”

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Above and right: longitudinal section and corresponding plan

Hillel, the foundation for Jewish campus life, provides opportunities for Jewish students to actively engage in Jewish culture and life at more then 500 colleges around the world. Their intent is to enrich the lives of these students through both social and Jewish events, while encouraging its participants to pursue social causes and provide service to their communities. The UVA Hillel community is a very active and healthy one, providing weekly Shabbat dinners and study space for the larger student body. Currently located in an old house adjacent to the campus, the community has outgrown its building. As the building exists, it needs both expansion and renovation. With this as a pre-condition, this project proposes the construction of a new institution more centrally located on campus, with greater accessibility to the student body.

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Top: Chanukkah ceremony in the main congregation areaAbove left: diagram of the MikvahAbove right: the Mikvah

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Top: interior view of entranceBottom: Chanukkah ceremony in the main congregation space

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This project has allowed for the opportunity to explore themes and ideas about Jewish space that I have constructed from my research. The building is intended to reveal the cyclical nature of the Jewish seasons while at the same time reflecting the schedule of the academic calendar. It attempts to embody both the everyday activities of student life while allowing for transformation at certain times of religious significance. It is both secular and holy, both Jewish and American.

Above: the Center during PassoverBottom, from left to right: diagram of the Mikvah, the Mikvah

NOTES

1. Gissen, David. “Is There a Jewish Space? Jewish Identity beyond the Neo-Avant Garde.” thresholds 23 (2001): 90-95. Print

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The need for an Innovation Hub at the University of Virginia is clear. The academic setting provides a unique opportunity to bring together the theoretical and practical from a wide variety of fields to generate the effective innovations that could lead to new solutions. In order to facilitate a more agile and more productive innovative environment, the University must break down what are known as ‘Academic Silos’—the notion of a researcher working in an insulated and isolated environment—and allow for more cross-pollination between different fields of study. Doctors working alongside artists, scientists collaborating with musicians, engineers developing solutions with sociologists could all potentially generate the next great innovative strategies. It is in this spirit that a new typology of building for the Academic community should be built to embody this new attitude towards collaboration.

FOSTERING INNOVATION:

ALEXANDRE GARRISON M.ARCH 2010RYAN MCENROE M.ARCH 2009 / MLA 2010

The Opportunity. We advance that the University of Virginia has the potential to be distinguished as a wellspring of Innovation. In the next global, economic and social wellbeing will be achieved via an evolving paradigm that causally links knowledge creation, innovation, entrepreneurship, human dignity and social freedom.

The Vision. To achieve our vision of the University as a wellspring, we propose the creation of an Innovation Hub to serve as a central conduit for innovation activities at the University.

-T. Skalak, Vice President of Research and M. Lenox, Director, Batten Institute, Darden

“A Vision for an Innovation Hub at UVa”

August 30, 2009

A FRAMEWORK OF SELF-ORGANIZING SPACES

INTERCONNECTIVITY

The UVa Center for Innovation will be a collection of spaces that promote interdisciplinary communication through collaborative workspace. The building will inspire its occupants through natural phenomena, and encourage social interaction by providing informal gathering spaces. The strategic placements of communicative areas will enhance these nodes of activity, altering the way the occupants interact with one another by creating non-territorial, self-organizing neighborhoods. Furthermore, the building program will be highly elastic, allowing for different uses over time. The Center will be configured through the amalgam of four different elements:

1. Connective Tissue: the medium for light, air and social interaction

2. Public Hub: enhancing the intersection of the building and the greater University

3. Self-Organizing Neighborhoods: the primary workspace

4. Support Space: defined programmatic space

Layers of connective tissue that permeate the building


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Connective Tissue (communicative areas) The building’s thickened skin and atrium provides benefits for both the environmental and social strategies for the spaces within. These spaces are passively heated and cooled, controlling glare into the building, and allowing for circulation and informal meeting space.

Public Hub (the attraction) Bringing the public into the building is an important part of the equation for inspiring innovation. The building program encourages interdisciplinary interaction through the strategic placement of public program. These spaces are intended to act as a conduit for the public, who otherwise may not interact with the scholars housed within the building.

Self-Organizing Neighborhoods (open work labs) As the primary workspace, these areas encourage collaboration through highly flexible and easily re-configurable moveable partitions and furniture. The space allows for a number of different-size communities, or ‘neighborhoods,’ to form. Collaborative interaction is encouraged through the open floor plates, shared services, and gathering nodes.

Support Space (fixed program) The program attempts to maximize the amount of flexible working space and minimize the amount of permanently fixed program space.

Ventilation The atrium plays an important role in the services of the building. The stack effect enables natural ventilation. Breezes on the site filter into the ground floor, and through convection, naturally rise towards the top of the atrium. The greenhouse effect, occuring at the top of the glazed atrium, further enhances this process. This rising air draws the stale air out of the workspaces, upward, and exhausts the excess heat through wind turbines and out of the building.

Vertical Circulation Situated perpendicular to a very active pedestrian path (Engineer’s Way), the Center for Innovation will be a very active space. The ground floor acts as a large conduit, allowing pedestrians and bicycles through and upwards. The central atrium provides primary access to the working space above, and numerous opportunities for the student, professor, and visitor to interact.

Cross Pollination The programmatic design of the Center for Innovation cannot be prescriptive. Instead it is intentionally flexible to allow for self-organizing configurations of doctors, scientists, engineers, designers and any who wish to pursue cross-disciplinary work. The central atrium governs movement in the building, encouraging chance encounters, meetings, friendships and inspiration.

Sunlight Human beings are naturally drawn towards brighter spaces. Sunlight will be brought into the central atrium through reflective surfaces, bright colors, and glazing. The daylight is filtered to reduce glare and directed towards bright surfaces. This effect draws occupants of the building toward the atrium, where further opportunities exist to meet, discuss, share, and motivate one another.


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THE VERTICAL CITY Contemporary buildings have become a multiplicity of overlapping services and activities. The communicative atrium is a new opportunity to greatly increase the daily interactions between researchers and students in an academic setting. Flexible workspaces all share a common, open circulation core. This dense network of ramps, stairs, and bridges provide many places for meeting old friends, new friends, or even a chance encounter.

V. CHAKRABARTI

pg 16

HYPERDENSITY IN MANHATTAN

J.VANDERGOOT

pg 32

WILD FOOD, WATER WELLS, LOCATION MARKERS

N. BOLTON

pg 72

CONSTRUCTING A JEWISH IDENTITY IN ARCHITECTURE

L. HACKNEY

pg 107

DIURNAL/DIALECTIC

textured light informative constructionstructured fill fluctuating borderformed condition cultivated wild indeterminant edgeeducational playconstructed ambiguitypotent decay

T. HOGGE / D. MALDA

pg 142

DISRUPTIVE INLAY

A. PARKER / J. PRICE

pg 194

FROM SEWAGE TO SWAMP

E. BAILEY

pg 180

AFTER THE STORM: SOCIAL SPACE AS FLEXIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE

D. WOODEN

pg 188

THE BIG LEAK

The Cistercian monks of Mepkin Abbey work and live in silent meditation. Sited on a bluff along the Cooper River, the monastery manifests their mission of service physically and spiritually, at once open and contained. The abbey is open to guests who come for days or weeks at a time to engage in the monks’ daily rituals; the three-sided cloister opens towards the river, to the site’s bluffs and cliffs. This addition responds to this dialectic: twenty guest rooms embedded in the earth, away from the cloister, create places of quiet individual reflection. The chapel, a shared space of worship for the guests, is hyper-ephemeral, sited in the river, its inhabitation subject to tidal and climatic fluctuations. The diurnal exchange between the life of the cloister and the solitary meditation of the guests etches the abbey’s grounds, encompassing its landscape of high bluffs and eroding swales as a physical corollary to the spiritual experience of retreat.

DIURNAL / DIALECTIC

LAUREN HACKNEYMLA 2010 / M.ARCH 2011

ADDITION TO MEPKIN ABBEY

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Above: Structured by an armature which leads to the chapel, twenty individual cells are embedded in the bluff ’s edge; in material and in section they are in static juxtaposition with the chapel’s fluctuations.

Right: Sited in the water, the chapel engages the river’s tides and its reflections through folded panels that refract direct and reflected light; unconditioned, it is an ephemeral, dynamic shelter, subject to temporal fluctuations of light, temperature and sound.

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Sited as part of a larger landscape sequence, the addition engages the site’s

bluffs, swales, and live oak canopy as guests move from room to abbey,

abbey to chapel, and chapel to room according to the diurnal cycles of the

retreat.

Hana Kim’s 2009 Needle Box series synthesizes the artist’s broad base of knowledge with a cross-pollination of processes, from sculpture, technology and design to drawing and works on paper. The artist models the box forms in a digital modeling program and assembles them by hand with synthetic paper and metal pins, speaking to the technological evolution of design alongside the history of craft and women in the textile industries. A domestic tension is present in the artist’s use of paper, a historically and culturally weighted material resource, the quality of workmanship and the precision of simple forms.

This dialogue with craft first appears in the artist’s earlier work, Cage Game (2000), and continues as an underlying vein throughout her three-dimensional catalogue. For Cage Game, two 5”x5”x5” mesh metal boxes are filled with cloth and speared with wooden dowels. The sheer smallness of the sculptures brings the work back to the hand and the viewer is privy to the physicality of the boxes’ experience—their external and internal traumas are equally subject to the viewers’ gaze. This openness disappears in the needle box series, in the shift from mesh metal to synthetic paper.

HYBRID VISIONS :

WORK BY HANA KIM, LECTURERESSAY BY ASHLEY VAUGHAN

CRAFT, PROCESS AND TACTILE FLUX

Cage Game (2000)

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detail, Untitled (agape) (2009)

Untitled (six boxes after Eva Hesse) (2009)

Both Untitled (six boxes after Eva Hesse) (2009) and Untitled (landscape) (2009) are transformative works exploring the correlation between modest, domestic materials and industrial ones. The architectural framework of the sculptures leads viewers to expect the use of iron or steel, but closer inspection reveals white paper boxes whose interiors sparkle with the glint of household quilting pins. Kim finds a balance between industry and craft, but redefines the semiotics of parts: domestic sewing needles absorb the sheen of industry en masse, and paper is plastic artifice.

Kim’s work speaks to the technological and post-postmodern hybridity that has accompanied the developing role of technology in art, culture and society in the past decade and simultaneously, the relationship between the artist and the machine. Although following templates created by computers, the complex geometries of process are left open to the weaknesses of the human hand—the frailty of hand-assemblage.

In Untitled (2009), the boxes exist in a constant state of flux—designed by computer, crafted by hand, destined to move via sensors, and consequently, to crank, sound and function as machines, but innately emulating organic matter—whether that be the rippling vestiges of sea anemones or the hair of human skin. The quest for synthetic systems is always undermined by the desire for the product to look, feel and move like us. In the same way, Hana Kim’s needle boxes are both sensual and mechanical; they scream unheimlich.

Untitled (landscape) (2009)

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Ashley Vaughan is a curator and artist based in London, UK. She received a BA in Journalism Studies from the University of Denver and an MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She is a regular contributor to ArtSlant London and is currently practicing photography worldwide. Find more of her work at www.ashley-vaughan.com.

Hana Kim is an artist, lecturer, and designer based in Charlottesville, VA. She received her MA in Architecture from UVa She most recently exhibited work with the Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA and actively maintains her own studio practice. Her work can be found online at www.hanakimlee.com

detail, Untitled (landscape) (2009)

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Untitled (agape) (2009)

FABRIC[ATED] ATMOSPHERES

JIE HUANG M.ARCH 2011KURT MARSH M.ARCH 2011ERIN ROOT M.ARCH 2011

In the landscape, forms intervene in the elemental flows of sun and wind to create distinct spaces more conducive to habitation. The perception of a change in climatic conditions can mark a soft, flexible boundary between spaces. When one enters a grove of trees, the canopy creates a shaded microclimate that helps to define the space of the grove as unique from its surroundings. Similarly, vertical elements within a landscape, such as hedgerows, block the wind and delineate a sheltered space that exists amongst a less comfortably inhabitable expanse.

This project uses layers of fabric stretched across modular aluminum frames to filter sunlight, creating a cooler space on warmer days similar to a grove of trees. The project also redirects wind like a hedgerow, creating a warmer space on cooler days.

The trees that provide shaded spaces in the summer lose their leaves to allow sunlight

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12140% reflective Aluminet Reflective aluminet layered with 60%

relective white shade cloth

Bent aluminum conduit

Climatic Fabrics at night

to penetrate to the ground in colder months. To maintain a relatively consistent level of comfort, a constructed microclimatic space must be flexible to respond to changing environmental conditions. The modular form of the triangle used in our construction can be reconfigured to regulate penetration of sun and wind: a denser configuration offers fuller protection from the elements, while a looser configuration has minimal impact, perhaps only shading a person’s face from direct light. The modules are connected with hinged joints that allow for manual adjustments to the structure to accommodate the changing angle of the sun or wind.

The fabric surface is also varied on either side. A highly reflective aluminet fabric was sewn to a white agricultural shade fabric to create the differing surfaces. Depending on orientation, the aluminet surface can either reflect sunlight away from the inhabitant, adding to the cooling shade, or it can be positioned to reflect both sunlight and the inhabitant’s own body-heat back down into the created space for a warming effect. The white fabric is of a denser weave to ensure a consistently adequate ability for each panel to block both sun and wind.

The spaces created by the different assemblies of the module form lack a hard physical boundary. They are perceived by the body as a shift in climate, an interruption in elemental flows creating a more comfortable space for gathering. The desire to inhabit these spaces is furthered by the distinct visual presence of the construction. The shadows cast on the ground are of varied densities, creating a filigree of light not unlike that created by overlapping densities of a tree canopy. Furthermore, the different configurations can be turned and twisted to create sculptural forms with an elegance and complexity that prompts people to explore the different micro climatic spaces created. The project demonstrates that with an economy of inexpensive materials, a lightweight intervention can create beautiful spaces easily manipulated by their inhabitants to adapt to a multitude of shifting environments.


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Wire frame studies of potential operability

Digital modeling explorations of scale

125

Loose configuration

Dense configuration

EMILY ROGERS MLA 2009

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TAKING A DIP: DIVERSIFYING THE URBAN EXPERIENCE OF WATER

To design a landscape for water is to design for a condition that is inherently inconstant. Taking a Dip seeks to embrace this fact in service of the diversification of the urban experience of water in the heart of downtown Richmond, VA. Situated in a low, broad valley, Shockoe Bottom has long been known for extensive flooding. The site, over 20 acres, is currently used as surface parking because of the potential for future floods.

This project proposes strategies to collect, cleanse and retain stormwater using a variety of physical forms which in turn allow for multiple modes of kinesthetic interaction. These include wetlands, mounds, tanks, pools, channels, walkways, and wet surfaces. The proposal suggests utilizing the realities of Shockoe Bottom’s inherent flows to improve urban life for Richmond’s citizens by creating a hybrid landscape of public works and recreation.

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Examination of the site’s cultural context also reveals the shifting values of Richmond’s inhabitants. The southwest corner of the site is an eighteenth century burial ground for free and enslaved Africans and African Americans. During the nineteenth century, the site was a massive railyard; many physical traces of this history remain. The twentieth century brought pavement, the material of the automobile, to the site.

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The proposed project seeks to adaptively reuse physical traces of industrial use and to end two centuries of neglect and disregard for human life, instead offering the burial ground as sacred high ground in this public landscape. Investigation of the site’s landscape infrastructure and cultural context provides a framework for the design proposal to integrate natural processes and culture to allow for landscape resiliency in the face of constant change.

A CASE FOR RUINS

DANIELLE WILLKENSLECTURER IN ARCHITECTURE

AND A CAUSE FOR CONCERN

Not all ruins tell tales of empires; many are skeletons of industries long past, memorials bearing the scars of war, and others have an even quieter presence as ghosts of social constructions. Ruins can be in a deteriorated form or classified by the complete absence of a once-rich built environment. Ruins are memories, objective and subjective storytellers. Although not evident to most visitors, such ruins exist at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

As a UNESCO World Heritage site and the home of a patriot and president, Monticello receives nearly half a million visitors each year. People come to see the home, collections, and picturesque landscape. Although the visitation to Monticello comes from a global population, visitors are universally polarized by the aspect of slavery at the home of the founding father. Some are eager to question, while others consciously overlook Jefferson’s life of contradiction between his pen and practice. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, yet held more than 600 slaves during his lifetime; he wrote the enslaved were “destined to be free”1 but he

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Top: A view of Mulberry Row todayMiddle: A photostitch looking North from the garden.Bottom: A digital rendering overlaying a photograph showing what Mulberry Row may have looked like in Jef-ferson’s time

manumitted only seven held within his own property. Visitors that explore Monticello today walk the u-shaped cryptoporticus that contained many of the domestic service spaces and peer into the cavernous quarters of the cook’s room along the south passage. The architecture of slavery is relegated to the underground passage beneath the ‘big house’. The term monticello means ‘little mountain’ in Italian, yet few visitors to the mountaintop realize there was an entire built landscape beyond the confines of the brick and stone mansion.

Today’s visitors walk along Mulberry Row unaware of the vibrant community, and associated structures, that once occupied the gravel alley named for the tightly spaced Mulberry trees along its edges. The only remnants of activities along Mulberry Row are the precariously braced stone chimney of the Joinery, the foundations of the structure known as the 1809 Stone House, and oddly placed piles of stone that mark building footprints. At one point in time there were more than seventeen buildings lining Mulberry Row: this 1,000 ft long swath of land along the south embankment of the ‘little mountain’ fueled the agricultural, industrial, and domestic operations of Jefferson’s plantation. Mulberry Row was the lifeblood of the mountaintop and although few physical ruins mark the land, the absence of such ruins tells a powerful

LIGHTER GRAPHICS CAN BLEED OVER TEXT

Above: Digital renderings of three eras of Mulberry Row: 1770-1790, 1790s-1808, 1809- 1831

Right: A digital slave dwelling rendered with section cut

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story of social constructions, preservation, and memory. Many people are aware that Jefferson’s residence at Monticello underwent drastic transformations for more than forty years. The design and construction process of the home was not a linear one; however, it is evident from Jefferson’s earliest drawings for the home that he had a Palladian parti in mind. Mulberry Row, on the other hand, represented an alternative design approach that valued fluidity, function over form, and demolition over adaptation.

There were three distinct periods of the built environment along Mulberry Row. The first period, 1770-1790s, represented provisional and contradictory approaches to architecture beyond the ‘big house.’ There were temporary constructions for washing and cooking but also neoclassical constructions. There was not a divided demographic in housing placement since enslaved, indentured, and hired workers were neighbors, but the materiality of housing identified the occupants of the dwellings: stone was reserved for the white workmen, and logs for those enslaved. A materiality of impermanence was assigned to the structures associated with slavery. The second period of Mulberry Row, 1790s-1808, marked a shift away from agricultural operations to those of light industry. Buildings multiplied along the Row and Jefferson moved away from the Tidewater tradition of barracks style housing for slaves to individual cabins. For the first time, Jefferson assigned value to the structures and had them numerated, detailed, and insured along with his home as part of the Richmond-based Mutual Assurance Society in 1800. Yet few buildings were made of anything but wood. In 1809, Jefferson came home from the presidency to begin his seventeen years in retirement. It was the

first time since the Revolution that he would spend more than four years at home, but the industrial operations of nail-making and iron-working had slowed. As the demands on Mulberry Row shrank, so did density of the structures. Many were dismantled but the structures left were given a dramatic backdrop when the terrace garden was dropped, leveled, and then expanded. The Row was now a ridge. Jefferson built two stone buildings and commissioned masons for the construction. It seemed as though the permanence of brick and stone from the ‘big house’ was slowly making its way across the entire landscape of the mountain and a villa rustica was coming into fruition.

Some have argued that Jefferson tried to hide slavery at Monticello by submersing many of the functional aspects of the plantation beneath the u-shaped wings of his home. However, these scholars have forgotten the seventeen structures that once stood along Mulberry Row, a village of buildings that would be difficult for Jefferson to hide from sight let alone contain the smells or sounds that that would invade the experience of any Washington socialite or local farmer visiting the former president. Although slavery

Above: Digital renderings of three eras of Mulberry Row: 1770-1790, 1790s-1808, 1809- 1831

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Above: Digitally rendered porch of a slave dwelling.

-

was most certainly not invisible during Jefferson’s time at Monticello, the buildings of Mulberry Row quickly slipped into decay following his death. When Uriah Levy bought Monticello in 1836, little was left along the Row. Levy’s idea of preservation at Monticello was strictly in regards to the ‘big house’ and for nearly one hundred years this attitude did not change, despite the transfer of Monticello’s ownership to the non-profit Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923.2 Extant slave cabins in Jefferson’s surrounding farms were destroyed when Route 64 was redirected and in 1934, a WPA project paved Mulberry Row, destroying valuable archaeological information.3 By the 1930s, slavery at Monticello was practically invisible, not because of how Jefferson hid the built environment of the enslaved, but because of what the buildings were made of and how modern society did nothing to alter the attitudes of impermanence and neglect. Conversations about ‘restoring’ Mulberry Row started in the 1930s but letters reveal that the intent of rebuilding was to “reveal additional facets of Mr. Jefferson’s genius and interests”, not to enlighten the public about the architecture of slavery.

A dialogue about the ‘restoration’ of Mulberry Row has been renewed in recent years. How can a ‘restoration’ be made when little is known about the constructed details of dwellings and shops along Mulberry Row, and what is the function of a ‘re-creation’? If Mulberry Row was repopulated with small conjectural buildings to resemble a certain period in the dynamic history of this agricultural and industrial alley, it seems as though costumed interpreters and live animals are not too far away. I have no biases against living history museums but I question if that is the right approach to Jefferson’s villa: is re-creation necessary to envision those who labored and lived along the Row when the stories of the enslaved at Monticello are richly edified by objects discovered from archaeological excavations, written documentary evidence, and oral histories passed down over the years? This is a case where the making of architecture, ‘re-creation’, is not the answer.

The scant ruins and pure absence of buildings along Mulberry Row tell visitors more about the time, place and importance of architecture for those enslaved at Jefferson’s home. The dwellings and workhouses of the hundreds of people held as property were not designed or built to be permanent structures. They were made of wood, waddle and daub, and dry laid stone; these material compositions existed in stark contrast to the durable construction of Jefferson’s brick, stone, and metal home. With the abundance of clay loam soil perfect for brick-making and kilns that fired at the mountain’s base for more than forty years, it appears to be a conscious choice that the structures of Mulberry Row were not composed of Jefferson’s typical material palette. Mulberry Row was conceived with a drastically shortened lifecycle in mind. The deterioration and near-absence of architecture reflects the cultural attitude towards slavery during both Jefferson’s time and for decades after; today, the Row serves as a ghosted, cultural ruin.

The recreation of the Row would be detrimental to our understanding of history as well as the experience of visitors to the mountain. Research at Monticello has shed light on what slaves ate, what they collected and crafted, what they wore and even what music they played, but a perplexingly small amount of information is available within documentary or archaeological research on specific details of buildings along Mulberry Row. Re-creations inherently exist in the grey area of historical interpretation but how saturated can that grey become before the re-creation becomes pure conjecture? At Monticello, it would be a disservice to visitors to present Jefferson’s home, with approximately ninety percent of its architectural fabric from Jefferson’s time, in contrast to a completely re-created Mulberry Row. It would be inconsistent in regard to the TJF’s mission of ‘preservation and education’: in order to re-create portions of Mulberry Row structures would have to be anchored into the south embankment of the mountaintop and areas that have not yet been excavated to sterile subsoil. Worse yet, a re-created Mulberry Row could face the recent fate of the

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Spread Periphery: A series of drawings after an artist’s sketch of slave dwellings.

icehouse or kitchen: both recently underwent costly renovations to correct ‘accurate re-constructions’ that were made in the early years of the TJF.If physical reconstruction is not advised, and may even be detrimental to the educational mission of the TJF, what is the answer to interpreting the Row? Although built architecture is not the answer, there is a strong case to be made for the power of the digital, architectural explorations. A computer model would show visitors the variation of building type, scale, and density throughout the dynamic evolution of architecture and occupation along Mulberry Row. Monticello should not become a Disneyland of plantation life, presented to visitors in a point-and-touch fashion. I shudder to think about the distinct possibility that shovels will one day break ground on the Row, destroying precious archaeological information yet to be discovered and freezing the interpretation of the Row to a distinct time period despite the ever-changing nature of the alley for more than sixty years. If the TJF makes the decision to build along Mulberry Row they will need to ensure a sense of institutional memory that has escaped many historic sites: the stories of recreations devolve into those of restoration and eventually, stories of preservation. Structures created to help visitors better understand a historic site can, in time, be interpreted as originals. The TJF will need to be diligent and consistent in their interpretation of any recreated buildings along Mulberry Row.

NOTES:

1. Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Pleasant, 1796. Letter. From Library of Congress.

2. The foundation will subsequently be referred to as the TJF.

3. The paving was not removed between the Weaver’s Cottage and the Joinery until 1977-8.

amplify disturbance + inlay addition

expand diversity

claimed ground

ambiguous ground

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DISRUPTIVE INLAY

C. THOMAS HOGGE M.ARCH 2009 / MLA 2010DAVID MALDA M.ARCH 2009 / MLA 2010

On the ambiguous ground of Union Square, in Washington, DC, this project invests in the potency of disturbance to reestablish a democratic ground on the 15 acres separating the National Mall from the U.S. Capitol. Folding the edges of the precinct builds on the highway passing underneath, amplifying this earlier disturbance as a productive urban force. A series of smaller folds promote ecological difference and microclimatic diversity, unexpected socialization and protest, as vital forces for shaping a national identity.”

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MALL

While the National Mall has served as a stage for nation-changing events such as the March on Washington and the inauguration of President Obama, daily events and interactions among diverse peoples and changing seasons play an equally significant role in shaping the attitudes and ideas of the population. Shared experiences of play, rest, and the unanticipated encounter of difference are productive forces in forging a national identity, yet are inhibited by the projected monolithic uniformity of the mall. Instead of declaring the potency of social and cultural expression, the already isolated figure of today’s mall is little more than a mute surface. This project suggests that a new working potential for the mall can be cultivated in connections between the federal core and the lived city, as productive pockets for exchange stitched on common ground.

CITY

Climate change and the evolving role of the United States in an increasingly and globally connected world challenge accepted ideals of ‘local’ and national identity. The National Mall – a constructed symbol of democracy, a common space of national identity and manifest for exploration – at once projects the ideals of the nation and offers a venue for transforming those ideals through protest and collective voice. This project engages the plurality of this voice, cultivating a place in the city wild enough to imagine alternative futures and generate new myths for the nation.

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Folded topography establishes a range of conditions for diverse species while maintaining a continuity of public ground.

The mall sequence culminates in an unexpected prospect and rediscovery of the fluctuating public ground.

14797

A generative inlay of new productive public space that disturbs and excites the Union Square precinct.

SQUARE

At the vital intersection of political and cultural vantage points, Union Square is an ambiguous terrain. It has been a singular host to the Botanic Garden as a symbol of national exploration and growth; an intersection of tributaries to the Tiber River; a determining ground for retrospective conceptions and sculptural symbols of “union”; and a capped surface hiding highway infrastructure. Along with this fluctuating identity, its situation as the national porch underscores the importance of its role as a place in which interaction builds community: hosting a wider range of events, connecting educational opportunities and daily experiences of local residents with national level research, and cultivating a regenerative national identity grounded in diversity. This project intensifies the parcel edges to frame the potency of collective events, environmental fluctuation and national policy occurring at its edges.

INLAY

As an addition to the capitol of the nation, this project reinterprets the topographic founding of the city, which leveraged particular geomorphologic conditions, by inlaying a network of path and place that presents rather than conceals layers of disturbed ground in the precinct. Creating an inlay within the designed landscapes of the National Mall and Capitol Grounds, this project distinguishes itself from these adjacencies, intentionally disrupting the monolithic axis held by the Mall and Capitol Building, and figuring the urban fabric within the federal vision as a new inlay of social and material tactics. As an addition to Pennsylvania Avenue, this project further asserts the vitality of difference onto this symbolic, democratic line by inlaying a folded ground that provides for a range of social and environmental microclimates.

section B exotic investigation converge collect rest filter cross dry island collection fluctuation adaptation promenade

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section B exotic investigation converge collect rest filter cross dry island collection fluctuation adaptation promenade

continued erosion develops a long tidal flat, organic material exchange with bluff plants

long piers extend out into the shore and limit tidal fluctuation; lumber and other resources extracted and shipped from piers

warehouses and a rail line transfer goods directly from the port to the region resources, extracted and shipped from piers

a seawall, rail lines and additional warehouses expand, exchange as a international port

the viaduct supports commuter exchange with region as shipping moves out of the city center

tidal action erodes the bluff

1000 bce bluff + tidal flat

3000 bce bluff + shore

1874 piers

1891 rail lines + fill

1936seawall + fill

1961viaduct

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RENEGOTIATED INFRASTRUCTURE: PROPOSALS FOR A WORKING WATERFRONT IN SEATTLE

DAVID MALDAM.ARCH 2009 / MLA 2010

The freeway is an icon of infrastructure for the twentieth century. Massive in scale and serving a very narrow purpose, the freeway’s success is rooted in its ability to avoid intersections with local conditions. Much of what we consider infrastructure follows this same strategy in an effort to stabilize connections between global and local interests for a predetermined set of exchanges. While highly effective in one respect, this attitude fails to see the intersection as a potentially productive condidion for the vitality of our communities, where differences meet and dynamic conditions demand sustained negotiation.

The infrastructure of the next century cannot perpetuate the legacy of the last. America’s cities need an investment in landscape as infrastructure that facilitates the potential for intersections between global and local priorities. The structure of the city needs to be responsive and adaptive to the ways in which glocalization impacts the region as well as the city block. This is an additive approach that builds on the existing material conditions of the city, offering access to a broader public and supporting previously supressed ecologies. The infrastructural landscape serves as the ground where active citizens negotiate multiple priorities and public engagement is understood as integral to the sustainability of the city.

A PRODUCTIVE EDGE:

In the Pacific Northwest, the edge between water and land has been productive for thousands of years. 20,000 years ago glaciers carevd out the bluffs that form the Puget Sound. Over millenia the energy of the tides slowly eroded the bluffs and fed the development of an intertidal zone that evolved to become one of the most diverse and productive ecosystems in the world. The activity of this edge between the bluff and the bay supported the growth of the city of Seattle. The construction of piers, a seawall, rail lines, and an elevated highway transformed the edge between the city and the world.

Concern for the stuctural integrity of the elevated viaduct and the decaying seawall brings the city to a new debate over the future of the water’s edge. The city calls this its opprtunity for the next one hundred years to question the role of a “working waterfront” in an age where the port is no longer active in the city center and there is an increasing pressure for reacreational access to the bay.

SITE READING: MORE THAN A LINE

infrastructural edge topography: bluff + shore

local roads: negotiated terrain destinations

MLLW (-18.6’)

MHHW (-7.3’)

Street level (0’)

relieving platformseawall viaduct

Existing Condition

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transportation

NEGOTIATE MULTIPLE PRIORITIES: DEVELOP MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

nearshore habitat

tourism development

THE SPIT

COASTAL RESEARCHTHE COVE

species

hydrology

movement floating eel grass beds

A NEW WORKING WATERFRONT

This project explores a new investment in the “working waterfront” that expands the potential productivity of the edge between land and sea. Rather than proposing a new single identity for this territory, the proposal expands on the material conditions of the site and transforms the existing structures of the seawall and viaduct to support a greater diversity of access and opportunity for public engagement. This “working waterfront” is a place of learning and experimentation, where diverse interests intersect and an active public plays a central role in regenerating previously suppressed ecologies and shaping the future health of the bay and the city.

material

cobble sand/gravelcoconut fiber

dune grasssurfgrassmarine eelgrass

chinook salmon surf smelt

sand lance

open bay

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madrone

amphipod

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sand/gravel

sand lance

madrone

intertidal shelf street car 2 lanes driving

cisternfilter petroleum

filter metals

promenade

intertidal beach

bike lane

parking

sand amended soil amended soilpaved surface

red aldershore pine vine maple saskatoon big leaf maplesalalevergreen

huckleberry

paved surface

amphipod

remarking + reclaiming demolish viaduct road beds, maintain columns (crush material for reuse)

excavate behind seawall (transport material to beach construction down shore)

regrade shore edge with viaduct material

1 2

5 6

SEATTLE WATERFRONT CONCEPT PLAN

What will define the future character of the “working waterfront?” While waterborne passenger travel remains a vital use in the area, other water dependent activities are gone in most areas and will not likely return.

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recondition surface below viaduct

engage local organizations in planting events

cut seawall down to platform height

3 4

7 8

Terminal 46 remains as a major container cargo handling facility, but its long term future is uncertain. What is the appropriate concept of a working waterfront for this century?

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Flux defines experience on the Kafue Flats, a seasonally flooded landscape of oxbow lakes, verdant grasslands and wooded islands along the Kafue River in central Zambia (Figure 1). The natural wealth and livelihoods of the Kafue Flats are dependent on a dynamic rhythm of seasonal flooding, but for the last 30 years the seasonal floods have been regulated by two large dams in order to provide electricity for the nation. Regulation has diminished the variance in flooding between rainy and dry seasons, and made the timing of yearly floods more dependent on dam operations than on rainfall patterns.

The Kafue Photovoice Project1 revealed fundamental uncertainty about the timing and duration of the seasonal flooding of the Flats and the effects that such timing has on the fishing, farming and cattle grazing livelihoods that characterize the region. By recognizing that one of the primary issues for residents is the timing of the floods, specifically uncertainty of when it will occur, it may be possible to pursue new kinds of adaptive intervention and resource management in the Flats, allowing certainty for livelihoods and dam operations within an expected and acceptable range of flux.

UNCERTAINTY IS THE GRIEVANCE

ALLEGRA CHURCHILL MLA 2010

LIVELIHOODS IN FLUX ON THE KAFUE FLATS

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Figure 1: Location of the Kafue Flats

Flux and uncertainty operate in three dimensions in the Flats— cause (dynamic and uncontrollable rainfall patterns, both seasonal and climatic), reaction (irregular dam management practices), and effect (changed dependability and availability of resources). Flux operates across multiple dimensions, but manifests as real consequences for food security, health, and ecosystem sustainability.

CAUSE: CLIMATIC UNCERTAINTY

On a climatic scale, changes in global rainfall patterns manifest as years of drought or years of heavy floods. In addition, rainfall occurs as distinct wet and dry seasons, creating a natural state of flux in the ecosystem that is the generator of great biodiversity and resource wealth.

The rainy season begins in early November and continues until March, with peak flooding historically occurring in March at the western end of the Flats and almost six weeks later at the eastern end. From December to April, significant parts of the floodplain are underwater by as much as fifteen feet and canoes become a major type of transportation for some communities. Fish breed in the submerged grasses. By May the plains are dry enough for foot traffic, cattle graze on the rich new grass and fishermen are able to access fishing areas. September and October are characterized by water scarcity, apart from the mainstem river and borehole wells. The large typical seasonal variation in the extent of the flooded area is integral to the diversity of the ecological and economic wealth of the Flats.

Marco Glystra for WWF

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REACTION: OPERATIONAL UNCERTAINTY

The operation of the two dams represents an intermediate scale of uncertainty, as management is a reaction to fluctuating rainfall patterns, and in turn affects livelihoods and local experiences on the floodplain. The dam operations are a man-made system trying to respond to and mimic a natural one, and so inconsistency in the flow regime is heightened due to several factors including inconsistent rainfall patterns, continuing evolution of technologies, and shifts in dam management practices.

Since completion of the Kafue Gorge Dam (1972) and Itezhitezhi Dam (1978), the flow regime of the Kafue River has been severely altered. River flow is regulated by the upstream Itezhitezhi Dam to provide consistent flow levels for the downstream Kafue Gorge Dam, which provides power for Lusaka and the Copperbelt industries.

Compared with the Kafue River’s natural flow regime, the post-dam flow exhibits a reduced flood peak, higher minimum flows, and reduced flows overall (Figure 2). The alteration of the seasonal flood has negatively impacted both the floodplain ecosystem and the downstream communities that rely on it for economic and food security.

These impacts are compounded because most of the residents of the Flats do not have electricity and so benefit less directly from the power generated at Kafue Gorge.2 Thus the dams are viewed in a mixed light by residents:

Figure 2: Altered flows for dam operations has led to serious consequences for livelihoods and ecology on the Flats.

April: Flooded Areas June: Flooded AreasFebruary: Flooded Areas

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“Maybe the people in town can be proud because they get electricity but it brings misery here. Since

1977 there were times when the plains were perpetually dry and gave rise to shrubs, then floods,

then droughts with anthills. What is happening, if it is not addressed we will see no plains.”

—Steven Lowa, Headman, Chibundze fishing community

Interestingly, Itezhitezhi Dam was one of the first major dams designed with additional storage capacity and operating rules for managed seasonal flooding that would mimic the pre-dam hydrology of a peak flood or freshet in March. However, its promise to fulfill both ecological and hydropower needs, let alone economic/livelihood or cultural needs, has fallen short and the actual operation has been one of inconsistency. “It is not clear however to what extent these freshets were released in the past and what the benefits have been,” explains a World Wildlife Fund report.3

The World Commission on Dams (2000) brought increasing attention to dam impacts on the Kafue Flats and other sites worldwide. In 2004 new dam operating rules to implement environmental flows without compromising energy production specified increased releases from Itezhitezhi during January and February to create gradual flooding and recession in an extensive rather than flashy manner. The new rules are meant to allow for freshets of different values and timing, depending on the extent of rainfall in a given year so that in a wet year the freshet can start in January and in a dry year it can only start in March.3 While this may restore pre-dam variation and extents of the river flows, it may also increase uncertainty for residents because the timing of the releases is variable. The first two rainy seasons under the new rules were dry ones and no freshet was released. This calls into question the efficacy and intent of the new operating rules, revealing the difficulty inherent in implementing new practices.

Inconsistency is heightened by the lack of appropriate technology, especially for monitoring upper watershed rainfall and managing basin-wide flows. As scientists and the international NGO/donor community recognize the value of dynamic ecosystems like floodplains and deltas, they have also sought to implement new technology and educate dam operators and host nations.3,4 Thus partnerships such as the Tripartite Agreement and the Zambezi Forum are integral to improving technology and changing dam operating procedures so that some of the predictive uncertainty can be removed and riverflows can be managed with more nuance and receptivity to hydrological flux.

EFFECT: LIVELIHOOD UNCERTAINTY

All of the previously discussed variabilities in rainfall and operations mean that over the last 32 years there were very inconsistent flood releases, with the timing, duration and extent of flooding fluctuating quite widely from decade to decade and even from

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year to year. Fishing, farming and cattle are all dependent on the seasonal floods, and therefore vulnerable to the uncertain timing and duration of the floods. Participants in the Kafue Photovoice Project expressed great concern about a range of impacts that the dam has on the floodplain and their livelihoods, including diminishing fish catches, changes in grass composition and flooding of maize fields and gardens.

The issue that underlies all of these concerns is the uncertainty in the timing of the floods from the dam. Steven Lowa, the headman of the fishing community in the “island” village of Chibundze, was part of Photovoice and when the fishermen heard about the project they asked him to take a picture (Figure 3). Lowa explained:

“Each person has a complaint against the floods. They came together so they could be seen. They have

grievances. This year the floods didn’t help their activities because the [dam] gates were untimely

opened and didn’t let the water recede. Generally the movement of water, its not predictable and at the

time it is supposed to be flooded its not, so they are not sure of anything. The uncertainty is the grievance.”

Residents know that the Kafue Flats are an area of great flux, a place that has a rhythm of seasonal variation that should be expected and even celebrated for the rich grass, fertile soil and fishing resources that the seasonal floods create. Therefore, many express dismay at the mistiming and character of the floods that now occur. They want the flood to come at the “right” time to nurture natural resources and wanted to know when it would come in order to plan their own resources accordingly. The flooding that has occurred in the last several years has been characterized as “untimely” and causing uncertainty in their livelihoods and activities, whereas the pre-dam floods were seen to be in accord with human activities:

“And the floods themselves, they were actually timely, coming at the right time that we wanted. And it

used to go when we did not want it. So for us it was not a problem. It confined to our activities in the plain”.

—Gilda Miyoba, Midwife, Chibundze

Figure 3: A group of fishermen gathered to tell about their grievances with the Itezhitezhi Dam releases. Photo by Steven Lowa, Headman, Chibundze.

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The characterization of the pre-dam flooding patterns is likely idealized. Many do not know what the floodplain was like before the Itezhitezhi Dam, either because they are too young or have moved to the area since the dam was constructed in 1978. Moreover, in the intervening years there has been so much inconsistency in the flooding patterns, with a tendency towards more low-flow years, that the flooding patterns which ecologists say are “natural” or “correct” may seem higher and more disruptive than what is perceived as “normal”. And so there is a tendency, rightly or wrongly, to blame the floods for a host of difficulties:

“Before the construction of Itezhitezhi we didn’t have scarcity, but now there are always so

many problems. Fish and our ability to cross the river and we are poor. So we attribute this

to the water. We don’t know what is happening. The water is causing all these problems.”

—Joyce Kaunda, Fisherwoman, Maala

However, there are very real consequences to the altered flood regime, and the Photovoice participants photographed and discussed a range of problems that it caused. Changes in timing of seasonal floods can have profound consequences when plants and animals that have evolved under one set of flood conditions find themselves facing a much different set. The photos and interviews reveal a nuanced portrait of changing ecological conditions and the consequences for the communities’ livelihoods.

CHANGES IN FISH CATCHES

Fish breeding in the Kafue is highly dependent on natural flooding patterns. The flooded grasslands are the spawning ground of many fish species and the submerged grasses shelter young fry from predators and provide a nutrient-rich food supply. However, when waters rise only during upstream dam releases, rather than from rainfall flowing from the uplands, this results in a different pattern of dispersal of the fish into the submerged grasses and is believed to affect spawning behavior and fry survival rates. 5

Rafael Zani, a fisherman and Photovoice participant, explained this consequence:

“When we have the floods from Itezhitezhi we have a poor catch of fish but when we have normal floods

as a result of the rains then we have good catch… When we have the normal floods from the upland here

the fish swim out of the river, following where the water comes from. …That is the normal situation

and causes the fish to breed, to come into the plain and breed….When the water is only coming

from Itezhitezhi…you will find the fish just swimming along the river and not coming in the plain.

—Rafael Zani, Fisherman, Kavuwa community, Maala

Other fish species breed in the mainstem river but are dependent on flooding to trigger spawning behaviors. Breeding triggers may not occur when the timing of floods differes from the pre-dam conditions to which the fish are adapted, or when there are

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multiple controlled flood events in a year.6 Additional threats arise from increased fishing and use of destructive fishing methods. Low water levels due to droughts or minimum flows can also make fish easier to catch, resulting in peak catches one year followed by reduced fish populations in subsequent years.4

To protect fish during the breeding season, there is a national “fish ban” in effect from December 1 to March 1 that makes it illegal to catch, buy, sell or even cook fish during this time. These rules impose extreme hardship on the fishing community as well as larger towns where fish are the staple diet, although insufficient enforcement of the ban somewhat mitigates the hardship. Nevertheless, the fishing ban represents a distinct low point in the food security of many families in the Flats since fish are a staple food and primary protein source for most households. It also represents the precariousness of the fishery, though whether that is due primarily to dam-induced hydrological changes or to increased fishing is yet unclear. 3

DIFFICULTIES FOR CATTLE

Cattle are a cultural touchstone for the local Ila people and a traditional source of much of their wealth. Cattle graze in upland areas during the rainy season and are driven onto the floodplain between late April and early June to graze on the nutritious grasses

“In the picture, we are only able to get a few fish, just two each.... At this time of year we expected to be able to catch enough to cater for everyone. When I compared the catch to what it used to be, those days before the Itezhitezhi dam, I was actually forced to wonder what had happened.”-- text and photo by Castellah Kaunda, Headman, Kavawu Fishing Community

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during the remaining months. If the floods come late, or are particularly deep, the floodplain can take longer to dry out sufficiently for grazing. There are costs to keeping cattle upland, including damage to neighbors’ crops, increased exposure to ticks, and reliance on inferior forage and limited water supplies. During the droughts of the mid-1980s and 1990s, cattle populations were decimated due to the tick-borne Corridor disease because there was insufficient flooding to flush ticks away. Since cattle are the primary means of transportation and ploughing as well as wealth accumulation, their loss reduced agricultural production and capital among communities in the Flats.

Although several Photovoice participants did not own cattle themselves, every single participant took pictures of cattle and spoke extensively about the importance of cattle to their family and the larger community. They stressed the reliance of the cattle, and by extension their own well-being, on the seasonally renewed grasses of the floodplain.

AGRICULTURAL SHIFTS

Maize and smaller garden crops are grown extensively in the upland areas, on the floodplain margin, and on selected higher sites in the floodplain such as the rivers’ natural levee. Floodplain soils are acknowledged to be the most fertile and thus the most desirable for planting. If dam operations create unexpected floods however, crops

“I have 197 head of cattle. They were still here when I took the photos, now they are in the plains. They are thin now due to the fl oods--there was a shortfall of green pasture to graze in the upland. When they go for grazingin the plains they are fatter. They are still going deeper in the plains, the grass is not stable yet, but in the deeper plains they will get good pasture.” -- text and photo by Oliver Ndombe, Cattle Farmer, Bambwe

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can get washed out, making crop production in the floodplain risky. “We just depend on

the garden. Veronica Mutafela says: “[I have] potato beds that were made before the floods, but they got washed away, leaving only the stringy plants. They were planted in March. It looked like it was receding, but it got flooded again. The flooding is not stable. You think it is finished and it comes back again.”

Floodplain agriculture may also be reduced from pre-dam levels because of differences in where the floods reach and how long they remain. Lowered high flows result in areas on the edges of the Flats that no longer get wetted, and the agricultural potential of those areas is lessened because there is less moisture and nutrients in the soil from floodwater, sediment deposition and floodplain grass decomposition. Invasive exotic shrubs and grasses gain dominance.3 At the same time, because of the need for a constant minimum flow for the downstream dam, the area that is kept flooded at the driest point of the year has increased fivefold so the plain is actually wetter in the dry season than it used to be,7 a point that many participants brought up in regards to the timing of access to parts of the floodplain by fishermen, farmers and cattle. By making some areas wetter and some areas too dry, dam operations have reduced floodplain food production, diminishing local people’s food security and nutrition, while increasing pressure on upland soils.

THE FUTURE OF FLATS IS (IN) FLUX

If the natural flux of the Flats can be restored through more sustainable dam operations, the Flats will continue to be a wealth of natural resources such as grazing and thatching grass, fish, and fertile soils. However, this wealth inevitably attracts in-migration, as people from other parts of Zambia as well as surrounding countries like Zimbabwe and Angola seek stable and productive places to live. Increasingly, stable economies are predicated on well-managed ecologies that can support development within reasonable bounds. If the Kafue Flats becomes overgrazed, overfished and overdeveloped, or if flows are not restored, it will not be able to support the populations who depend on it. These populations extend well outside the floodplain, as there is high dependence, even in Lusaka, on the fish, beef, and trade opportunities from the Flats.

Therefore, adjudicating common resources will also be increasingly important to managing the social, cultural, economic and ecological sustainability of the Flats. Currently most of the floodplain in considered a common resource, held by local chiefs. However, privatization of land in the Flats upland areas is growing. In addition, the Flats are threatened by heavy metal pollution from the upstream Copperbelt industries, as well as increasing water abstraction. The floodplain itself, a zone of vulnerability but

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also great natural wealth, will become an even greater source of uncertainty for local residents livelihoods, and regional trade networks if its role as a common resource is further threatened.

By viewing the Kafue Flats as a dynamic system, one of flux in flood duration and timing, as well as in population migration and sources of livelihoods, then a framework for managing resources and developing the region can begin to address the questions of what are acceptable levels of change within a dynamic envelope. While the Tripartite Agreement addresses changes in dam operations, increased communication with communities in the Flats about these changes is also necessary, as is a range of strategies about increasing food security8 and protecting the commons. A new way forward can be predicated on the assumption that the Flats are a varied and variable environment that will continue to be a place of great ecological and social flux, and one that can use those dynamic qualities as strengths and opportunities.

NOTES:

Many thanks to the Howland Travelling Fellowship, the UVA Landscape Architecture faculty, The Nature Conservancy Freshwater Program and WWF Zambia for making this research possible.

1. Photovoice is a methodology that elicits community members own voices and photographic vision about a given issue, in this case the impact of seasonal flooding patterns on their livelihoods. In July 2009 I worked with 26 participants in the Namwla area of the Kafue Flats. I am deeply grateful to them all and to Misheck Mapani, facilitator. For Photovoice methodology see Cunningham, T., N. Botchwey, R. Dillingham, V. Netshandama, J. Boissevan, K. Firehock, G. Learmonth, and G. Louis. 2009. Understanding Water Perceptions in Limpopo Province: A Photovoice Community Assessment. Environmental Pollution and Public Health, IEEE.

2. None of the participants homes had electricity; 8% of Namwla District households have electricity compared to 65% of Chililabombwe in the Copperbelt. 60% of the nation’s power is used by mines. World Meteorological Organization. 2007. Strategy for Flood Management for Kafue River Basin. Prepared for the Government of the Republic of Zambia, August 2007.

3. Schelle, P. and Pittock, J. 2005. Restoring the Kafue Flats: a partnership approach to environmental flows in Zambia. Paper presented at the Brisbane River Symposium, September 2005.

4. The July 2003 Tripartite Agreement was between the Zambian Ministry of Energy and Water Development (MEWD), ZESCO and the World Wildlife Fund. WorldFish. 2004. Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Fisheries of the Zambezi Basin. Livingstone, Zambia, 31 May - 2 June 2004.

5. Haller, T. and Merten, S. 2008. “We are Zambians—Don’t Tell Us How to Fish!” Institutional Change, Power Relations and Conflicts in the Kafue Flats Fisheries in Zambia. Human Ecology (2008) 36:699–715.

6. Ramsar Designation for Kafue Flats, 2007 Update. www.ramsar.org/ris/key_ris_index.htm.

7. Acreman, M. 2000. Managed flood releases from reservoirs: Issues and guidance. Contributing Paper. Thematic Review II.1: Dams, ecosystem functions and environmental restoration. World Commission on Dams, United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya.

8. DANIDA and WWF are working with MEWD and communities in the study area on food security, but more can always be done.

The experience of water is both intimate and public to an extreme; in today’s climate water is the ultimate determinant of our personal and cultural regime. One flooded room full of ruined possessions. An entire city weighed down by debt because of the cost of its sewer system, dikes, dams, or pumping stations. Some cultures plan complex investments and activities around controlling water. Others make flooding part of their public life and private rebuilding, if only because they frequently lose their bets about how much rain will fall. Our relationship to water reveals the limitations of our minds and bodies. We will either learn to invest in expensive public structures to mediate water flows, or bear the private costs of keeping our homes, transportation systems, and commercial sites workable when wet.

The next 20-50 years will bring new water shortages, floods and extreme storms. This is true both because of increased urbanization in coastal and arid areas as well as climate change trends. We’re living through the end of an era. For 8,000 years, our cities have developed in an age of very slow rates of sea level rise, and now we’re likely to see those rates accelerate. Between rising seas and more extreme storms, flooding is going to become either a much bigger investment to control, or a fact of life in almost all cities.

This dynamic is going to change not just cities, but also the design practices that engage and operate in urban space. We are broadly interested in dynamics as a driver of design aesthetics at the very moment when we must address flooding dynamics functionally. Will we be able to translate that broad interest into insights and innovations that matter urgently, or at least, matter to how we conceive of cities 100 years from now? Is this the moment for a transformation of urban design practices, with necessity as the mother of the new? Do we actually need anything new to deal with these flows, and if so, how will those new things and spaces coexist with much older, culturally significant types? Will we have to give up our biodiversity and social justice goals, because they become much less feasible in the next 100 years?

Imagine practicing the design of built space through the lens of what ecologists call “regime shifts”—i.e., changes in system states that take different forms on a time series graph: linear trends, step functions, steep curves (see fig. 1)– and which for many

ADAPTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE

KRISTINA HILLASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

2009 WOLTZ SYMPOSIUM

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city systems will not be smooth or gradual, but instead will introduce discontinuities. Think New Orleans. But apply its situation to Galveston, Houston, Miami, Savannah, Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston. Then add the places that will have inland flooding and droughts: Denver, Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Atlanta. Then add the west coast cities that will experience sea level rise with heavier El Nino rains: San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Finally, apply a drought to Portland and Seattle in the Northwest. And that’s just the US; how will designers respond to such rapid changes occurring in so many places at the same time? Isn’t it likely to change us and our priorities as well as the cities that we practice in?

This fall, Woltz Symposium participants discussed these issues in design through the framework of these key questions:

• What scale of infrastructure changes are needed, and where?

• Whose health and safety will be most vulnerable in the climate we can expect in 2050 and beyond, and what investments will protect our most vulnerable citizens?

• What multi-functional approaches might allow urban regions to make these investments and produce fundamental benefits to quality of life and robust urban economy?

• Are there any insights we can gain from these challenges about what it means to be human in our time?

Figure 1: Models of Regime ShiftsK. Hill, after Sheffer et al. 2009

Photo depicts a floodable park in Germany where gates are positioned to retain water in large storm events. Image courtesy of Martin Prominski.

FOUR CASE STUDIES: ROTTERDAM, HAMBURG, LONDON AND NEW ORLEANS

Rotterdam is Europe’s busiest port and has the world’s newest storm surge barrier. It took about 10 years to build, and wasn’t used for 10 years after that. Its purpose is to block storm surges from the North Sea, while river floods are allowed to pass between the city’s riverfront dikes. New urban districts are being built in the urban harbor on floating platforms where river waters will buoy them up even in floods. The harbor has moved to the edge of the sea at the river’s mouth along with an extension the rail system that supports distribution, in order to serve larger container ships. They’re planning for more than a 3-foot rise in sea level by 2100.

Hamburg is Europe’s second largest port. It has decided to keep its harbor in the city, in part because the city and the coast are in two different political jurisdictions. But decades of dredging have made the river bottom actually lower than the delta at the estuary’s mouth, so that tides rush in to the river like a storm surge and are elevated by dikes running the length of the river into the city that channel it like a firehose. They cope with a 20-foot storm surge once every year or two, and with daily tidal fluctuations of more than 10 feet. Everything in the new Harbor City district is outside the dikes, but instead of floating, the buildings have been designed to handle the flows of water with a 1st-story batter wall on top of the seawalls, emergency pedestrian catwalks and bridges elevated at least one story above the street, and garages with water-proof metal doors that hold cars when the streets are under water. Parks and streets are designed to be flooded, and public spaces include large wooden docks on pontoons that provide floating sun decks for recreation. But they’re not officially planning for a specific sea level rise or increased river flooding, and the open question is whether the Harbor City district can take that much flux.

London is planning what they call an “adaptive pathways” strategy for metropolitan-scale adaptations to increased flooding. They’ve mapped out a flowchart of interventions that increase in cost from top to bottom, and that can address sea level/flooding heights of up to 13 feet. The catch is that they plan to marshal the resources to implement these changes “just in time,” about a decade before they’ll be needed. This will require good climate predictions as well as a stable economy, since these interventions can easily take 10 years to implement and many of them will be very expensive. If the global finance markets tank, so will London’s capacity to pay for these adaptations.

New Orleans has a complicated story, but in the simples terms they are (1) rebuilding the levees to an inadequate safety standard (a category 3 hurricane, when scientists now see increases likely in the number of category 4 and 5 storms along the Gulf ); (2) re-building some homes 8-13 ft above the ground on piles in neighborhoods at risk of

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future flooding, and (3) continuing to require legally-mandated evacuations of people and their domestic animals. The future very likely will be a patchy mosaic of abandoned areas where flooding happens too often to rebuild, an island of tourist activity, and higher-ground residential areas. The very active port is already mostly offshore, using the Louisiana Offshore Oil Platform (LOOP) to do business with oil tankers.

Design of dynamic systems at the site scale requires us to imagine a typology of spatial strategies that describe a range of choices. This allows us to focus on what differences are most likely to produce different performance outcomes, rather than on differences that may be formally diverse but not significantly different in function. This kind of explicit resource is usually missing in the design process, although designers’ implicit models may influence their choices. The goal of ethical intervention requires an explicit comparison of risks to determine whether people who are already the most vulnerable are being asked to bear increased risk.

In addition to strategic typologies, designers need analytical tools that can describe a system’s current state and sensitivity to change, and – most importantly -- predict a likely future state based on changes in shape, size, number, or adjacent conditions influenced by design. These models are always conditioned by uncertainties, but they can generate a range of possible scenarios that designers can use to evaluate the potential and the risks of specific interventions.

Images from left: Rotterdam flood barrier, image courtesy of Piet Dircke; First-story flood zone in Hamburg, image courtesy of Antje Stokman; Thames barrier in London, photo by Andy Roberts; New Orleans barrier under construction, image courtesy of ARCADIS, NL.

PARODOXCITY: NEW ORLEANSJORG SIEWEKEASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

The ParadoxCity Studio began with a research interest in comparing the historic, geographic and geomorphologic analogies of Venice and New Orleans as two very different sinking former empires. Both cities emerged on impossible grounds in order to take advantage of their strategic location. They proved to be very successful in their time and rose to be the most important points of trade and commerce managing growth and affluence within their constrained water-bound environment. Both have lost the elaborate cultural techniques used to sustain and manage their fluid territory in modern times. Both heroic cities went from a state of stability and pride to a state of stagnation. Tourism sells the vanishing identity of these culturally rich cities. The decline of these cities can be attributed to their failure to recognize the dynamic character of their environment as both a constraint and a resource, and the more their cultural base falls away to stagnation, the more the cyclic and dynamic

VENICE, ITALY AND NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

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character of natural conditions threaten their very existence. With rise and fall as a basis for investigation, New Orleans is taken as a case study for the state of transition encompassing many delta cities.

Weeks after Katrina, when the water finally receded, it became obvious that the tragedy was not the inevitability of the storm, but the catastrophic miscalculation of the relationship between culture and nature. The positivistic belief that technology could establish and impose order over natural dynamics was severely questioned. How could a failure of this magnitude occur? In order to understand the inherent infrastructural shortcomings we first need to assess and understand the larger picture and put aside the immediate hurricane event. The future of the city will not be solved by patching and maintaining the present infrastructural layout, but by reconsidering the relationship of the city to its highly dynamic deltaic environment.

REAL-TIME GEOMORPHOLOGY

The city of New Orleans is built on the implausible foundation of Southern Louisiana’s quasi-fluid geological condition, comprised of a shifting delta fan and subsiding land. Built on limited higher ground, the crescent city is a product of the natural dynamic of the Mississippi River periodically overtopping its banks and depositing sediment.

The French conquerors learned about the geo-strategic location of the city from the Native Americans, who had been using the Bayou St. Johns as a portage to the banks of the Mississippi, thus circumventing the winding route of the river. In addition to serving as a source of transport, energy, fresh water and nutrients, the river also provided the very ground for the city, depositing sediment along its natural levees. The river was the natural infrastructure of the city; it supplied and spurred its commerce in all aspects of life.

New Orleans’ struggle can be understood as a signifier of modernist mal-adaptations that neglect the environment. The stand-or-fall binary of a flood wall subdues the forces of the vast deltaic landscape by introducing a single vertical line, representing the arrogance and misconception of a mechanistic attitude.

As a city trying to maintain a steady state in an environment that is characterized by cyclic and fluctuating natural processes, New Orleans today finds itself in a series of paradoxes:

1. The “levees only” policy undermines the natural dynamic of Mississippi; sediment is diverted to sustain the deltaic fan and is carried all the way into the Gulf of Mexico. The lack of sedimentation causes a series of problems - the most obvious of which is the erosion of the wetlands south and east of New Orleans that used to protect the city from storm surges from the gulf.

2. The more the river and lake are controlled, the more the occurrences of catastrophic flood events are likely to occur. If the Mississippi was not guided away from the Atchafalaya at the Old River Control Structure north of the city, New Orleans would no longer be on the river, but on a brackish bayou.

3. Every rational consideration suggests not to take the risk of rebuilding in low-lying areas subject to further rapid subsidence. On the other hand, a significant number of former residents express a strong sense of cultural and social identity in these areas, and demand return to their neighborhoods despite the risk. The rate of return for private properties in the lower middle class communities is high and the commitment to rebuild makes it politically impossible to suggest a rational approach of a reduced

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urban footprint. This paradox is reflected in the stagnation of long-term strategic planning approaches.

4. The Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) fights a war against the water that it cannot win. The harder they try to defeat natural dynamics, the more dramatic the failure of their control regimes are to become. The mind-set of combating and controlling nature is to be questioned. A larger pumping station cannot solve the long-term problem, but will only produce significant maintenance and operation costs. Even an occasional rain event requires the city’s pumping stations to run at full capacity for hours to prevent flooding. The switches for the electric motors that drive these pumps are located in the basement, where flood waters reaching the stations can cause power outages and decommission the pump. During Katrina, standing water prevented the pumps from working, leaving the city submerged for weeks. In addition, the subterranean water infrastructure represents a centralized system that undermines itself. Sixty percent of potable water is lost through leaks during delivery to households, unintentionally feeding the groundwater system below. While the city is an island in the water, one would seldom envision the water in the city.

REGIME OF CONTROL VS. REGIME OF NEGOTIATION

The concept of imposing order over a highly fluctuating environment has been rendered naive. The ACOE’s rhetoric of fighting a war against nature will obviously never be won. In his book Rising Tide1, John Barry lays out the different schools of thought in the history of the ACOE. Today the militant mind-set is only gradually returning to the earlier paradigm that seeks ways to collaborate and negotiate with the dynamics of the river in the delta. Constructed diversion projects allow the river to break through the levees and supply the delta with sediment and nutrients carried by the water again.

The poorly reflected late modernist strategy of responding to increasing flood risk with larger machinery and higher walls had to shift from flood protection to risk reduction. One of many paradoxical acknowledgments is the self-induced process of subsidence: the former swamp territories, already under sea level, are drained by pumping, which causes the soils to dry out and compact; the land subsides, and more pumping is necessary.

The retrofitted drainage basin itself suffers from a number of structural shortcomings that create inequality: A sloped and crooked ground creates disadvantage and leaves the underprivileged at high risk in the former back-swamp.

be able to continue raising their dikes higher when they face a sea front that extends over several hundred miles. This paradigm shift in flood protection turns away from the concept of rigid order and control to a different concept of negotiating the boundary between land and sea. The borderline becomes a border zone; defense and defeat becomes coexistence.

The city of New Orleans has engaged in a conversation with officials from the Netherlands on how to shift from a regime of control to one of working with the water. These Dutch Dialogues2 are an ongoing series of mutual exchange and workshops among Dutch and American specialists in flood protection and polder management. The Dutch Dialogues propose a critical reflection on management techniques, with an attempt to move on from best practice, to next practice.

THE PARADOXCITY STUDIO

The ParadoxCity Studio first investigates the cultural geography of the city. It strives for a comprehensive understanding of the managed urban landscape in its delta environment. The city’s history is interpreted as a series of trial and error attempts to keep up with the growing population, ill-fit in this geographic condition. Early measures were successful in adapting to the dynamic environment. The more the civilization imposed measures of static order and control over the natural dynamics, the more severe the consequences of failure of these technical systems became.

The early research of the studio was used to compose a matrix of diagrams and drawings that trace the history of the ideas that created interdependencies between the city and the delta. These explorations were driven by one investigative question: When did New Orleans become modern?

PARADIGM SHIFT: TRANSFORMING WITH INSTEAD OF AGAINST WATER

Southern Louisiana is now also reconsidering its flood protection concept, consulting the Dutch on their long tradition of polder management, as well as their newer techniques for managing a waterlogged territory. The Netherlands has on a long tradition of first claiming and then defending their land from the sea; large parts of the country are below sea level and have been effectively managed with dykes and polders. For this densely populated nation it has always been a necessity to establish a regime of order and control over nature. Making it a national effort, the Dutch have been very successful in doing so. With the ongoing process of sea level rise and land subsidence their water maintenance regimes are beginning to be questioned. The Dutch will not

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There are several strong relationships between modernization and the state of New Orleans as a Delta City. First, the invention of the Baldwin Wood’s screw pump allowed for the massive drainage and subsequent settlement of the back swamp (which eventually experienced the most severe flooding in Katrina). The advent of steamboats brought travel upstream, which shifted the role of the inland as a source and as a market. Lastly, the introduction of a modern sewage system allowed New Orleans to gain control over the mosquito habitat, “civilizing” the city. The complexity of these developments and their role in the evolution of New Orleans was explored in the Thaler exhibit (see photo below).

The studio also created a series of models to explore the history of the dramatically fluctuating relationship of the following three strata: the mucky ground and water landscape, representing the early “natural infrastructure,” the modernist technical infrastructure systems that try to gain control over these elements, and the urban fabric of settlement relying on these supporting layers. In radical abstraction of the entire city, a series of paired models represent the interdependence between these three layers. One represents a historic condition, the other a contemporary state (models below, and on page 173).

The conceptual framework of the studio prioritizes an understanding and reflection on existing processes, be they natural or man-made, in order to develop more resilient local infrastructure systems of elements that are capable of responding to the fluctuating environment. Landscape is therefore not understood as a given form or any fixed

configuration, but a highly dynamic framework. J.B Jackson’s prototypical definition of landscape is utilized: landscape is a space where processes of nature are deliberately sped up or slowed down..3

New strategies of negotiation that question the late-modernist measures of imposing order and control need to be explored. We have to acknowledge that the concept of gaining ultimate control over natural processes in the scale of the Mississippi and its Delta are shortsighted. The limited lifespan of any constructed technical infrastructure that fails to work along these dynamics will soon be outdated by the cyclic dynamic of natural forces. Resilient and adaptive infrastructural systems will embrace conditions that fluctuate between wet and dry, stable and dynamic, and will challenge the given conventions that envision infrastructure as centralized, robust and permanent.

The three ParadoxCity studio projects presented here introduce unique and specific interpretations of adaptive infrastructural systems that are resilient, responsive, and can be implemented in stages. These new public infrastructures are multi-purpose, and as integral parts of the urban realm they are accessible and create an amenity, rather than obstacles. They ease the load of the outdated centralized systems and take advantage to move along with the identified flux.

The Lafitte Corridor scheme, Social Space as Flexible Infrastructure, negotiates the boundary of an important inner city historic district by introducing a storm water matrix, that will generate a new address for residents and commerce within the community.

Strata models: historic and contemporary ground conditions of New Orleans - stitching represents layering of compaction, subsidence, and the imprint of infrastructure on the ground overtime

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The Orleans Outfall Canal project, The Big Leak, fundamentally blurs the boundary between infrastructure and adjacent surface and program of the urbanized landscape. It comments on the shortcoming of all leaking systems and suggests leaking as a per formative quality that is translated into gradient of perforated constructed surfaces.

The Lower 9th Ward Proposal, From Sewage to Swamp, takes into account the fundamentally changed density of return and rebuilding in this neighborhood. It also accounts for the built-in inequality of the sloped polder. The proposal suggests a decentralized constructed wetland that takes advantage of the available land and the sloped condition to convey the water to a new productive back swamp.

NOTES

1. Barry, John. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (New York: Touchstone, 1998).

2. Morris, Dale (Ed.) Dutch Dialogues: New Orleans, Netherlands. (Amsterdam: SUN Architecture, 2009).

A professional network initiated by David Waggonner, New Orleans Architect.

3. Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. (New Haven: Yale University, 1984).

The former industrial corridor is transformed into an urban stormwa-ter park-whose boundaries respond to the rhythms and flows of the adja-cent neighborhoods.

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AFTER THE STORM:

ELIZABETH BAILEYMLA 2011

SOCIAL SPACE AS FLEXIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE

Located in an abandoned railyard within New Orleans’ Lafitte corridor, the site is an in-between, a non-space, a vague terrain, neither a part of the surrounding neighborhoods nor able to sustain the role it once held for the economic and social vitality of the city. As it currently exists, it is seemingly void and lifeless. The project attempts to give new meaning to this liminal space, re-envisioning the role of a former industrial corridor as an urban stormwater park.

This project identifies three types of flux as a means for identifying a site within the context of a larger city, negotiating boundaries and edges to develop a design strategy that responds to the cultural, social, political and ecological pasts and future of this new urban space. The MidCity Stormwater Park illustrates that social space can function as flexible infrastructure, providing an alternative to the traditional and taxed water infrastructure systems of the city of New Orleans.

Wetlands in the interior of the park flood and retain stormwater during high rainfall - and, when the water recedes, reveal paths and spaces for inhabitation.

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RESURGENCE IN NEW ORLEANS: A PARADOXCITY

Water in New Orleans is a paradox, both sustaining and potentially destroying the city in one fell swoop. Historically, the city’s hydraulic endeavors have attempted to subjugate the natural flows of water in this deltaic plain, using huge infrastructural feats to combat the threat of flood. Many of the social, economic, and infrastructural challenges that the MidCity neighborhood faces are tied to the city’s struggle to keep New Orleans afloat. The pumping of ground and storm water in New Orleans has lead not only to ground subsidence but continues to be a significant economic drain on the city. With these challenges in mind, there is an opportunity to rethink the city’s current drainage infrastructure and to focus on the cultural and functional aspects of water in MidCity, the Lafitte Corridor and New Orleans as a whole.

The Lafitte corridor is traditionally defined as the site of the former Carondelet Canal and the Norfolk Southern rail line, extending three miles from the edge of the French Quarter to the Lakeview neighborhood bordering Lake Ponchartrain. In its heyday, the Lafitte Corridor was one of the earliest locations in the New Orleans community where residents could experience public and private outdoor space created for recreation and leisure. Unfortunately, today, the Lafitte Corridor is nothing more than an underutilized post-industrial site. While the corridor was largely derelict far before the complications of Hurricane Katrina revealed the shortcomings of the city’s infrastructure systems, the adjacent neighborhoods have maintained, if not responded remarkably well, to the surrounding challenges. In fact, the post-Katrina return rates for the MidCity neighborhood total about 70% which is significantly higher than most New Orleans neighborhoods.

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The park is defined, not by a single boundary, but instead by a series of overlapping boundaries and thresholds, from underutilized railroads corridors to vacant properties.

AN INVESTIGATION INTO EDGES AND BOUNDARIES

In this proposal, the MidCity Stormwater Park would alleviate pressure on the existing drainage system by day-lighting the drainage canal that runs from the French Quarter along Lafitte Street at North Jefferson Davis Parkway. Allowing the Park to serve as the primary drainage system, the current system would be maintained to serve as backup during large storm events. The Park would create a network of “urban wetlands” that would allow for flooding during times of high water volume. Creating a floodable landscape in MidCity could contribute to an overall strategy for the city to manage stormwater and subsidence by establishing a more permeable landscape.

Addressing the issue of water as one of both cultural and functional importance, the MidCity Stormwater Park revitalizes an existing and underutilized public space by re-establishing the economic and cultural importance of the land and water. Obliging social space to double as flexible infrastructure, the park engages the surrounding communities with the water that defines their city, and by doing so blurs the boundaries that currently separates them from each other.

A CHOREOGRAPHY OF SPACE AND FLOW

This new social infrastructure sets forth a dynamic spatial framework that will grow and morph. By engaging this liminal space, matrices of circulation, seasonality, habitat and social patterning begin to overlap. This is a prescriptive and responsive flux, a choreography of space and flow that becomes a strategy for fostering positive urban growth and a new landscape identity.

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MidCity Stormwater Park responds to type and location of boundaries, engaging neighborhoods (bottom) and providing intermediary public space between the park’s edge and the interior wetlands (top).

The Big Leak addresses the Crescent City’s land subsidence issue, proposing an adaptable stormwater conveyance system that modulates the ground in order to allow for varying infiltration conditions. New Orlean’s existing stormwater conveyance network primarily consists of underground pipes, canals and culverts, and its primary purpose is to remove stormwater from the system as quickly as possible. Leaks in the stormwater management infrastructure causes the removal of groundwater from the water table, resulting in further land subsidence. Parametric design applications were used to create a series of abstract models of the ground condition that were responsive to variable water flows. These models represent the ground as an urban grid of columns; as the desired range of ground porosity increased, the columns decrease in 3-dimensions. The resulting form describes a structural gradient that creates low, porous areas for canals, and high, dense areas along the natural levees. The porous ground model was used to propose a series of abstract constructs that act as an exfiltration infrastructure for strategically recharging NOLA’s water table.

THE BIG LEAK

DAVID WOODENMLA 2011

ADAPTIVE METHODS FOR RECHARGING NOLA’S GROUNDWATER

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Proposed storm water conveyance systems responding to adjacent site conditions.

The proposed drainage system responds to specific site conditions by using a series of water conveyance forms.

SITE OCCUPANCY

The abstract models also provided insight into the construction of the ground. In this case the paving system extends into the ground to provide columnar support and reduce soil compaction.

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ABOVE-GROUND CONDITION

A porous, above-ground stormwater conveyance system allows for infiltration of water into the water table. Performance parameters influenced the form of the physical construction. Aperture size, material and fills of the construct were adjusted based on the conditions and performance requirements of a particular site.

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v

SITE-SPECIFIC GENERATORS

The parametrically derived forms emerge from the ground, creating inhabitable spaces. Additional parameters can be applied to the infrastructure to make it responsive to above-ground conditions, like sun and wind.

The residents of the Lower Ninth Ward face a number of hurdles in their efforts to reform a cohesive neighborhood landscape. The entire region and city are grappling with long-term issues of wetland loss, associated loss of protective buffering, a lack of sediment accretion (causing subsidence) and the resulting deterioration of the metropolitan sewerage system. As part of their general risk management measures, the Sewerage and Water Board is currently experimenting with using treated sewage to decrease salinity in the Central Wetland Unit and aid in swamp restoration.

FROM SEWAGE TO SWAMPCREATING MARSHWAYS IN THE LOWER NINTH WARD

ANDREA PARKER MLA 2011 JULIA PRICE MLA 2011

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lower ninth ward

cypress triangle

mississippi river

FROM SEWAGE TO SWAMPCREATING MARSHWAYS IN THE LOWER NINTH WARD

PRIMARY TREATMENT TERTIARY TREATMENTSECONDARY TREATMENT

02C02

H20

H20

S03

NO

30 tons/day

incineration

particulates

landfill

East Bank Sewage Treatment Plant

Dravo Treatment Plant

Munster Treatment Plant

Riverbend Oxidation Pond

West Bank Sewage Treatment Plant

CURRENT CITY INITIATIVE: THE WETLAND ASSIMILATION PLAN

barscreens removal

grit pure oxygen activatedclarification disinfectionsludge system

A centralized facility releases treated wastewater effluent into cypress triangle to decrease salinity + restore swamp.

There is an additional opportunity to expand this initiative further through greater decentralization, thereby decreasing pressure on the sewage system and producing even cleaner effluent for swamp restoration, while simultaneously accreting sediment, nutrients, and recharging groundwater levels. This decentralized system could be the foundation of a new neighborhood form that recalls the historic landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward.

compost farm

• treat wastewater in neighborhood wetlands

• accrete sediment + nutrients within the flood wall

• release effluent into the cypress triangle for swamp restoration

FROM SEWERS TO SWAMP PROPOSAL:

NEIGHBORHOOD TREATMENT + WETLAND ASSIMILATION

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ninth ward marshways

florida avenuecypress triangle

tertiary treatment & stormwater detention

UV filtration & disinfection

secondary treatment subterranean wetlands

primary treatment settlement tanks

stormwater collection & detention

A comprehensive system of subsurface treatment wetlands anchor existing housing and form a new community porch and pedestrian network. This helps to establish a neighborhood identity for existing residents while the neighborhood is still returning. New residents can hook into existing wetlands and provide for incremental growth of the system.

LOWER NINTH MARSHWAYSSECONDARY TREATMENT + NEIGHBORHOOD FORM

homes marshway

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lower ninth ward

destroyed houses rebuilt houses

homes

caption here Em senatusum he-bunti, ilin vitam adhuium pularion ta, sessiliam lariverumena

lower ninth ward

florida ave bayouhomes

cypress triangle

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T1_TITLE: EXTENDED TITLE

The sewage effluent, after UV filtration, drains with collected stormwater to the Florida Avenue Bayou constructed within the floodwall. This bayou provides groundwater infiltration, detention, and a recreational amenity that connects to the Cypress Triangle swamp restoration. The Florida Avenue Bayou prefigures the protective swamp outside the floodwall and restores the community connection to the swamp.

FLORIDA AVE BAYOUTERTIARY TREATMENT + STORMWATER DETENTION PARK

cypress trianglefloodwall

The term ‘lunch’ is an informal derivation of the word luncheon. The colloquialism of the term coupled with some “talk of you and me” speaks to the core intention of this collection. Lunch is inspired by chance; by chance discussions that grow from a meal in a shared setting and by chance discussions that alter or challenge views of the space and place we inhabit. Lunch provides for the meeting of diverse voices in common place tended by a casual atmosphere. To lunch suggests an escape from the day’s work; perhaps even a break.

Kevin Bell, M.Arch 2006

Matthew Ibarra, M.Arch 2006

Ryan Moody, M.Arch 2007

lunch 5: flux

Documents

landscape architecture

disciplines of architecture

volume of lunch

university of virginia

lunch possible

urban flow

charlottesville va

wonderful copy editors