POLAR ICE IS MELTING, warmer water is expanding, and coastal cities—confronted with projections of eroded coastlines and ever more frequent flooding—are grappling with the looming question of how to keep the water out. As early as 2004, researchers at Stony Brook University in New York were proposing the construction of three floodgates to protect New York Harbor. Sited at the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, at the upper end of the East River, and in the tidal strait between New Jersey and Staten Island, these defensive barriers would hem in the New York metropolitan area in the event of high water. While similar structures (such as the Delta Works in the Netherlands and the Thames Barrier in London) have proved effective in other coastal sites and are in development worldwide, the failure of New Orleans’s levees during Hurricane Katrina betrayed the potential hazards of this kind of single-solution infrastructure. Engineer Guy Nordenson, landscape architect Catherine Seavitt, and architect Adam Yarinsky of Architecture Research Office (ARO) describe these large-scale defensive works as “hard” infrastructure. Countering this approach, they have proposed a series of “soft” infra- structural interventions for New York Bay that would absorb storm surges into a newly permeable city fabric. The restoration of tidal wetlands, the construction of artificial islands and reefs, and the erection of breakwater towers and detached piers could, they argue, create a tiered buffer zone that would diminish the height and force of storm waves while recalibrating the city’s relationship to its ecological context.
“Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” a residency and exhibition organized by curator Barry Bergdoll, in consultation with Nordenson, for the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York, presents a series of design proposals drawing on Nordenson, Seavitt, and Yarinsky’s research. Reinventing itself as a temporary laboratory for urban research, MoMA PS1 invited five interdisciplinary teams of architects, engineers, landscape architects, artists, and ecologists, led by principals from New York–area design offices, to partake in a two-month residency at the Queens space. There, they were charged with developing soft infrastructural solutions to rising sea levels at distinct locations in the bay. The resulting schemes are now on view at MoMA. Confounding the usual distinction between buildable and speculative projects, these proposals defer neither to building codes nor to the libidinal impulses of science fiction. Rather, they hover somewhere between a near-microscopic interest in scientific fact and an expansive view of architecture’s role in shaping the social landscape. The scale of the projects, the frequent invocation of modular forms, and the incorporation of design contingency suggest an affinity with the megastructure designs of the Metabolist group, a postwar Japanese movement that conceived of vastly scaled urban frameworks—comparing city functions to cellular processes, imagining and (more rarely) building capsule towers and marine cities, and following such mantras as “Land for man to live; sea for machine to function.” Like the Metabolist proposals, the sometimes fantastic schemes for New York’s harbor draw on biological models. Here, however, rather than using biological processes as metaphors for the aggregation of architectural elements into urban forms, the teams directly engage these organic processes as variables for design.
“Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” a residency and exhibition organized by curator Barry Bergdoll, in consultation with Nordenson, for the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York, presents a series of design proposals drawing on Nordenson, Seavitt, and Yarinsky’s research. Reinventing itself as a temporary laboratory for urban research, MoMA PS1 invited five interdisciplinary teams of architects, engineers, landscape architects, artists, and ecologists, led by principals from New York–area design offices, to partake in a two-month residency at the Queens space. There, they were charged with developing soft infrastructural solutions to rising sea levels at distinct locations in the bay. The resulting schemes are now on view at MoMA. Confounding the usual distinction between buildable and speculative projects, these proposals defer neither to building codes nor to the libidinal impulses of science fiction. Rather, they hover somewhere between a near-microscopic interest in scientific fact and an expansive view of architecture’s role in shaping the social landscape. The scale of the projects, the frequent invocation of modular forms, and the incorporation of design contingency suggest an affinity with the megastructure designs of the Metabolist group, a postwar Japanese movement that conceived of vastly scaled urban frameworks—comparing city functions to cellular processes, imagining and (more rarely) building capsule towers and marine cities, and following such mantras as “Land for man to live; sea for machine to function.” Like the Metabolist proposals, the sometimes fantastic schemes for New York’s harbor draw on biological models. Here, however, rather than using biological processes as metaphors for the aggregation of architectural elements into urban forms, the teams directly engage these organic processes as variables for design.
In a video interview for her team’s proposal, appropriately titled “Oyster-Tecture,” landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE describes a desire to “harness the biological processes and the biological power of the oyster itself.” The proposal envisions the improvement of harbor water quality and the attenuation of storm waves through the reintroduction of oyster beds. While the project seeks the restoration of native ecologies, the sustained manipulation of an already disrupted natural system also depends on sympathetic social forms and on new technical and formal vocabularies. Orff and her team take a cue from Brooklyn’s urban farming movement to imagine an expansive system of curving synthetic-rope nets, anchored to piles and locally seeded by enterprising aquaculturists. Similarly, the team led by architect Matthew Baird makes use of natural systems, offering tumbled clumps of recycled-glass “jacks” that, dumped into the waters of Bayonne, New Jersey, would slowly form crystal- line reefs as a buffer against storm surges. Waste glass becomes aquatic habitat, counterintuitively aligning ecological growth with urban consumption. Revitalizing neglected industry at its site, the team even evinces an interest in cellular processes: the cultivation, in disused oil tankers, of single-celled algae for biofuel production. ARO and dlandstudio’s team fashions traditional infrastructure as both an ecological apparatus and a landscape feature: They propose the excavation of downtown roadbeds to produce a permeable system of “both hard and soft elements” that would admit seawater into the underbelly of the city. Porous paving would allow for drainage into an enormous subterranean sponge and encourage resilient plant life to colonize the streets’ surfaces. A “mega- infrastructure,” the design nonetheless avoids the highly visible fetishization of infrastructural elements—the sweeping highways, soaring bridges, tangled pipelines, and expansive space frames—so characteristic of historic megastructural proposals. The basis of New York’s urban development, the street grid, is here almost invisibly integrated with the region’s natural systems.
Foregrounding the precarious boundary between city and sea, between the built and the natural landscape, the proposals by LTL Architects and nArchitects depict the city itself in a state of flux. LTL, leading a redevelopment of Liberty State Park in New Jersey, designed not so much around as with the tidal variation at the site to create an “amphibious landscape” that could engage rising water levels “opportunistically.” Public spaces and walkways appear and disappear with the tides, giving way to expanding spaces of aquatic recreation. Likewise, the nArchitects scheme plots water transportation routes between Brooklyn and Staten Island and to multiple points throughout the bay—posing the body of water as a newly dynamic urban space. Housing blocks suspended from structural roofs extend into the water, overlooking floating green space that rises and falls with the sea. Public space shaped by natural rhythms reorients the city from the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan to the open space of the bay: an “active waterline” (on multiple registers), in the punning parlance of nArchitects.
The municipal value of natural foundations, and in particular the status of cities’ waterways, has been an issue of political significance since at least the sixteenth century, when debates around hydraulics and architecture played a pivotal role in the urban development of Renaissance Venice. In an era of economic decline, the Venetian lagoon was threatened both ecologically, from excessive silting and the construction of embankments by private landholders, and symbolically, as maritime trade began to wane with the opening of Atlantic routes to the east. Two opposing plans for the simultaneous transformation and preservation of the lagoon emerged. The first, championed by hydrologist Cristoforo Sabbadino, was primarily a “soft” intervention: the dredging of canals to accommodate an influx of seawater and the diversion of rivers to curb the accumulation of silt. The second, envisioned by the architectural patron Alvise Cornaro, was both symbolic and “hard”: the erection of a fortified seawall around the islands of Venice and the construction of two classical monuments in the Bacino di San Marco, the body of water fronting the Piazza San Marco. The former attempted to restore the lagoon to a previous natural state, yet did not preclude the organic expansion of the city fabric. The latter exulted in the monumental refashioning of the city and, importantly, the reorientation of the city’s symbolic center from the land of San Marco to the water of the Bacino.
Appropriately, Nordenson had initially proposed that an eighteenth-century veduta by Canaletto, dominated by the watery expanse of the Bacino, be hung at the exhibition’s entrance. Nordenson envisioned New York Bay, like the Bacino in Cornaro’s proposal, becoming a center for a newly expanded metropolitan region. While Cornaro’s recentered Venice would symbolically extend to the farmlands of the Veneto, the region addressed by “Rising Currents” includes parts of New Jersey and Staten Island, South Brooklyn and Governor’s Island, and only a fragment of Lower Manhattan. Yet none of the proposals in “Rising Currents” takes up Cornaro’s hard strategies of defensive barriers and iconic buildings as means to enforce an image of the city. Suggesting that the static monument is no longer an adequate mode of urban representation, these schemes recognize the displacement of the city center through dispersed infrastructural supplements and itinerant landscapes. Sabbadino and Cornaro appear conflated here: Ecology assumes the qualities of the monumental.
A pervasive rhetoric of design optimism and of “working with nature” runs through the “Rising Currents” proposals. But the same romanticism that engenders an idealized conception of nature also imparts a legacy of nature as annihilating irrationality. In 1999, the architect Lebbeus Woods envisioned the damming of the Hudson and the East rivers (and, presumably, the bay’s outlets to the Atlantic) and a dramatic drop in the basin of New York Harbor. In a provocative drawing, Lower Manhattan, supported on a towering base of bedrock, becomes an impermeable cliff facing Brooklyn and the harbor. It is an exaggeration of the proposals to build floodgates against surges. Manhattan itself becomes a monolithic wall. The drawing represents an inversion of the strategies embraced in “Rising Currents.” Yet both endeavors point to the newfound subjugation of architecture to nature in the shaping of the urban landscape. Despite the details of the towering barriers in Woods’s drawing, which suggest engineering by human hands, the effect is of a natural disaster—the seismic uplift of Manhattan from its geologic context. A monumental and “hard” infrastructural project becomes indistinguishable from the sublime terrors of untamed nature.
Though “Rising Currents” rallies environmental alarmism in order to dispel it through architectural optimism, something of Woods’s darker vision, of an architecture assimilated to the catastrophic side of nature, remains. The disaster these projects anticipate—climate change—is, of course, man-made: Rising sea levels are among the effects of a nature now swayed by technological intervention. As the proposals in “Rising Currents” attest, the built environment has become inseparable from the natural landscape and its processes, while natural cycles are themselves subject to an array of anthropogenic factors. Designing with nature is also the conquest of nature by design.
“Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Oct. 11.
Michael Wang is based in New York and works between the fields of art and architecture.
