Umbral
In collaboration with Emily Drury.
This project* confronts the highly optimized culture and politics of climate denial.
Resistance is embedded in the critical occupation of a new zone: the indeterminate urban edge. We recognize the feedback loop between industrialization, urbanization, and the infill of South Boston, across the last century, and the current conditions of sea level rise. As the product of harbor infill, our site did not exist 100 years ago; now the reverse process has begun as the harbor reclaims the land. The next hundred years of the Anthropocene present an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between ocean and city. The haptic, experimental and cumulative embodied experience of this specific effect of climate change constitutes a new urban zeitgeist.
According to projected scenarios for the Boston Harbor area, sea level will rise 6 ft by 2100 and up to 11 ft in the occurrence of a major storm. This condition defines a specific area of land along the coast starting with today’s water edge, a line in constant state of flux during a one century period.
Inspired by examples of progressive educational groups or institutions with short life spans but significant legacies such as Fruitlands (1843), Bauhaus (1919-1933), Black Mountain College (1933-1957), Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (1967-1970) and New Alchemy Institute (1969-1991), this project is an educational institution that works in, with, by, and for the landscape it occupies aware of its own impermanence.
In collaboration with Emily Drury.
This project* confronts the highly optimized culture and politics of climate denial.
Resistance is embedded in the critical occupation of a new zone: the indeterminate urban edge. We recognize the feedback loop between industrialization, urbanization, and the infill of South Boston, across the last century, and the current conditions of sea level rise. As the product of harbor infill, our site did not exist 100 years ago; now the reverse process has begun as the harbor reclaims the land. The next hundred years of the Anthropocene present an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between ocean and city. The haptic, experimental and cumulative embodied experience of this specific effect of climate change constitutes a new urban zeitgeist.
According to projected scenarios for the Boston Harbor area, sea level will rise 6 ft by 2100 and up to 11 ft in the occurrence of a major storm. This condition defines a specific area of land along the coast starting with today’s water edge, a line in constant state of flux during a one century period.
Inspired by examples of progressive educational groups or institutions with short life spans but significant legacies such as Fruitlands (1843), Bauhaus (1919-1933), Black Mountain College (1933-1957), Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (1967-1970) and New Alchemy Institute (1969-1991), this project is an educational institution that works in, with, by, and for the landscape it occupies aware of its own impermanence.
The forested site goes through a process of thinning through time wich generates an array of spatial conditions and present opportunities for occupation and programs to evolve. As the landscape (topography, water levels, plant and animal species) shifts, the seven kilometer long steel structure is continously occupied and vacated by humans and vegetation answering to economic, political, social and cultural climates. Wooden units are built from the forests and plugged into the structure from the utility and circulation cores outward.
This project speculates around the different domesticities that would occur.
*Developed in the studio “The Adaptive City: Constructing Urbanity Through Shifting Landscapes” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was advised by Fionn Byrne.
*Developed in the studio “The Adaptive City: Constructing Urbanity Through Shifting Landscapes” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was advised by Fionn Byrne.
2016 | Design
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![Plan and section in year 2016]()
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![Plan and section in year 2116]()
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