Download Rising Currents, Moma Project, NY , 2009

Rising Currents, Moma Project, NY , 2009
“The global rise in sea levels—which is predicted to reach levels of transformation that will affect not only the contours of
continents and islands, but also billions of people in heavily populated areas—is currently underway. There is hardly a day in
which we don’t read about aspects of global warming and its consequences, both in terms of the new topography of the seas
and unpredictable weather phenomena—one can’t yet say “patterns”—that seem to be emerging everywhere. The problems
are likely to be the most severe in the global south, where the overwhelming majority of the world’s cities with over ten million
inhabitants lie, and where an overwhelming percentage of the world’s poor and at-risk populations live. Yet even in the
northern part of the world, the opening of year-round channels around the polar cap is changing patterns of trade, opening up
potential new geopolitical rivalries, displacing populations, and endangering indigenous species.”
Starting from Guy Nordenson’s studies on Palm Bay, the project tried to change New York bay image and form.
The challenge wanted to do that to fight against rising sea levels and water storm, against climate change. Five
potential areas were chosen and assigned to five different teams. The studios tried to imagine a new New York city
and new ways to design its coasts. The areas chosen are coastlines of New Jersey, Statue island, Brooklyn and
lower Manhattan.
The main goal is to make the city more resilient to climate change.
“The goal is not to imagine what is economically viable, but to create proposals so compelling that they cannot be ignored as
the future unfolds”
We have to use green design to protect local waterways from storm-water runoff and use innovative design for
parks and open spaces, in order to create a defense and spaces for human activities at the same time. The Rising
Currents exhibition provides us with a model of how the innovative use of both structural and non-structural
elements can help us withstand the impacts of climate change while making the city more sustainable. It also
emphasizes the need to involve a wide variety of disciplines, experts, and stakeholders in developing resilience
strategies to ensure that all possibilities are
explored. They wanted to introduce, in our city
idea, the green flexible principle: green spaces
in which men, animals, water and land are
mixed to create now spaces for the city.
As told before, there were five zones and five
team that worked on them.
Zone 0 Comprised of the lower Manhattan
landscape. New Urban Ground (Adam Yarinsky
and Stephen Cassell + Susannah Drake) works
to reinvent arguably one of the most well known
landscapes. They designed a scenario in which
all the coasts and main streets around the area
were transformed in green way and spaces:
streets made by porous concrete and
engineered soil with salt tolerant plants while
the coasts were divided in a porous system of
green defense composed by several green
spaces in the sea.
Zone 1 Water Proving Ground by Paul Lewis,
Marc Tsurumaki and David J. Lewis) said that if
zone 1 was left alone, it will be underwater in
the future. The area involved Staten parks, Ellis
island and statue of Liberty that had to be
prevent from disappearing. The studio decide to
modified the coasts increasing the length of
coasts perimeter from 5 miles to 45 miles
designing “four fingers” that extend into the
harbor. They designed an hybrid land-seascape
that tried to keep land and water in contact.
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Zone 2 Working Waterline (Matthew Baird)
included the oil tank farm of Bayonne. The
project used the 600 oil tanks to create bio-fuel
from algae fed by wastewater. Elevated paths
allows persons and vehicles to use the area and
the team was focused on reef-building units:
jacks, a modular form made of discarded glass.
The main idea was to create a leisure place
where this new artificial reef have to be in the
future a place for marine animals and a clean
green area.
Zone 3 Aqueous City (Eric Bunge and Mimi
Hoang) was the largest and most varied. An
archipelago of man-made islands lines the
coast of Staten Island and Brooklyn. These
islands not only filtered the storm waves, but
will be programmed with specific functions to
accommodate the expected spike in the
population. The proposal included numerous
routes for bio-gas powered ferry services that
will bring people to piers that extend from the
coasts. The team developed a new housing idea
that flips the house upside down so the floors
will be farther away from water.
Zone 4: Oyster-Tecture (Kate Orff) contained
the controversial zone – the polluted canal.
The team proposed to nurture the already
active revitalization of a long lost natural oyster
reef. The oyster reed was constructed from
nets of woven “fuzzy rope” that supports oyster
growth. The reef will clean millions of gallons of
harbour water and by attenuating waters,
protect the adjacent shore line. Dubbed
“Oyster-tecture,” the series of oyster nurseries,
combined with the underwater rope scaffolding
for reefs, would generate a new public
landscape for the New York Harbor and enable
a new cleaner water-based Gowanus
community to take shape in the inland zone.
In my opinion this is a good example of a planning in which architects were able to design a beautiful image of
future NY city integrated with a sustainable development idea. Maybe not all these projects are cheap to be built or
started but they give us an idea of which could be a sustainable future without losing our city. They are able to mix
green, leisure, housing and infrastructured spaces without creating segregation between these elements; they are
all integrated and interconnected.
I can find a lot of my sustainable development ideas in this project. First of all the idea of designing places where
artificial spaces and natural elements are mixed to create new spaces. They worked a lot on open spaces and they
tried to change the ordinary image of a public space. In the projects a park or a house were integrated with
everything and, of course, with nature. At the same time they didn’t put green everywhere but they used different
strategies to create resilient spaces. There are also long-term projects and short-term projects, they have mixed
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projects that could start from tomorrow and works that need a lot of time and money to be done. They understood
that people need to see results in order to start thinking in a different way.
A weakness of this project is that none of these projects will be built but at the same time, people could see how
we can change the future of our cities, how imagining a resilient city, how being greener.
Of course this type of projects can show us how to change our environment in order to adapt to climate change. It
started from an analysis of our environment and then five teams tried to find a solution in which we can develop the
NY bay and at the same time protect ourselves from nature disasters.
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