One of the more spectacular engineering accomplishments of the United States in the late nineteenth century was the reversal of the Chicago River. Through the construction of a series of canals — most notably, the Chicago Sanitary and Shipping Canal, seen under construction in 1896 above — the river was made to flow not into Lake Michigan, as it did when Europeans arrived in Illinois, but away from Lake Michigan and towards the Mississippi, which it had not done since the area was covered by the prehistoric glacial Lake Chicago. As Scott Huler explains in On the Grid, this was done because of fecal matter: ”…the outfalls of the sewers made such a mess of Lake Michigan that during large rainstorms the plume of tainted water flowed all the way out to the intake for the water system”, contaminating the city’s water supply.

[The images above are from the Field Museum Library's Urban Landscapes of Illinois collection on Flickr.]

There is widespread agreement that the rapid loss of coastal wetlands is one of the most negative consequences of the channelization of the Mississippi River for flood control and commercial navigation.  (After Richard Campanella, we can call this the dysfunction of the land-making machine.)  The Mississippi no longer carries as much sediment as it once did (increased erosion due to agriculture, deforestation, and urbanization in the Mississippi River Basin are collectively more than offset by the siltation produced by dams), and much of what sediment it does carry is now shot so rapidly out the Birdfoot into the Gulf that it is unable to coalesce into new land. Overbank flooding, which once carried freshwater and sediment into the wetlands adjacent to the course of the river, no longer occurs. Consequently, the delta, which once grew so rapidly, has been shrinking for most of the 20th century and all of the 21st —  somewhere around a football field of land erodes every forty-five minutes¹.

Just as the Army Corps has a stated interest in preserving a specific moment in the hydrological distribution of the Mississippi River through the Old River Control Structure, it also has a significant — though less fully realized — interest in preserving a specific historical moment in the evolution of the soggy land of the delta, as the delta is valuable both ecologically (roughly a third of the nation’s coastal wetlands are in Louisiana) and economically (fish and wildlife harvests, protection from storm surge, sites for both infrastructure and buildings).  Hurricane Katrina, of course, both highlighted the increased vulnerability of human settlements to the sea as the wetlands that once buffered those settlements are lost, and accelerated that loss by washing sandbars and barrier islands away.

[Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion]

[Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion]

The first effort that the Army Corps made to slow the loss of the delta was the planning and construction of three “freshwater diversion structures”: Caernavon, Davis Pond, and Bonnet Carre.  Caernavon (1991) is downstream from New Orleans, Davis Pond (2002) is upstream, and, when it is built, Bonnet Carre (planned) will be upstream (at the site of the Bonnet Carre Spillway).  These structures do not directly restore the function of the land-making machine — they do not carry sediment — but they do funnel freshwater into the marshes, “re-establishing favorable salinity conditions” for both wildlife and the brackish marsh vegetation which helps establish and maintain deltaic land.  In halting and reversing the process of salt water intrusion at Caernavon (which has been exacerbated by the canals cut into the delta in the pursuit of resource extraction), for instance, the Corps has achieved a net annual increase of 15 acres.

This was a substantial achievement; but it is hardly sufficient to restore the function of the land-making machine.  Hurricane Katrina, for example, destroyed 26,176 acres of wetland in the Caernavon project area — it would take nearly two millennia for the freshwater diversion structure to restore those lost acres.

[Army Corps of Engineers photographs of the construction of the West Bay Sediment Diversion, a project in the Mississippi River Delta near Head of Passes; while the Sediment Diversion itself is intended to build land by capturing water and sediment from the main stem of the Mississippi, the process of constructing the channel for the Diversion required dredging, and no good land builder ever misses an opportunity to use free dredge.  The photos above, then, show how the dredge generated by the digging of the Diversion channel was used to construct more than 200 acres of new wetlands.  (It's not worth explaining the details here, but it is worth noting that the West Bay Sediment Diversion is scheduled to be closed, because it has interfered with shipping without producing as significant a clear benefit as had been expected.  The politics of land-making are difficult.)]

In response to this scalar mismatch, the Corps is utilizing two primary additional tactics: dredging and directly placing sediment in key locations (as in the Bayou Dupont Sediment Delivery System, the Barataria Basin Land Bridge, or even the construction process of the West Bay Sediment Diversion shown above), and testing a new kind of diversion structure, which will divert ten times as much water as the original diversion structures².  A fascinating article by T. Edward Nickens at Popular Mechanics describes the design and engineering of this new diversion structure, called the Myrtle Grove Water and Sediment Diversion Structure; the design process relied on both physical modeling — a “24 x 28–foot small-scale physical model [that] replicates the river’s final 84 miles through 3526 square miles of wetlands and estuary” — and advanced hydrological and sedimentary simulations run by the computers of the Waterways Experiment Station.  Here, Nickens describes the operation of the physical model and the process of gathering experimental data in the river itself:

When [LSU engineering professor  Clinton] Willson turns up the river, particles begin to vibrate, then roll along the bottom. Other particles race downstream in inky blue plumes and screw-like helixes. Choreographing this dance is critical to designing systems that capture the maximum amount of suspended clays, sands and silts. At what flow rate do sand grains experience “liftoff” from the river bottom? When does saltation—the bouncing, leaping movement of individual grains that bump into one another to create a cascade of sediment flow—begin? “We’re dealing with a multitude of intricacies,” [project geologist Brian] Vosburg says.

He could be referring to the complex model, or to the complicated process of getting dirt out of a real ­river. Capturing sediment isn’t as simple as unplugging a levee. Only at river-flow levels above approximately 600,000 cfs, a volume that can occur any time of year, do the heavier, coarser sands that are best for building new land rise to the upper strata of the river, where they can be siphoned off through the diversion and channeled to the marsh.

To calculate how much sediment might be available at Myrtle Grove, engineers deploy an ingenious array of monitoring technologies. Ship-based multibeam bathymetry paints a picture of gigantic underwater dunes rippling along the riverbed. Side-scan sonar maps the relative hardness of the bottom; a device using LISST (laser in-situ scattering and transmisso­metry) technology measures sediment volume. An Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler produces detailed imagery of water velocity, direction and magnitude in cross sections of the riverbed and reveals patterns of sediments. “We are literally and technically listening to the river and letting it tell us where the resources are,” Vosburg says.

Restoring the land-making machine, in other words, requires an experimental landscape architecture.

[The "Barataria Basin Finite Element Grid", from morphological studies of the effects of the proposed Myrtle Grove diversion.  (The small bulge in the upper north-west corner of the image is Davis Pond.)  Image by Moffat & Nichol and the Office of Coastal Protection and Restoration.]

[One of the potential configurations of the Myrtle Grove diversion, from an Army Corps of Engineers study.]

Whether this landscape architecture will involve landscape architects, of course, is an entirely separate question.  Mammoth would argue that it can and should, of course, that these kinds of projects would benefit from being guided by both the specialized expertise of the engineer and the generalist sensibilities of the landscape architect, as they require both a rigorous understanding of the forces being invoked and they trace a transect across a hopelessly broad swath of issues, from competing land (and water) use claims to conflicting visions of nature; but for this to happen, there will need to be an internal shift in both how landscape architects understand the discipline, and an external shift in how their skills are utilized.

Old River Control sits at the northern end of the Atchafalaya River; at the southern end, in the brackish waters of Atchafalaya Bay, a similarly massive wall of concrete protects a port: the Morgan City Floodwall.

[The Morgan City Floodwall on 20 May 2011, via the Times-Picayune.]

[The floodwall on a drier day; photograph by flickr user milepost36.]

Like the river ports of the Mississippi, Morgan City exists because of the confluence of hydrology and industry: first oysters and shipping, then laden with sawmills as the center of America’s cypress industry when the big old-growth cypresses of the Atchafalaya swamp were logged, later shrimp harvesting, and, finally, oil.  (Even the city’s name reflects this history: it was named after Charles Morgan, a nineteenth-century New York shipper, who moved his Louisiana business to the nascent port — then known as Brashear City — to escape both growing competition and increasingly expensive fees in New Orleans.  He brought both rail lines and steamboat lines to the city, and the intersection of those lines with the Atchafalaya River rapidly produced prosperity in the city.)

[Map from a 1982 Army Corps of Engineers report, showing the position of the Eastern and Western Guide Levees.  The approximate extent of the Morgan City Floodwall is shown in red.]

[The Floodwall from above, via Bing Maps.]

When the Morganza Spillway was opened this past May, releasing Mississippi floodwaters into the Atchafalaya Basin, those waters were eventually headed for Morgan City, channeled by the two great levees of the Atchafalaya Basin, the Eastern Guide Levee and the Western Guide Levee.  The Morgan City Floodwall is a small dash along the line of the Eastern Guide Levee, twenty-two feet of concrete interrupting the generally monotonous earthen character of the levee, an interruption whose bulk imagines, as John McPhee says, water — “a sheet of water at least twenty feet thick between Morgan City and the horizon”.

[The Auxiliary Structure at Old River Control; photographed by the Army Corps of Engineers, Team New Orleans.

Various circumstances have conspired to keep me from finishing the Floods series last week like I had hoped; there are still a few posts yet to come, and several of them will be part of this mini-series within a series, on the Atchafalaya Basin Project.  That project could, I think, be fairly described as the single most significant component of the entire Mississippi River flood control complex.  In truth, this is an interrupted series, which properly begins with a series of Atchafalaya-related posts from June: 1973, morganza floodway, and red river landing.  I'm going to try to avoid repeating things already explained in those posts, so if it feels like you're missing something, you might check there.  If it still feels like you're missing something, that's probably just me writing poorly.]

[Old River Control and Old River Lock, via the Army Corps of Engineers' "Old River Hydraulic Sediment Response Model Study".]

Old River is probably the most tense site of conflict between human engineering and the wild geomorphological tendencies of water in the United States, as it is here that the Army Corps fights the desire of the Mississippi River to switch its course into the Atchafalaya River and burn a faster, steeper path to the Gulf.  Between 1890 and 1950, the Atchafalaya captured an ever increasing volume of water from the Mississippi — ten percent in 1890, twenty in 1920, thirty in 1950.  This is because the Atchafalaya is roughly half the length of the Mississippi (measured from their point of convergence at Old River), and so it presents twice as steep a gradient.  There is nothing unusual about the desire of the Mississippi to shift courses; since sea levels stabilized after the end of the last glacial period, it has done so roughly every thousand years, spraying sediment around the Gulf to form Southern Louisiana.  In the time that the Mississippi has been on its present main course, though, it has been intensely urbanized — in 1950, New Orleans alone had over half a million citizens — and permitting it to shift has become unthinkable.

Consequently, the Army Corps of Engineers was ordered to freeze, for apparent perpetuity, the proportional flow of the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi, as they existed in 1950: thirty percent down the Atchafalaya, seventy percent down the Mississippi¹.

Old River Control is the primary product of that order: one hydroelectric plant — ancillary to the primary purpose of the structure — and two sills, massive weirs for regulating the flow of the river.  The higher sill is the Auxiliary Control Structure; it was completed in 1986, and is elevated above the normal level of the river, so that it serves as an additional release during extreme flood conditions.  The Low Sill, the primary component of Old River Control, was finished in 1963: eleven gates, each forty-four feet wide, on a weir nearly six hundred feet long.

[The Auxiliary Control Structure.]

[The Low Sill.]

[Old River Lock, which permits navigation between the Mississippi, Red, and Atchafalaya Rivers, via Old River.  These three images are via Bing Maps and to the same scale.]

The primary impetus for the construction of the Auxiliary Control Structure was an extraordinary event during the infrastructure-straining flood of 1973, which nearly destroyed the Low Sill — and almost set the Mississippi free down the course of the Atchafalaya.  John McPhee’s classic narrative of the struggle between the Army Corps of Engineers and these two rivers, “Atchafalaya”, tells the story of that event.  It may seem like I am quoting at extreme length — I suppose that I am — but the full piece is much, much longer, and well-worth reserving a few hours to read.  At any rate, “Atchafalaya”:

“In mid-March [1973], when the volume began to approach that amount, curiosity got the best of Raphael G. Kazmann, author of a book called “Modern Hydrology” and professor of civil engineering at Louisiana State University. Kazmann got into his car, crossed the Mississippi on the high bridge at Baton Rouge, and made his way north to Old River. He parked, got out, and began to walk the structure. An extremely low percentage of its five hundred and sixty-six feet eradicated his curiosity. “That whole miserable structure was vibrating,” he recalled in 1986, adding that he had felt as if he were standing on a platform at a small rural train station when “a fully loaded freight goes through.” Kazmann opted not to wait for the caboose. “I thought, This thing weighs two hundred thousand tons. When two hundred thousand tons vibrates like this, this is no place for R. G. Kazmann. I got into my car, turned around, and got the hell out of there. I was just a professor—and, thank God, not responsible.”

…Nowhere in the Mississippi Valley were velocities greater than in this one place, where the waters made their hydraulic jump, plunging over what Kazmann describes as “concrete falls” into the regime of the Atchafalaya. The structure and its stilling basin had been configured to dissipate energy—but not nearly so much energy. The excess force was attacking the environment of the structure. A large eddy had formed. Unbeknownst to anyone, its swirling power was excavating sediments by the inflow apron of the structure. Even larger holes had formed under the apron itself. Unfortunately, the main force of the Mississippi was crashing against the south side of the inflow channel, producing unplanned turbulence. The control structure had been set up near the outside of a bend of the river, and closer to the Mississippi than many engineers thought wise.

On the outflow side—where the water fell to the level of the Atchafalaya—a hole had developed that was larger and deeper than a football stadium, and with much the same shape. It was hidden, of course, far beneath the chop of wild water. The Corps had long since been compelled to leave all eleven gates wide open, in order to reduce to the greatest extent possible the force that was shaking the structure, and so there was no alternative to aggravating the effects on the bed of the channel. In addition to the structure’s weight, what was holding it in place was a millipede of stilts—steel H-beams that reached down at various angles, as pilings, ninety feet through sands and silts, through clayey peats and organic mucks. There never was a question of anchoring such a fortress in rock. The shallowest rock was seven thousand feet straight down. In three places below the structure, sheet steel went into the substrate like fins; but the integrity of the structure depended essentially on the H-beams, and vehicular traffic continued to cross it en route to San Luis Rey.

Then, as now, LeRoy Dugas was the person whose hand controlled Old River Control—a thought that makes him smile. “We couldn’t afford to close any of the gates,” he remarked to me one day at Old River. “Too much water was passing through the structure. Water picked up riprap off the bottom in front, and rammed it through to the tail bed.” The riprap included derrick stones, and each stone weighed seven tons. On the level of the road deck, the vibrations increased. The operator of a moving crane let the crane move without him and waited for it at the end of the structure. Dugie continued, “You could get on the structure with your automobile and open the door and it would close the door.” The crisis recalled the magnitude of “the ’27 high water,” when Dugie was a baby. Up the valley somewhere, during the ’27 high water, was a railroad bridge with a train sitting on it loaded with coal. The train had been put there because its weight might help keep the bridge in place, but the bridge, vibrating in the floodwater, produced so much friction that the coal in the gondolas caught fire. Soon the bridge, the train, and the glowing coal fell into the water.

One April evening in 1973—at the height of the flood—a fisherman walked onto the structure. There is, after all, order in the universe, and some things take precedence over impending disasters. On the inflow side, facing the Mississippi, the structure was bracketed by a pair of guide walls that reached out like curving arms to bring in the water. Close by the guide wall at the south end was the swirling eddy, which by now had become a whirlpool. There was other motion as well—or so it seemed. The fisherman went to find Dugas, in his command post at the north end of the structure, and told him the guide wall had moved. Dugie told the fisherman he was seeing things. The fisherman nodded affirmatively.

When Dugie himself went to look at the guide wall, he looked at it for the last time. “It was slipping into the river, into the inflow channel.” Slowly it dipped, sank, broke. Its foundations were gone. There was nothing below it but water. Professor Kazmann likes to say that this was when the Corps became “scared green.” Whatever the engineers may have felt, as soon as the water began to recede they set about learning the dimensions of the damage. The structure was obviously undermined, but how much so, and where? What was solid, what was not? What was directly below the gates and the roadway? With a diamond drill, in a central position, they bored the first of many holes in the structure. When they had penetrated to basal levels, they lowered a television camera into the hole. They saw fish.

…

The damage at Old River was increased but not initiated by the 1973 flood. The invasive scouring of the channel bed and the undermining of the control structure may actually have begun in 1963, as soon as the structure opened. In years that followed, loose barges now and again slammed against the gates, stuck there for months, blocked the flow, enhanced the hydraulic jump, and no doubt contributed to the scouring. Scour holes formed on both sides of the control structure, and expanded steadily. If they had met in 1973, they might have brought the structure down.

After the waters quieted and the concrete had been penetrated by exploratory diamond drills, Old River Control at once became, and has since remained, the civil-works project of highest national priority for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Through the surface of Louisiana 15, the road that traverses the structure, more holes were drilled, with diameters the size of dinner plates, and grout was inserted in the cavities below, like fillings in a row of molars. The grout was cement and bentonite. The drilling and filling went on for months. There was no alternative to leaving gates open and giving up control. Stress on the structure was lowest with the gates open. Turbulence in the channel was commensurately higher. The greater turbulence allowed tho water on the Atchafalaya side to dig deeper and increase its advantage over the Mississippi side. As the Corps has reported, “The percentage of Mississippi River flow being diverted through the structure in the absence of control was steadily increasing.” That could not be helped.

After three and a half years, control was to some extent restored, but the extent was limited. In the words of the Corps, “The partial foundation undermining which occurred in 1973 inflicted permanent damage to the foundation of the low sill control structure. Emergency foundation repair, in the form of rock riprap and cement grout, was performed to safeguard the structure from a potential total failure. The foundation under approximately fifty per cent of the structure was drastically and irrevocably changed.” The structure had been built to function with a maximum difference of thirty-seven feet between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya sides. That maximum now had to be lowered to twenty-two feet—a diminution that brought forth the humor in the phrase “Old River Control.” Robert Fairless, a New Orleans District engineer who has long been a part of the Old River story, once told me that “things were touch and go for some months in 1973” and the situation was precarious still. “At a head greater than twenty-two feet, there’s danger of losing the whole thing,” he said. “If loose barges were to be pulled into the front of the structure where they would block the flow, the head would build up, and there’d be nothing we could do about it.”

Read the full piece in the New Yorker’s archive; it can also be found in one of McPhee’s books, The Control of Nature.

I’ve already talked a fair about the idea that the Mississippi River is, at this point in its history, an artificially-constructed system that should be understood as a hybrid of infrastructural and natural forces.   So far, though, I’ve explained this primarily in macroscope terms, such as by noting that the flow rates of the river are artificially bounded and increased, or that the position and magnitude of flood events are produced by a confluence of natural forces, politics, and engineering — the river overlaid by ”a diagram with… persistent instrumental effect”, in Brett Milligan’s apt description.

[Zooming in further on Atchafalaya and Mississippi revetments.]

The Mississippi, though, is also materially artificial, to a degree that may be quite surprising and, frankly, intensely weird.  The entire lower reach of the Mississippi has undergone the process of “channel stabilization”, which includes dredging (to improve navigability and maintain consistent channel depth), building dikes, providing cutoffs (artificially dug straight paths for the river which anthropogenically accelerate the production of oxbow lakes), and, most importantly for the alteration of the river as a channel of sedimentary material, the construction of “revetments” on the majority of the river’s banks¹.

[Revetment mapping, close-up.  The extent of the material application of the concrete mats -- the sheer scale of the transformation of the Mississippi from a soft system in perpetual erosive motion to a semi-hard system, locked in place -- can be felt in the completeness of the trace of the river's form.]

[Constructing the Goldbottom revetment in Mississippi, 1964; images via the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.]

[Lowering a revetment onto the "subaqueous stream bank" near Memphis, Tennessee; via the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.]

[A finished revetment in Kentucky; via the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.]

The revetments seek to freeze a specific temporal and spatial moment in channel migration for apparent perpetuity, encasing soft earth in hardened cement and aggregate; they are most often placed on the outside banks of bends in the river, where the erosive action of riverwater is concentrated.  (In alluvial flood plains, like the Mississippi’s, rivers are ever migrating (meandering) towards their outside bends, producing “cut banks”, while depositing material on their inside edges, producing “point bars”.)

In Mississippi River channel stabilization, these revetments are most typically constructed out of “articulated concrete mattresses”, vast mats of interlocked concrete blocks which are laid onto banks by special “launching barges”.

[The "Mat Sinking Unit", in operation, Fall 2010.]

The Army Corps of Engineers describes the operations of the “Mat Sinking Unit”, the Vicksburg District’s mat launching barge:

“Each autumn the Mat Sinking Unit, with over 350 employees, begins several months of work on the Mississippi River for the annual construction program of establishing permanent locations for the constantly moving river banks using flexible concrete blankets. The designers allow the river to eat away at the banks until they arrive at the desired position and at that point, they are fixed in place…

Mat sinking is not an 8-to-5 job, but rather, seasonal work conducted during the traditional low water months of August, September, October and November. When the workers leave Vicksburg on the quarter boats, compared by some to a large, floating hotel, their work season consists of 10-hour shifts for 12 consecutive days with two days off. This mat sinking operation is a unique river operation and is the only one of its kind in the world.

The articulated concrete mattress (mat) arrives on location by barge from one of the mat-casting fields along the river in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. A fleet of 50 mat supply barges, some loaded and on location and some empty and awaiting loading by the mat-loading crew at the casting field, are towed up and down the river by Corps or contract boats.

On location, the mooring barge and spar barge are perpendicular to the shore and the work barge (mat boat) is parallel to shore and tied off to the mooring barge. The work boat positions a supply barge to be tied off to the back of the mat boat and the mat-laying operation is ready to begin.

The four overhead cranes move the 16-block sections of mat from the supply barge across to the mat boat where workers, using a pneumatic “mat-tying” tools, wire the sections together and connect to 3/8-inch launching cables running from the mat boat to the bank. The 4- by 25-foot sections (squares) are tied together with 35 other squares to form one launch. A typical blanket of mat will consist of from 12 to 24 launches. Each supply barge holds 585 squares of mat, consisting of 950 tons of concrete.

In order to get the mat anchored firmly on the bank, anchors are driven in the ground. The crew will hook the mat cables to dozers (tractors) waiting on shore that serve at temporary anchors. The mat boat will then move away from the bank launching the concrete mattress in the process. The mat boat can move riverward [along the] mooring barge and then spar barges are utilized to allow the mat boat to continue out for the remainder of the channel mat length. The entire plant moves upstream… and begins the first launch of a new channel mat.”

[The St. Francisville Casting Fields, via Bing Maps.]

The blocks for these articulated mattresses are cast at several locations along the Mississippi River, such as the Army Corps’ St. Francisville Casting Fields, an obscure facility in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, composed of a dock (where the barges are loaded) and the 210-acre casting field, from which the Army Corps accomplishes the exceptionally bizarre task of creating and exporting artificial banks for America’s greatest river, in a fascinatingly quick and hard anthropogenic twist on the processes of sedimentation which slowly form natural river banks.  A couple more of these fields of future river bottoms, which are spread throughout Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, can be found on the Mississippi Floods map.

[A dike field in the Mississippi River near Greenfield, Mississippi; via bing maps.]

In the Mississippi River, dike fields are constructed in order to direct the river’s flow to a central channel, scouring it and reducing the need for dredging.  Though their primary purpose is to thus maintain navigability for shipping, dike fields tend, as a side-effect, to produce useful habitat, through both the creation of low-velocity zones (‘dike field pools’) within the river (various fish and invertebrate species favor different river velocities at different points in their life cycles) and through sedimentation behind the dikes — the sandbars thus produced are often of great value for waterfowl.

Mississippi River blogger Quinta Scott describes one particularly fascinating dike field incident, an Army Corps re-design of a dike field near St. Louis, which had succeeded in producing a sand-bar, but a sand-bar which was dry and lacking the associated side-channels which birds and fish favor:

“Using an aerial photograph, the engineers built a scale model of the dike field and studied various alternatives for scouring new side channels along the east bankline and creating aquatic depth and diversity for fishes, creating an island between the side channel and the navigation channel, and creating a reliable navigation channel next to the island. They tried raising the dikes; widening and narrowing the notches dike; increasing and decreasing the number of notches in each dike; increasing and decreasing the height of the notches over the Low Water Reference Plane; subtracting and adding dikes to the field and adding dikes to the opposite bank.

They tested each new configuration. Would it create a self-sustaining side channel? Would it create a high elevation island within the dike field? Would it increase the depth of the navigation channel? Of the fourteen configurations they tested, three filled the bill. One created a good side channel, but a small dike in the field would interfere with barge fleeting. A second created a good navigation channel, but the side channel would be too shallow. The third worked. The small dike was removed and therefore did not interfere with barge fleeting, but the notches created a continuous side channel between five and ten feet deep at low water for fish and a nicely isolated, 190-acre island for the terns.”

This is experimental landscape architecture, testing various infrastructural hacks through the construction and modification of physical models.  (Yet another example of why the Army Corps is — despite the bureaucratic language it cloaks its practice in — such a radical landscape organization.)  A bit more of this sort of experimentation with fluid and granular dynamics — and a bit less second-rate aping of mediocre parametricism — might be quite good for the profession.

[Fort Peck Lake (top), Spillway (middle) and Dam (above), in northeast Montana; built between 1933 and 1940, Fort Peck is the world's largest "hydraulically-filled" dam, which means that it was constructed by dredging suspended sediment from borrow pits and pumping it to discharge pipes at the dam site, where it settles onto the embankment.  (This method of construction is rarely used today, as it can be extremely unreliable; in fact, the Fort Peck Dam suffered a major failure during construction, in 1938.)  The lake the dam creates is the fifth-largest in the United States, and has a coastline longer than that of California's Pacific coast.  Currently, the dam is releasing water at around 65,000 cubic feet per second -- nearly double its previous highest release volume.]

As I mentioned back in May, massive snowpack in the Rockies is melting to produce volumes of water that will continue to push unprecedented levels of runoff through the river systems that drain the western United States throughout the summer.  Burdened by this snowmelt, the six reservoirs of the Upper Missouri — Fort Peck Lake, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case, and Lewis and Clarke Lake – are exceptionally full, and the Army Corps of Engineers has decided it must release unprecedented volumes of water from those reservoirs for the remainder of the summer.

[Lake Sakakawea (top) and Garrison Dam (above), in western North Dakota.  Sakakawea is the nation's third-largest artificial lake, while Garrison Dam is, like Fort Peck Dam, a massive earthen embankment.  In the image above, two features deserve comment: the spillway, which is on the lower-right side of the dam, and the Garrison Dam National Fish Hatchery, which supplies some 10 million fish annually, including salmon, trout, and the pallid sturgeon, to rivers and lakes in North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, South Dakota, and Montana.  Being downriver from Fort Peck, Garrison Dam sees a greater volume of flow, and so is releasing around 150,000 cubic feet per second, nearly three times what Fort Peck is releasing (and, coincidentally, also nearly three times its previous record release).]

Like the Mississippi River, which it feeds into near St. Louis, the Missouri River is a complex, hybridized infra-natural system.  The riparian ecology of the Missouri’s floodplain has been almost entirely eradicated, as forest cover dropped from a high of 73% in 1826, to a mere 13% in 1972; in many places, this represents a mere single row of trees along each bank.  The historic diversity of ecosystems — “a ribbon of islands, chutes, oxbow lakes, backwaters, marshes, grasslands, and forests” –  has been replaced largely with the incredibly productive agricultural plots which appear as pixelation in the satellite images above and below.  Though the destruction of arable land by sediments deposited during and erosion caused by the great floods of 1993 and 1995 has led to a trend towards the purchase and re-naturalization of floodplain land, the general condition remains agricultural rather than riparian.  The river’s tendency to meander has been nearly eliminated, and the river has been confined “to a narrow floodplain approximately ten percent of its original width, [eliminating] side channels, quiet pools, isolated backwaters… and associated wetlands”.

The river itself has been massively altered, as well.  “Nearly one-third of the Missouri River has been impounded, another one-third channelized, and the hydrologic cycle… has been altered on the remainder”.  The river’s traditional cycle of ebb and flow — of both water volumes, which used to peak twice a year, in spring and early summer, and sediment levels (the river’s nickname was once “the Big Muddy”) have been interrupted by the presence of that impoundment and channelization.  (The river carries approximately a third to a fourth of its original sediment load.)  With erosion and deposition disrupted, the channel has degraded, as the river cannot cut side to side, and so cuts deep into its own bed; in achieving an equilibrium of flow — flattening the peaks and valleys of water flow in order to dampen flooding and combat drought — the dynamic equilibrium of sediment has been lost, and between the loss of shallow habitats (as the main channel deepens, its capacity to feed shallow bottoms around the main channel is reduced) and the alteration of hydrological conditions (temperature, seasonal flow variations, etc.), the river’s stocks of native fish have been devastated.

[Lake Oahe (top) and Oahe Dam (bottom).  Even as artificial lakes on the upper Missouri go, Lake Oahe is an exceptionally long and thin lake, stretching around 231 miles from just south of Bismarck, North Dakota to Pierre in central South Dakota.  Like most (all?) of the dams on the upper Missouri, Oahe Dam is pair with a major hydroelectric plant; the Oahe Plant sends power to Nebraska, Minnesota, Montana and North and South Dakota.]

Like the Misssissippi River, the infrastructural components of that system were constructed, are maintained, and are operated by the Army Corps of Engineers.  But where the Mississippi falls under the authority of the Mississippi Valley Division, the Missouri — despite the connectedness of the two rivers, which form a single continent-spanning watershed — is watched over by the Northwestern Division, whose purview stretches from the mouth of the Columbia on the Pacific, across the Rockies, and east along the Missouri.  Within the Division, two districts have specific responsibility for the Missouri: the Omaha District, which is responsible for the upper river (from Montana, including both of the Dakotas, and through Nebraska and Iowa), and the Kansas City District, which is responsible for the lower Missouri.

The six dams and reservoirs on the upper Missouri (and thus in the Omaha District) together comprise the largest system of reservoirs in the United States.  The first of these, Fort Peck Dam and Lake, was constructed by the Public Works Administration during the Great Depression. The other five — all downstream from Fort Peck — were constructed under the “Pick-Sloan plan”.  While the Army Corps began removing snags from the river in the 1820′s to improve navigability, and received funding from Congress beginning in 1881 for various projects on the Missouri, including dikes and piers to divert the river’s flow, clearing snags, and a permanent six-foot channel from Sioux City to St. Louis, it was the Pick-Sloan plan, approved in 1944, which initiated the modern era of Missouri River infrastructure.  The plan authorized over a hundred reservoirs within the Missouri basin, “but its cardinal feature was the integrated multi-purpose plan for five additional main stem dams”, “giant mounds of compacted earth [forming] a series of reservoirs with a storage capacity of more than 74 million acre-feet and a surface area of over one million acres”.

[Lake Sharpe (top) and Big Bend Dam (above); like the other four main stem dams, Big Bend is currently releasing over 150,000 cubic feet of water per second.  Big Bend was also the last of the six major dams to be completed.]

While we now know that the construction of this infra-natural system has had a host of negative consequences (specifically, the ecological and geomorphological consequences outlined above), it was proposed and built in response to very real problems, and its success in addressing those problems should not be minimized.  As World War Two raged, planners considering the future of the Missouri basin confronted multiple challenges: frequent flooding endangered lives and destroyed valuable crops; at other times, severe droughts could be just as destructive — if not more so — to agriculture, making the livelihoods of farmers in the basin precarious; and farmers were rapidly leaving farms for urban areas, a trend that was accelerated by the movement of populations in response to wartime economies.  New Deal Democrats were determined that returning soldiers not come home to depressed economies and historically-low crop prices, as they had at the end of World War One.  Flooding in 1943 emphasized the urgency of these needs, and General Lewis Pick — the Missouri River Division Engineer — and Glenn Sloan, of the Bureau of Reclamation, proposed a pair of plans which was soon combined into a single initiative that bore their names.  Construction of the main stem dams began in 1947, with Garrison Dam, and finished in 1966, with the completion of the power plant complex at Big Bend Dam.  The plan had four aims: flood control, navigation, irrigation, and hydropower; and if it was not an unqualified success (it was not), it certainly produced clear benefits in each of these areas.

[Lake Francis Case (top) and Fort Randall Dam (above); note that Big Bend Dam is visible at the northwestern terminus of Lake Francis Case, as the lake stretches contiguously from one dam to the next.]

Today, the operations of the Army Corps of Engineers are coordinated with the Fish and Wildlife Service, as the ecosystem services provided by the river have been assigned increasing value, in a program known as the “Missouri River Recovery Program”.  The program has several major components: the creation of new shallow water habitat (the current aim is between 20 and 30 acres for every river mile by 2020); “mechanically building and maintaining” new and existing sandbars; and planting new bottomland forest, primarily cottonwoods.  The restoration sites are located between Sioux City and St. Louis, which means that these landscape operations are confined to the lower Mississippi.  The primary change on the upper Mississippi — where the dams are — has been not a constructed transformation of the riverine landscape, but, rather, an essentially operative change.  This change is the “Spring Pulse” program, in which reservoir waters are released in March and May to mimic the historic annual flows, improving both sediment transport and the quality of the river as habitat for native species.

[Lewis and Clark Lake (top) and Gavins Point Dam (above); note that something of the meandering, shallow historical character of the Missouri is visible at the western end of the lake.]

I’ve said elsewhere that I think the Army Corps is an exceptionally peculiar organization, probably the country’s most radically avant-garde landscape practice, but rarely recognized for that, as it is the scale, agency, and organizational intricacy of the Corps’ work, not its formal properties, which render it so radical.  A project like Hargreaves’ Guadeloupe River Park (rightly) receives attention for reconsidering the “paradigms of modern flood control” — but the Corps both constructed those paradigms and is currently deconstructing them, at the scale of not a single urban park, but the entire Missouri River Basin.  Who else is doing organization work on this kind of scale?  And what is the Spring Pulse, if not an infrastructural hack?

[Sources for this post include "Big Dam Era", an Army Corps publication on the history of Missouri River infrastructures; "Sharing the Challenge", a report by the "Interagency Floodplain Management Review Committee" recommending reactions to the Missouri and upper Mississippi floods in 1993; and materials from the Missouri River Recovery Program.  Quotes not specifically attributed to other sources are taken from these publications.  Another thing that is worth mentioning: I haven't gone into them, but there are a host of issues related to the rights of Native populations in the basin, both historical -- Native populations were displaced during the construction of the main stem dams -- and contemporary, particularly concerning water rights.  Finally, all satellite imagery via Google Maps, unless otherwise noted.]

The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture.   But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an exciting decade for architecture, despite the crashing, the burning, and the erupting into flames.

The unfortunate thing about year-end lists is that they often devolve into self-congratulatory displays of one’s good taste.  With that in mind, allow us to state at the outset that the purpose of this list is not to preen the superiority of our taste (we’re well aware that the critics who pen those boring lists have visited far more of the relevant architecture constructed this decade than we have), but rather to share a handful of the reasons that we’re genuinely excited about the future of architecture, and to hopefully engender a bit of that excitement in a reader or two.  To that end, the items on this list have been selected to represent some of the most hopeful trends which impinge upon the territory of architecture (and, occasionally, landscape architecture, as the constant and intentional conflation of the two disciplines which is a mammoth trademark continues).  You’ll discover that our criticism of boring lists consists primarily in their being confined to (a) buildings and (b) things built by architects, though our list includes both buildings and things built by architects.

In fact, “favorite” might be a better way to describe this list than “best”, but we’ve stuck with “best” because it’s more fun, as you can’t argue about “favorites”.  With those disclaimers out of the way (and hopefully conveniently forgotten), in no particular order, mammoth‘s best architecture of the decade:

ORANGE COUNTY’S GROUNDWATER REPLENISHMENT SYSTEM
[Image of the reverse osmosis cylinders, which remove "viruses, salts, pesticides and most organic chemicals" from water being treated by Orange County's wastewater reclamation plant, via Wired's photo gallery]

With apologies to Matt Jones, whose piece for io9, “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future”, spawned great conversation last year, you might say that the Groundwater Replenishment System is a small step towards a new way of thinking about urban hydrology: the city is a stillsuit for surviving the drought.  Intended to halt the traditional mass flush of urban effluent and wastewater into the ocean, Orange County’s latest addition to its wastewater infrastructure is “the world’s largest, most modern reclamation plant”, capable of turning “70 million gallons of treated sewage into drinking water every day”, according to the LA Times.

This capability, a staggeringly futuristic feat of engineering and technology, has unfortunately been derided as “toilet-to-tap” by opponents of wastewater reclamation, who fear the contamination of drinking water supplies.  As a result of this short-sighted political opposition, the plant’s treated water is injected into the bedrock beneath the county, counteracting saltwater intrusion and replenishing underground reservoirs, rather than forming a closed loop of water use and reuse, but the potential for that closed loop is there, and there’s no doubt that the closing of water use loops will become an increasingly central infrastructural tactic for municipalities and governments facing decreased water supplies and rainfall in the coming decade.  Closed water loops may even become as integral and expected a part of architecture as air conditioning is today (as a recent article in Landscape Architecture said, in what I thought was an unexpectedly beautiful phrase: “buildings are the new aquifers”); until then, we have the Groundwater Replenishment System.

Watch an eight-minute explanation of the function and purpose of the GWR System from the Orange County Water District, or scan the Orange County Water District’s headquarters in Fountain Valley on google maps; read a short overview of global efforts to utilize recycled sewage, at National Geographic.

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

[images of the LHC and CERN via Wired Science]

This recent Vanity Fair feature provides a succinct overview of the reasons that the LHC was the first and most obvious candidate for this list:

The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.

The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider is an excellent example of a theme that runs through this list, ably described by BDLGBLOG‘s Geoff Manaugh in his book (and quoted here with apologies to dpr-barcelona, who I borrowed the use of this quote from):

“Architecture schools and publications today seem almost desperate for a new avant-garde –even for a “new Archigram”– but they seem only to be looking within the field of architecture to find it. For the sake of argument, let’s say that BP, with its offshore oil rigs, or the U.S. military, with its rapidly deployed instant cities, or private space tourism firms are the new Archigram. They, too, are experimenting with spatial technologies and structures. Is it possible that the “new Archigram” won’t involve architects at all –but will be, say, rogue engineers from the construction wing of an international oil-services firm?”

As we see it, the LHC falls easily into the long tradition of Architecture without Architects, but with scientists, engineers, and miners standing in for, say, traditional Saharan construction technologies and the vernacular architecture of the Mediterranean coasts; instead of timeless ways of building, a building that may have altered time itself.

Various blog coverage of the Large Hadron Collider of note includes Pruned’s post on the descent of the last of the LHC’s more than seventeen hundred magnets into the subterranean complex, BLDGBLOG’s speculations generated by the necessity of freezing an underground river in place in order to construct the complex, and the Large Hadron Collider tag in Wired Science‘s archives, which covers the birth and life of the LHC in exhaustive detail.

SVALBARD GLOBAL SEED VAULT

[images via SEED magazine slideshow]

A doomsday vault for when it all goes terribly, terribly wrong? Well, yes, but that’s not all the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is.  Located in the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen, one of the world’s northernmost towns, the vault is a bank dedicated to the preservation of variety and dynamism, itself a seed for the regeneration of complexity in ecosystems.  Ironically, given that mission, everything about the structure strives toward stasis: political and geographic locale; ownership and maintenance of the seeds; interior and exterior climate conditions; technology and construction.  Like the LHC, Svalbard’s Seed Vault is sublime because of purpose and engineering, not aesthetic or theoretical vision — though the structure, again like the LHC, does not lack in aesthetic wonder.

Norway owns the Vault, but not the seeds it contains.  The majority are varietals of staple crops from around the globe, sent by local seed banks across the globe to take advantage of the Vault’s offer of free storage.    Unlike these local banks, the Vault is not meant for regular access.  These seeds will only be reclaimed in situations of dire need.  But those situations are not post-apocalyptic scenarios in which survivors begin a trek to Svalbard to salvage seeds, as rebuilding after catastrophic collapse, while perhaps a romantic scenario, is not the primary disaster which SGSV guards against.  Rather, the Vault stands as a bulwark against the creeping (and probably inevitable) extinction of various crop strains and their valuable genetic data – perhaps even before we have had time to examine their potential.

Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, identifies Svalbard’s mission in an interview with C-Lab in Volume 17, “Content Management”.  He describes a crop called ‘Lathyrus,’ or Grass Pea, which is easy to grow, requires little water and fertilizer, and could “easily be the only crop you need to provide food for yourself and your family.”  However, it is also toxic, and if you eat enough to ward off starvation, you have also eaten enough to paralyze yourself:

It’s an awful choice that the most unfortunate people on earth have, which is to starve to death or become paralyzed. That is where I think the seed vault comes in. Within this crop there is a fair amount of diversity, and some varieties have less toxin than others. We use the collections to breed new varieties that have all the great qualities I just mentioned without the bad quality. If we can do that, we can provide the poorest people on earth with a great insurance policy. In a sense, I know the attraction of the doomsday vault is doomsday, but I really see the whole see vault as something remarkable and positive

iPHONE

[Image from Urban Omnibus's write-up on the "Museum of the Phantom City", a fantastic iPhone application which lets the phone owner navigate the history of architectural proposals for the (paleo-)future of Manhattan as an extension of their experience of the physical city]

Much has already been written about the iPhone as an extension of both city life and architecture, by persons with better understanding of both the technology and its import, but we’d be extremely remiss if we failed to include a device with the capacity to so thoroughly transform the urban experience.  Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of that transformation is the capacity of the smart or ‘app’ phone to serve as a window into additional layers of data on the city — often described as ‘augmented reality’ — while tying smart phone users into the network that maintains those layers of data.  Smart phone users are not merely passive observers of the augmentation of the physical infrastructure of the city by networked data, but participate in the active construction of that data.

The interface between place and network appears likely to grow stronger, as the linking of network participation with location which first gained mass effect through the iPhone is strengthened and deepened by hardware and software advances, such as hyper-local trending topics on twitter, google goggles, wikitude, collective memory models, and the tools being developed by MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group.  Public utilities can utilize the collective intelligence of a city’s citizens to detect system malfunctions; citizens can develop tools to gather reports of failure within the urban system, collate those failures geographically, and pressure government to react using the collected data.  And as the network becomes increasingly tactile, immediate, and geographically relevant, it can be expected to develop more direct interfaces with buildings.

If you doubt that the iPhone is appropriately considered an act of architecture, we suggest considering the argument discussed our recent post object fixations: urban systems are “defined most fundamentally not by structure and infrastructure, but by practice, action, and thought-process”; what act has more signficantly altered the practices and thought-processes of urbanites in the past ten years than the mass distribution of smart phones?

QUINTA MONROY

[images via Elemental]

Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert.  Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades.  The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.

The first challenge that Elemental faced was a strict budgetary limit of $7500 (USD), the standard Chilean per-family housing subsidy.  This subsidy would have to purchase the land, architecture, and infrastructure of the development, yet is only enough — at market-rate construction costs in Chile — to buy thirty square meters (322 square feet) of built space on such a center-city site.  Because of this, social housing in Chile tends to be produced as outlying sprawl, where land can be bought more cheaply, allowing a greater percentage of the subsidy to be devoted to the architecture.  Unfortunately, for reasons that are not fully elucidated in Elemental’s project description (though I am led to believe those reasons are the low value of the land social housing is usually built on and the low quality of the construction), social housing in Chile tends to depreciate in value, rather than appreciate, further miring families in poverty, as the housing subsidy is the largest single sum of aid that most impoverished families will receive from the Chilean government.  If that movement could be altered — if the housing could be designed so that it appreciates rather than depreciates — it might be the difference between long-term poverty and a gradual climb towards sustainable familial self-sufficiency.

[The Quinta Monroy site in urban context, via google maps]

Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required.  High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions.  Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:

We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.

In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.

Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.

Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.

Finally, instead a designing a small house (in 30 sqm everything is small), we provided a middle-income house, out of which we were giving just a small part now. This meant a change in the standard: kitchens, bathrooms, stairs, partition walls and all the difficult parts of the house had to be designed for final scenario of a 72 sqm house.

In the end, when the given money is enough for just half of the house, the key question is, which half do we do. We choose to make the half that a family individually will never be able to achieve on its own, no matter how much money, energy or time they spend. That is how we expect to contribute using architectural tools, to non-architectural questions, in this case, how to overcome poverty.

[Quinta Monroy shortly after construction of the initial framework and living space, but before the families have begun self-construction, via Elemental.]

Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (which mammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families.  While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture.  This seems like an important step — made visually apparent by the strong contrast between the simple lines of the initial framework and the colorful and varied familial additions — in the direction of what Lebbeus Woods describes as offering architecture as “the rules of the game”, or, the thinking he described behind a “capsule” which could offer architectural aid to people living in slums:

From the side of the slum dwellers, it might seem an unwelcome intrusion from outside, just another quick fix imposed by the economically advantaged on the desperately poor, serving the interests of the rich by transforming the slum according to their well-intentioned but—to the slum dweller–necessarily opposed values. It is especially important, then, that the transformative capsule enables the slum-dwellers to achieve their goals, serving their values, and does not reduce them to subjects of its designers’ and makers’ will. Inevitably, the values, prejudices, perspectives and aspirations of the designers and makers will be imbedded in the capsule and what it does. Therefore the slum-dwellers should, in the first place, have the right of refusal. Also, they must have the right to modify the capsule and its effects as they see fit. It cannot be a locked system, capable of producing only a predetermined outcome. The implication of these freedoms is that the capsule, whatever its capabilities, could be used to work against the intentions of its designers and makers. Because the effects of the capsule would be powerfully transformative, its possession would involve risk for all the groups, and individuals, involved.

Take a video tour of Quinta Monroy or watch a documentary about Quinta Monroy (in Spanish); construction photographs of a similar project by Elemental in Monterrey, Mexico; a brief article at Dezeen; a bit of commentary on the project as well as the stories of two of the inhabitants of the houses, at The Incremental House, a research blog by one of the 2008 Branner fellowship recipients.

PONTINE SYSTEMIC DESIGN

[Perspective view of P-REX's proposed "wetland machine", the regional master plan, and a factory and agricultural land within the watershed of the masterplan; images via P-REX, Pruned, and Google Maps, respectively]

The IBA Emscher Park — most famously symbolized by Peter Latz’s Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, a fantastic recreational park that recycles the industrial past for contemporary recreation without losing the melancholy charm of the “natural decay and dilapidation of the site”, but as a whole, “[embraces] more than 120 distinct projects” scattered through out the Ruhr — is perhaps the exemplary global example of how a systematic program of landscape and architecture can combat regional decline in the wake of de-industrialization.  If this list were a list of the best architecture of the previous decade, the Emscher Park would be the first item on the list.  However, while the Emscher Park is a good and kind way of dismantling an industrial region in response to global economic trends, incorporating the repair of the damaged ecology of that region into the construction of new spaces for recreation and provision of the physical infrastructure for cultural programming, it is nonetheless fundamentally a deconstructive program.  It is only intended to preserve the industrial infrastructure of the past as museum, not to re-purpose that infrastructure as the foundation of new production economies and new industries.

Which is why projects such as P-REX’s Pontine Systemic Design, a regional master plan which proposes the transformation of a portion of Italy’s drained Pontine Marshes into a wetland machine which serves to repair and maintain ecological balance in an industrial and agricultural region while that industry and agriculture remains vital, are so important.  A 2008 NYTimes article explains the intentions of Alan Berger, the landscape architect who founded P-REX:

[Berger] is recommending a radical solution: not so much to restore the environment as to redesign it.

“It is so ecologically out of balance that if it goes on this way, it will kill itself,” said Alan Berger… who was excitedly poking around the smelly canals on a recent day… You can’t remove the economy and move the people away,” he added. “Ecologically speaking, you can’t restore it; you have to go forward, to set this place on a new path.”

Designing nature might seem to be an oxymoron or an act of hubris. But instead of simply recommending that polluting farms and factories be shut, Professor Berger specializes in creating new ecosystems in severely damaged environments: redirecting water flow, moving hills, building islands and planting new species to absorb pollution, to create natural, though “artificial,” landscapes that can ultimately sustain themselves [emphasis ours].

The Pontine Systemic Design represents exactly the sort of “reformulation” of the “historically suppressed” “biophysical landscape” “as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban economies” which Pierre Bélanger called for in his recent article in Landscape Journal, “Landscape as Infrastructure” (PDF).  P-REX’s website describes the elements of the wetland machine which lies at the heart of the regional master plan:

Choosing a gigantic, consolidated wetland site will likely be more viable in the complex patchwork of land ownership. Given Latina’s situation, distributed treatment areas would be both enormously complex to purchase and ineffective to manage. The Wetland Machine’s dimensions are directly related to the amount of wetland area needed to treat the amount of water in the Canale Aque Alte—the major collector for this highly polluted zone. At 220 l/s, with a load around 50+ mg/l of N, at least 2 square kilometers of treatment wetland will be required. The design retro-fits and widens existing canals to serve as flow distributors. Furthermore, soil cut/fill operations are used for terraforming shallow ridges and valleys to hold/treat water and make raised areas for new public space and program. At 2.3 sq. km., the new wetland machine will drastically improve the regional water supply and provide needed open space for recreation. At only 6 km from Latina, the site could house programs and environments almost completely lacking in the region—large open landscapes with diverse vegetation. Extensive edge habitat diversity or programs—shallow shoals for juvenile fish and swimming, starker edges for fishing and water storage.

The landscape, in the form of a constructed wetland, becomes the central hydrological infrastructure of this polluted agricultural and industrial watershed, a transformation firmly situated within the understanding of landscape infrastructures as  the key component of “urban ecologies”, which Bélanger delineates in “Landscape as Infrastructure”:

Endogenous and exogenous processes, such eutrophication, combined-sewer overflow, sediment contamination, invasive flora, exotic fauna, depleted water reserves, and seasonal floods can no longer be perceived as isolated incidents, but rather as part of large, constructed hydrological ecolog that is entirely and irreversibly connected to the process of urbanization.  The slow, yet large-scale accumulated effects of near-water industries and upstream urban activities once considered solely at the scale of the city, are now more effectively understood at the scale of the region.

Insofar as the P-REX’s design represents a step in the direction of this regional consideration of landscape infrastructures, it provides hope that architecture and landscape architecture may yet have some agency in addressing in what Berger has described as “the larger-scale environmental issues that are currently affecting urbanized regions”.

Though the project is not yet built, as far as I am aware P-REX and the provincial government are still collaborating on the planning and design of the project, with every intention of seeing it through construction; and, at any rate, mammoth has no distaste for entirely speculative projects. Pruned has an excellent summary of the project, which includes higher-resolution images of the project provided by P-REX.  I wrote a brief piece two years ago attempting to situate Berger’s design within the cultural landscape history of the Agri Pontini, though the efficacy of that effort was surely inhibited by my lack of knowledge of Italy; at any rate, I still think the contrast/parallel between the early 20th century pump machinery which drains the Pontine Marshes and the wetland machine proposed by Berger is fascinating.  Abitare did an excellent recent interview with Berger touching on the Pontine Marshes but dealing primarily with Berger’s research techniques, methodologies, and thoughts on the discipline of landscape architecture.

CITYCAR

[Images via CNET]

Developed by MIT’s Smart Cities group, headed by William Mitchell, CityCar is:

…a foldable, electric, two-passenger vehicle for crowded cities. It uses Wheel Robots—fully modular in-wheel electric motors—that integrate drive motors, suspension, braking, and steering inside the hub-space of the wheel. This drive-by-wire system requires only data, power, and mechanical connection to the chassis of the vehicle. Wheel Robots have over 120 degrees of steering freedom, allowing for a zero-turn radius and 90-degree parking (sideways translation); they also enable the CityCar to fold by eliminating the gasoline-powered engine and drive-train. Folded, the CityCar is very compact (roughly 60” or 1500mm), with an on-street parking ratio of at least 3:1 to traditional cars. It is also lightweight (1000lbs) and modular, and automatically recharges when parked, reducing battery needs and excess weight. The CityCar has two use models: private (traditional ownership), and shared (Mobility On Demand, high-utilization, one-way shared systems like Paris’s Vélib’ bicycle-sharing program).

While the technology behind CityCar is interesting in and of itself, architecturally the most interesting aspects of CityCar are the dynamically-priced markets for electricity and roadspace which Smart Cities envision developing around the second, shared use model.  Through GPS systems embedded in the cars, congestion pricing could be altered in real-time in response to the flow of traffic through a city’s streets, achieving a far more perfect market reflection of the urban condition than could be imposed by any top-down model.  Similarly, CityCars — being essentially mobile batteries — would be tied through their recharging stations into a city or region-wide smart grid, purchasing electricity at cheap rates during off-peak hours from the grid and selling it back to the grid at higher rates during peak hours, at once exploiting the market potential of the smart grid and becoming an essential component of the grid.  The CityCar, then, is not merely a vehicle traveling across fixed infrastructures (or a smaller version of today’s cars), but is itself a distributed infrastructure, resilient, flexible, and responsive to input from the city.

A Boston Globe article highlights some of the pragmatic and regulatory difficulties that will be faced in attempting to bring the CityCar to mass realization; interestingly, this CNET article notes that Hawaii — where residents often travel from island to island without their cars — has shown interest in CityCar as a mass transit system; read a roundtable conversation between William Mitchell and Robin Chase (founder of the car-sharing service ZipCar) at the Next American City; read a feature on Chase at Urban Omnibus; this Places article discusses the notion of “fracture critical” infrastructures, and how their potential for disastorous failure suggests the necessity of resilient and flexible infrastructures.

FRESH KILLS

[images via Metropolis slideshow]

There was a lot of talk in the past decade about how landscape architecture — whether in the slightly older guise of landscape urbanism, or in the more fashionable and current guise of landscape infrastructure — would come to dominate urban design practice.  Both architects and landscape architects, from Koolhaas to Corner, noted that the contemporary city is dominated by flatness, that the singular architectural object is powerless to overcome the conditions of that flat city, and that landscape architects are seemingly well-equipped, being situated at the boundaries of ecology (with its emphasis on process and flow), architecture, and urban planning, to operate on flat yet incestuously complicated cities.

Yet that potential has been largely unrealized.  Designers, even in competition and academic endeavors (to say nothing of what has been built) stuck with what they knew: overtly formal, often beautiful, but ultimately stale master-planning exercises.  The influx of data-based and algorithmic methods of indexing has done little to shift this paradigm; if anything, it has reinforced the tendency to resort to the beautiful drawing because of the ease with which it can be created, and the veneer of systemic complexity they grant a project.  What use is the diagram when the plan is indistinguishable from it?

New York City’s Fresh Kills competition and the on-going work by Corner’s Field Operations, the competition winners, is one of the few examples that buck that trend, demonstrating the ability of an office led by a landscape architect to produce a synthesis of ecological, urban, social, and infrastructural processes on a large scale within an extremely complicated urban system.  This kind of work, of course, operates intentionally on long time scales, and so it is perhaps not surprising that even Corner, probably the best-known of the landscape architects who joined the first wave of landscape urbanists, has only completed one major landscape (at least as far as I’m aware), the rather disappointing High Line.

What is particularly exciting about Field Operations’s Fresh Kills for landscape architects is that this massive new park isn’t being built so much as it is being grown and cultivated, thereby realizing a firm reliance on the flow and flux of ecologies as not just inspiration for design, but as the tool of design, as is explained in Andrew Blum’s 2008 article for Metropolis on Corner:

Corner saw [Fresh Kills] as a proving ground—not just as a park but for landscape architecture as a whole. It stacked up all the challenges he had been wrestling with: contaminated lands, exhaustive environmental reviews, competing community interests, glacially slow (if not totally absent) funding, and the opportunity to create an aesthetic unencumbered by Romantic landscapes. (In all of this, Corner was influenced by the landscape architect Peter Latz’s Land­scape Park Duisburg-Nord, which was mostly completed by 1999.) “It was: Look, this is a landfill, it’s a regulated landscape, the soil is atrocious, how can you imagine a park here?” Corner says, describing his initial thought process. “It’s not an exercise of trying to design a fantastic park; it’s an exercise of trying to design a method to get from what it is now to something that is green, public, and safe. And that process would then produce a park that had very unique spatial and aesthetic experiences and properties.”

Corner called his scheme Lifescape, and the notion at its heart, part ecological and part poetic, came out of the earlier thinking: to grow the park, to reengineer the site as a “self-sustaining ecosystem,” an “autopoetic agent”—like a cell. One of the biggest challenges at the site was covering the mounds with at least four feet of soil, to make them safe for picnicking; Lifescape imagined the park growing that soil. “It’s easy to sit and dream up fantastic things,” Corner adds. “The trick is to dream up fantastic things that are smart with regards to the realities at stake.”

There’s still a lot to prove in this, um, proving ground — but mammoth suspects that landscape architecture will need more projects like Fresh Kills, not less, if it is to flourish in the next decade.

Of further interest might be this critique of Fresh Kills from Mario Ballestros, as well as this response to that critique from the official Fresh Kills blog and another response to the same critique which I posted a while ago at Eatingbark.

CHINA’S HIGH SPEED RAIL NETWORK

[image via Wikipedia]

The massive network of rail-lines, including conventional rail but particularly high speed rail, now spanning vast portions of China (and growing exponentially through the coming decade) is perhaps the best example of the continued relevance of the infrastructural “superproject” to emerge in the past decade.  Nonetheless, we debated whether or not it belonged on this list and, rather than assemble our points into a coherent argument, thought we’d share that debate directly.  You’ll note that we’ve entirely skipped over the question of whether a rail network can or should be considered architecture at all.

Stephen: I’m not yet convinced China’s high-speed rail belongs on the list.  It’s not terribly different from any other high speed rail system in how it affects the country, how it came to be, or (as far as I know) any particularly impossible engineering condition which needed to be overcome.  It’s not a triumph of project management or marketing, of building a massive infrastructural project despite difficult political or economic circumstances, because China is $loaded$ and, as a single-party state, doesn’t face the sort of political entanglements which make rail so difficult to build in the United States.

You mentioned earlier that it is an example of the continued relevance of the infrastructural superproject… in what way?  As economic stimulus? As a nation-building ‘look at us’ project?  Some other fashion?  I am concerned all we learn from this project is that China can do whatever it wants – at which point, its just a Pretty Cool, Really Big Project.

Rob: I think that definition of “continued relevance” is too narrow.  Sure, it’s most definitely not an example of an infrastructural building program which could be duplicated in a modern western state – but most states aren’t modern western states.

Stephen: Most states aren’t China either.

Rob: No, but it’s tremendously relevant to the future of China, and one in five people in the world lives in China.

Stephen: True.  You know I’m as big of a high-speed rail supporter as anyone, considering its ability to act as both near-term and sustained economic generator.

Rob: And while it’s true that most states aren’t China, there are other big, functionally-single party regimes – Russia, for instance.

Stephen: This project serves largely the same function as other HSR networks around the world.  Does it qualify as a best-of project just because it exists?  Does China building the rail system prove a massive infrastructure project is relevant to Russia?

Rob: If it proves that it is (a) possible and (b) will have important effects on urbanization in that country, then, yes.

Stephen: Maybe a new, enormous pipeline is more relevant to Russia… so the question is, what exactly is China’s HSR proving? That HSR projects in particular are worthwhile, or that any large infrastructural project is – as long as it is fine tuned to the needs of a region, with the political and economic conditions present to enable its creation?  And if it’s the latter, I’m inclined to say “Well, of course that’s true!”  But then, maybe you and I operate in a bubble where the value of the Big Infrastructural Project is taken as a given, and outside that bubble, reinforcing the relevance of the Big Infrastructural Project isn’t a bad idea, however disappointing it may be that they are only possible in select conditions.

Rob: I’m more convinced now than I was at the beginning of the conversation that it belongs. At the beginning I was ready to throw it out, but now I’m convinced it represents a major trend in infrastructure which we’re otherwise ignoring.  I think the last point you make as a devil’s advocate is key: while the acceptance of the continued value of large infrastructural projects may be a current idea within our circles, I doubt that it is so widely agreed.

[Map of China's current and proposed high-speed rail connections via the excellent Transport Politic]

Stephen: Right.  China’s HSR is a best-of-decade project because of its function as a signifier for the relevance of many types of large infrastructural projects, even if they are only possible in select areas.  It’s in because it’s important in defining the urban future of China, as other sorts of projects might be for their respective countries.  I think it’s instructive to contrast it against some other projects on this list which are better able to integrate themselves into areas without the benefit of a powerful centralized authoriy, like the Orange County Wastewater system or CityCar.  Projects which are smaller, lend themselves toward incremental expansion, and minimal disruption of current systems, especially land-ownership.  Those projects are often geared toward the remediation of damaged or obsolete infrastructures, whereas the Chinese HSR system is being introduced in as near a blank-slate condition as is possible in the twenty-first century.  Not only do projects in non-authoritarian regimes need to be smaller and nimbler, but they are generally reactive.  The fear of a broken system must exceed the fear of an angry mob of NIMBYs before action is taken.  Appealing to the prospect of a better future is — unfortunately — quite often impossible.

Newsweek has an article about China’s High Speed Rail network here; images of the network can be found here at Treehugger; map of existing rail lines here; discussion of the scale and importance of this project relative to China as compared to HSR endeavors by other countries, here.

PARQUE BIBLIOTECA ESPANA

[images via Architectural Record]

Parque Biblioteca España is one of a number of notable projects built in the past decade in Medellin, Colombia, whose exceptionally progressive mayor, Sergio Fajardo, is using infrastructure, landscape, and architecture to spark renewal and combat systemic poverty.  Much as Elemental’s Quinta Monroy made architecture a legible toolset for the residents of one city block in Iquique, the program of infrastructural development in Medellin has deployed architecture and landscape across the entire city, providing the city’s residents — and the inhabitants of the mountainside “comunas”, in particular — with an infrastructural toolset to rebuild their city and neighborhoods.  Once the headquarters of Pablo Escobar, wracked by corruption and violence, and described as “the murder capital of the world”, Medellin has been transformed by an emphasis on public culture, shared spaces, and transparency.  The Metro de Medellin was extended into the comunas by the construction of Line K, a public-transit cable car which replaced tedious and slow two-hour bus rides down the steep mountain side with a fast and comfortable twenty-minute ride, sparking the growth of community businesses in the comunas.  A botantical garden located in the dangerous neighborhood of Moravia was renovated to remove walls, symbolically opening the garden to the community, and upgraded with a striking new central pavilion under which cultural events are organized and attended.  The additions are both as small as the introduction of staircases connecting mountainside homes and as large as the system of five library parks, which includes Biblioteca España, providing safe and open places for meeting, playing and learning in the heart of the comunas.

[Passengers ride Line K, via the NY Times]

I highly recommend this slideshow from Medellin, taken by Quilian Riano (formerly fruitful contradictions, now @quilian on twitter and one of the two people behind DSGNAGNC), as well as Riano’s post at his Archinect school blog after visiting Medellin; the New York Times ran an article a couple years ago on Fajardo and Medellin; an Architectural Record article describes Parque Biblioteca Espana.

KIVA

[Modesta Tabanao in her general store in the Philippines. She received a loan of $225 "to purchase additional inventory and working capital" and is on-track to repay the loan over its nine month term.]

If the recent flury of projects in Medellin shows how traditional infrastructure tactically deployed can revitalize a city, Kiva shows how a non-traditional monetary infrastructure can do the same:

In 2004, Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley witnessed the power of microfinance firsthand while on a trip which would become a life-changing experience. Visiting East Africa – Jessica conducting impact evaluation surveys for Village Enterprise Fund and Matt filming interviews with small business entrepreneurs – they were able to see and hear firsthand how small grants of only $100 – $150 had been used to build small businesses which could then support a family. They heard stories of people who were able to sleep on mattresses instead of dirt floors, afford to take sugar in their tea daily instead of occasionally, and buy fresh fish for their families a few times every week rather than once a week. Instead of meeting the poor and helpless, they found themselves meeting successful entrepreneurs who had generated enough profits from their small businesses to create a real impact on their standard of living.

Kiva is an infrastructure for distributing relatively small amounts of money to entrepreneurs, particularly in developing countries.  Its brilliance is the realization that people would rather give to individuals — other people — than to an organization.  Rather than sell you on a particular charitable mission, Kiva’s website engages donors by encouraging them to become stakeholders in the economic future of specific recipients.  It displays their stories and, importantly, their business and repayment plans. Kiva, like those networks of physical structures more commonly understood as urban infrastructures such as roads, sewers, and powergrids, is fundamentally characterized by the properties of connection and transmission, which enables it to have widespread effect on cities across the globe.

Mammoth has written frequently about the city as it is constructed by complex interactions between systems, economies and societies, and argued that architects should engage this context. If one accepts this set of relationships as not merely descriptive of the processes within a city, but as the fundamental material of the city, more basic to the nature of urbanity than skyscrapers or freeways, how can the invention and deployment of Kiva not be considered an act of urban design?  Kiva is infrastructural urbanism at its purest: unconcerned with directing the formal evolution of the city, focused instead on generating the financial mechanisms which enable citizens to participate in reshaping the city.  These qualities make it n effective agent in some of the most informal urban conditions on the globe, conditions which confound traditional architectural response.

[PLOT's "Clover Block" scheme, an unsolicited proposal for public housing in the city of Copenhagen which generated enough public interest to provoke a competition for the design of public housing on the site, via rory hyde dot com blog]

Kiva also suggests hopeful and alternate models of architecture practice, perhaps beginning to incorporate or co-opt a similar infrastructure in place of the traditional financier-client-architect funding model.  Studies like the Office of Unsolicited Architecture and this post by FASLANYC begin to hypothesize what such a model might look like. They compliment financial experimentation found in projects such as these documented by Rory Hyde, architectural outfits like Supersudaca, and practices like Parking Day.  We’re not sure how (or even if) the infrastructure Kiva has developed for financing entrepreneurs is scalable to the development of an architecture or landscape project.  But mammoth believes that the dynamic between client, financier, and designer provides fertile ground for experimentation, and we hope lessons learned from Kiva can be applied to architecture in the coming decade.

[This post was co-authored by Stephen and Rob; we'd love to hear what we've gotten wrong (and why!), as well as what we've missed; we've got a handful of near-misses for this list in hand that we'll hopefully get around to writing about soon.]

Water on Buffalo Bayou can rise rapidly from sea level to 35 feet (11 m) deep, often within several hours. SWA met that challenge by designing all landscape plantings, trail markers, signage, benches, lights to withstand periodic submersion by muddy, debris filled flood waters. In the event of high water, small hydrants, spaced conveniently, wash off any deposited silt, returning it to the bayou before it dries.

Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1857 description of the bayou landscape emphasizes the expansive reach of the floodwaters that the Promenade accomodates, as well as the close tie between hydrology and economy which gave birth to Houston:

“The Brazos bottoms near by, are four or five miles wide.  They are of very great fertility, and the land commands high prices… The bottom is seldom reached by freshets, but was covered in those of the years 1833, 1843, and 1852.  We were landed from the ferry near night, and, barely accomplishing the dark and heavy miles of bottom by twilight, camped under a group of huge oaks, at the edge of the great coast-prairie.
To Houston the road lay across a flat surface, having a wet, sandy or “craw-fish” soil, bearing a coarse, rushy grass, diversified by occasional belts of pine and black-jack.  We had reached the level prairie region of the coast, and in fact saw henceforth not one appreciable elevation until we crossed the Mississippi.  Five miles from Houston we entered a pine forest, which extends to the town.
Houston, at the head of the navigation of Buffalo Bayou, has had for many years the advantage of being the point of transhipment of a great part of the merchandise that enters or leaves the State.  It shows many agreeable signs of the wealth accumulated, in homelike, retired residences, its large and good hotel, its well-supplied shops, and its shaded streets.  The principal thoroughfare, opening from the steamboat landing, is the busiest we saw in Texas.  Near the bayou are extensive cottonsheds, and huge exposed piles of bales.  The bayou itself is hardly larger than an ordinary canal, and steamboats would be unable to turn, were it not for a deep creek opposite the levee, up which they can push their stems.  There are several neat churches, a theatre (within the walls of a steam saw-mill) and a most remarkable number of showy bar-rooms and gambling saloons…
Houston (pronounced Hewston) has the reputation of being an unhealthy residence.  The country around it is low and flat, and generally covered by pines.  It is settled by small farmers, many of whom are Germans, owning a few cattle, and drawing a meagre subsistence from the thin soil… In the bayou bottoms near by, we noticed many magnolias, now in full glory of bloom, perfuming delicately the whole atmosphere.  We sketched one which stood one hundred and ten feet high, in perfect symmetry of development, superbly dark and lustrous in foliage, and studded from top to lowest branch with hundreds of great delicious white flowers.”

Another 19th century traveler, Edward King, praised the natural beauty of the bayous:

“The bayou which leads from Houston to Galveston, and is one of the main commercial highways between the two cities, is overhung by lofty and graceful magnolias; and in the season of their blossoming, one may sail for miles along the channel, with the heavy, passionate fragrance of the queen flower drifting about him.
Houston is set down upon prairie land; but there are some notable nooks and bluffs along the bayou, whose channel barely admits the passage of the great white steamer which plies to and from the coast.  This bayou Houston hopes one day to widen and dredge all the way to Galveston; but its prettiness and romance will then be gone.”

Though the Buffalo Bayou is one of the few riparian systems in Harris County to retain something of the character Olmsted and King described, the Buffalo Bayou today is a highly designed hydraulic system. Damaging floods in the 1930′s (documented in a government report entitled “Wild River”) prompted the construction of reservoirs, straigthened and deepened channels, and the replacement of streambank vegetation with concrete streambanks throughout Harris County.

In the 1940, the Army Corps of Engineers released a plan to divert the flows of White Oak and Buffalo Bayous around Houston through the construction of a massive system of canals and reservoirs. While the Addicks and Barker Reservoirs were built (and along with the dams that sustain them, still regulate the flow of water passing down Buffalo Bayou), World War II interrupted the planned canal construction. By the time the war passed, Houston had grown so rapidly that the original canal routes were obsolete and inadequate. “Wild River” was updated by the Harris County Flood Control District and re-issued in 1951. An updated flood reduction plan was ready by 1954, but opposition to the Army Corps of Engineers’ methodology mounted, culminating in the formation of a civic association named the Bayou Preservation Association, and brought a final halt to thirty-five years of attempts to beat back the floods with ever-increasing channelization, damming, and re-routing.

The Buffalo Bayou Promenade fits into the more recent program of the HCFCD, which has included projects such as the Greens Bayou Wetlands Mitigation Bank (a 1,400-acre constructed wetland — though, if I recall correctly, there is some debate about the worth of mitigation banking) and the Arthur Storey Park Stormwater Detention Basin, which, like the Buffalo Bayou Promenade, serves both as park and flood control system.

While I’ll admit to seeing a bit of rough charm in the ‘before’ images of Buffalo Bayou, I am quite pleased to see the ASLA honoring this sort of exceptionally useful project, as I suspect the ability to accommodate divergent layers of program — river, park, highway — will be essential if landscape architects are to retain any significant influence on the evolution of American cities, given the powerful apparatus of NIMBYism which resists (quite rightly) Olmstedian intervention and the static weight of a couple hundred years of city-building.

Another project which is situated in a similarly unstable riverine site is Brett Milligan’s Inundating the Border, winner of an ASLA student award a couple years ago. Inundating the Border is concerned with a section of the Rio Grande between Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, whose concrete channelization and dual service as river and border permits Milligan to explore fertile terrain in both ecology and politics:

In a 1962 agreement between the United States and Mexico, the river border between Juarez and El Paso was moved and stabilized within a concrete channel. This change left a void in the urban fabric between Juarez and El Paso that still exists today. [Inundating the Border] utilizes the urban void created by historical shifts of the border between Juarez and El Paso as an opportunity to redesign the border as a fluctuating, indeterminate space. This process begins by releasing the Rio Grande (the border by treaty definition) from the concrete channel, thus allowing flows of the river to meander through the floodplain, constantly changing the precise location and thickness of the border. Through time (daily, seasonal, and mechanistic) the river shifts, migrates, floods and runs dry, and these processes create entire spaces of migration in which all elements—the ground plane, ecologies, and human occupation are transitional and constantly changing.

While the Bayou Promenade allows for a great deal more accomodation of indeterminacy than traditional flood control engineering, Milligan’s proposal pushes that accomodation even further –not just accepting that portions of the area around a river in a flood plain will flood occasionally, but removing a large section of the concrete channel of the Rio Grande, making a few strategic insertions to help mold the transition between concrete and earthwork river banks, and setting aside a large tract of land to watch the river re-shape itself. It might be more properly thought of as a landscape experiment than a landscape plan.

“Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen—one of the first cheerleaders for investigating the gas-the-planet strategy—recently argued that geologists should refer to the past two centuries as the “anthropocene” period. In that time, humans have reshaped about half of the Earth’s surface. We have dictated what plants grow and where. We’ve pocked and deformed the Earth’s crust with mines and wells, and we’ve commandeered a huge fraction of its freshwater supply for our own purposes. What is new is the idea that we might want to deform the Earth intentionally, as a way to engineer the planet either back into its pre-industrial state, or into some improved third state. Large-scale projects that aim to accomplish this go by the name “geo-engineering,” and they constitute some of the most innovative and dangerous ideas being considered today to combat climate change. Some scientists see geo-engineering as a last-ditch option to prevent us from cooking the planet to death. Others fear that it could have unforeseen—and possibly catastrophic—consequences. What many agree on, however, is that the technology necessary to reshape the climate is so powerful, and so easily implemented, that the world must decide how to govern its use before the wrong nation—or even the wrong individual—starts to change the climate all on its own.”

A permanent fleet of ships sails the globe, churning the ocean with special propellers to spray seawater into the air and make clouds whiter and fluffier.  A battery of twenty electromagnetic guns, “each more than a mile long and positioned at high altitudes”, that would fire tens of millions of ceramic frisbees at the gravitational midpoint between the earth and the sun, putting “the Earth in a permanent state of annular eclipse”.  Hovering zeppelins spew sulfur dioxide into the air, turning the sky red at sunset.  Forests of Freeman Dyson’s genetically engineered trees hungrily suck carbon out of the air.  Vented structures, similar to industrial cooling towers, are filled with grids coated in a solution that captures carbon; the captured carbon is then scrubbed off the grids and sequestered deep below ground in exhausted oil wells.  Antarctic waters are seeded with iron, producing massive plankton blooms that cool the globe.

Perhaps the most unexpected (and frightening) turn in the Atlantic article is the suggestion of a worst-case scenario in which a “rich madman… obsessed with the environment” or “a single rogue nation” sets one of these plans into motion unilaterally, with potentially disastorous global side-effects — in the case of the sulfur aerosols, for instance, it is quite likely that any interruption of the supply of aerosols would produce immediate and catastrophically rapid climate change.  An appropriately sobering possibility to consider, for though the scenarios seem outlandish(ly exciting) and the risks are real, they are being given hearing not just at the fringes of scientific debate, but at bodies like the National Academy of Sciences.