Updated Topography and Bathymetry

Now with the New Charles River Dam's level of protection, 3.8m contour around Boston, and the limit of the tidal zone at -1.5m...

The Sectional City

As a new avenue of exploration, this week has been spent looking at the sectional city and the tradition of infrastructural drawings emerging from 19th century engineering.

Another week, another introduction

While infrastructure, landscape, and architecture have been intertwined for time immemorial, this reciprocal relationship was reinvigorated approximately a decade ago in Stan Allen’s seminal “Infrastructural Urbanism” in Points + Lines: Diagrams for the City.  In this article, he makes seven propositions, the four most salient maxims to landscape and this thesis being:

“Infrastructure works not so much to propose specific buildings on given sites, but to construct the site itself.”

“Infrastructures are flexible and anticipatory.”

“Infrastructures accommodate local contingency while maintaining overall continuity.”

“Although static in and of themselves, infrastructures organize and manage complex systems of flow, movement, and exchange.”

These concepts have thoroughly permeated contemporary theory and practice, and with the formulations of infrastructural urbanism, landscape urbanism, and most recently ecological urbanism, landscape has taken the opportunity to emerge as a leading, rather than lagging field.  No longer merely taking inspiration from architecture, the kitsch, land art, or minimal modernism, landscape architecture has in fact mined its own past to build its future.

            Looking to these historical trends in more depth and breadth, the field finds itself at an inflection point, and much as economics emerged from philosophy during the Enlightenment to dominate future discourse, so too landscape shows the potential to emerge from civil engineering and architecture.  This renaissance has been, in part, inspired by critically revisiting the great landscape architecture projects at the founding of the field.  Rather than addressing the City Beautiful movement’s immediately tangible goals such as hygiene, democracy, and poverty, landscape must grapple with the quest for the City Sustainable, where we face dynamic, nuanced issues climate change, empowerment, and equity.

            As such, landscape has recently begun to reevaluate the regionalist perspectives of the 1920s and 1930s.  Conceived in a similar economic times to the past decade and our own currently, these large scale ecologic and socioeconomic plans were well suited to a climate of greater governmental intervention and private market risk.  This financial and political instability has forced us to reexamine long-held assumptions, not dissimilar to how dramatic social change instigated many aspects of postmodernism.  We are currently in a period of reconsidering the achievements (and indeed problems) of megastructures created by engineers and megaforms theorized by architects, and we should realize that our present infrastructural and climate crises find their roots in the energy shocks and neoliberalization of the 1970s and 1980s.

As the above begins to demonstrate, a contemporary subject as rapidly changing as modern infrastructure, urban areas, and the landscape is especially difficult to theorize, and it is all too easy for an academic paper or design to fall victim to the times in which it was written.  This essay will therefore take a historical approach to its analysis rather than charting the path of a speculative future.  Consequently, as alluded to previously, it may be unsurprising that this paper is in turn influenced by the perceived collapse of the internet, housing, and credit bubbles in recent years, which has had the effect of casting doubt and uncertainty on prior assumptions and claims of new paradigms.

The past two years of a US president who has repeatedly promised change have created both a time for reflection and a renewed can-do attitude for the future. As change is an inevitable and constant phenomenon which has accelerated ever since the Enlightenment, the reader is encouraged to move back and forth across time and scale, seeking what the simplest, clearest ideas might be – distilling, but neither reducing nor reinventing the past century’s thought on and built work in the industrialized city. In this light, “Giving/Holding/Taking Ground” seeks not to establish an unprecedented new paradigm (a hackneyed design formulation), but rather redefine with nuance the strategic adaptation of our cities and infrastructure to a changing climate and century.

An Historical Framework

Topography and Bathymetry

In the process of beginning to understand the land/water condition of Boston Harbor, a map showing the relief and bathymetry of the region is helpful. On the land, drumlin fields are prominent as are the upland conditions above the fall line. To the sea, the Harbor Islands emerge as part a larger topographic system that has been drowned by increasing sea level since the last Ice Age. Furthermore, the hardened edge of the built coastal environment and linearly dredged shipping lanes are clearly visible. The line just offshore denotes MLLW, which begins to get at the flexible and temporal interface this project will explore in much greater detail...

And now for a timeline...

Very much in progress...

Site Selection...and an Idea of Scale...

Room for the River

A slightly hyperactive tour of infrastructure modifications to make the world a more resilient place in the face of a changing climate...

Landscape as Infrastructure | Infrastructure as Landscape

In beginning to explore the genre of this thesis, I find myself drawn to the concluding section of an essay I wrote in January 2009 for Charles Waldheim’s Fall 2008 semester course Ecology as Urbanism; Urbanism as Ecology. This term paper revisited Susan Nigra Snyder and Alex Wall’s 1998 Architectural Design article “Emerging Landscapes of Movement and Logistics,” and while it specifically addressed the logistics landscape, the observations apply equally well to infrastructure.

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Over the past decade, the field of landscape architecture has expanded beyond its traditional realm of gardens and parks to encompass in some dimension almost all horizontal surfaces that function as, in the words of Alex Wall, a “matrix of connective tissue that organizes not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them. This is landscape as active surface, structuring the conditions for new relationships and interactions among the things it supports” (Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 233). Nowhere is this clearer than in built up, highly engineered areas, such as cities and their attendant infrastructure.

[…Even as] design is inextricably linked with broader technological innovations and the zeitgeist, [… this] paper is extraordinarily timely (something that was not even perceived in October when it was begun) with the election of Obama and his promise to help rejuvenate the American economy, partially through infrastructure spending. This is generally understood to include roads, highways, bridges, rail, port facilities, national energy grids, clean energy production facilities, public buildings such as schools, broadband networks, etc.

Designers and planners such as Benton MacKaye, steeped in a prior period of rapid economic and technological growth in the 1920s analogous to the one that just ended, came into their own under a similar era of reevaluation and rebuilding. This past time, like the present era, called for innovative thinking, such as MacKaye’s approach of “liquid planning” where geometry was subordinated to the flexible needs of economy and efficiency (Keller Easterling, “Part 1,” Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 54).

Long before the recent changes in landscape and infrastructure scale that responded to globalization, “in 1927, MacKaye...proposed a new type of atlas...that [supported] not only the rearrangement of global infrastructure and transportation routes but also the formulation of new protocols for the economies of distribution among countries” (Easterling, 32). A few years later, a fellow Regional Planning Association of America thinker and possible coiner of the term “New Deal”, Stuart Chase wrote that “the American economy, with its wasteful land boom practices and severe depression” might require master planning “to bring purchasing power into alignment with the growth of the technical arts.... It means tinkering with the credit system, tinkering with wages, tinkering with hours of labor” (Easterling, 47-48).

This Keynesian language sounds similar to the discourse of current events. Obama’s call for federal infrastructure spending could arguably be traced back to a UVA planning and infrastructure conference in 1931 and FDR’s “presidential campaign, [when he] spoke of the need for an experiment in regional-national planning that might also generate employment” such as what would become the TVA (Easterling, 47-48).

Six, going on seven, decades later we find ourselves at a similar juncture with the promise of landscape and infrastructure, and we should therefore be mindful of the lessons of the past. […]The power of landscape to define these unique spaces and the modern day promise of infrastructure is well summarized by Chris Reed.

“While conceived as rational, absolute, and utilitarian, infrastructure has the capacity to be appropriated and transformed toward social, cultural, ecological, and artistic ends. [...A]rchitecture and landscape can appropriate the utility and serviceability of infrastructure. One could imagine landscape/architectural/urbanistic projects conceived as functional infrastructures, ecological machines that process and perform, public spaces that literally “work” [...] whose form is valued for its performative rather than sculptural characteristics” (Chris Reed, “Public Works Practice,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 282).

While the past century’s historical record sheds illumination on the intersection of landscape and (urban) infrastructure, it is clear that even after the passage of a decade, the theories presented in “Emerging Landscapes of Movement and Logistics” deserve further study. […]As landscape continues to rapidly adapt to changing economic climates and commercial/industrial innovations, projects that will be constructed in the coming years, whether with federal assistance or not, may provide the necessarily catalyst for discussion, much as the TVA […] did in [its] own time.

On the Water

The First Post

And we're off! This fantastic image came out of 4th semester's landscape architecture core studio in Chelsea, MA. Working with Vanessa and Carrie on the potential for reseeding the industrial area with an urban forest, we grappled with the concept and manifestation of landscape infrastructure.

This design thesis will look at the challenges and potentials facing the Charles River Dam in a changing climate and century. In my experience, most people are surprised to learn the Charles is not in fact dammed at the Museum of Science (the 1910 dam), but rather further downriver. The New Charles River Dam (built in 1978) is placed in the middle of a web of infrastructure and exhibits many laudable design intents (a pedestrian path, an ecologically informed fish ladder, and arches that reference the pumping station inside). Yet with the projected rise in sea level, Boston has the opportunity to revisit its infrastructure and chart a new course for coastal communities around the world. This blog will chronicle that design process.