IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

Stormwater management has had one of the most significant impacts on the social terrain of New Orleans’ city surfaces concerning its spatial impact. Due to social pressures for increased sanitation and the maintenance of dryer spaces for circulation and gathering, stormwater’s presence became problematic. As a result, this removal of stormwater from urban cores transitioned from the surface articulation of open gutters and ditches to a centralized subsurface condition embedded in the ground plane, mostly invisible from the site. However, rain gardens apply horizontal and vertical manipulations to the ground plane, allowing sites to hold rainwater momentarily. These systems celebrate the rediscovery of a lost ecological identity in low-lying urban landscapes and the re-emergence of visible surface-flooded conditions. These subtle sectional undulations once occupied the landscape throughout and around New Orleans before disappearing around the turn of the 20th century. Throughout a four-year research studio investigating the relationship between stormwater management infrastructure, public space, and precast systems, the water retention vessel project empowered students to challenge the dominant design constraints that seem to lock existing infrastructure innovation in place. With a maximum physical volume parameter of half the size of a standard New Orleans residential lot, students designed and fabricated precast objects that consider the relationship between geometric surface attributes, like accessibility, permeability, and the spatial implications of visible, surface-level water detention. As a result, the projects demonstrate the expressive potential of design methodologies that utilize a limited range of large-scale infrastructure constraints by encoding them in surfaces of small-scale artifacts.