Author(s): Charles D. Jones
This paper outlines a student design project that encapsulates large-scale manufactured watershed landscapes’ complexities into tangible physical artifacts, fabricated water vessels. This project, co-authored and taught with Kentaro Tsubaki at the Tulane School of Architecture, was part of a four-year research studio investigating the relationship between stormwater management infrastructure, public space, and precast systems at three distinct scales: urban scale, street scale, and component scale. At each scale, the research studio projects examined the combined potential of computational design and fabrication techniques to shape urban surface geometries that mitigate the impact of flooding and envision new aesthetic atmospheres to public spaces.1 A rain garden in New Orleans, Louisiana, served as a case study to formulate specific water vessel design criteria. The revealing2 quality of this surface-level detention system, a socially constructed technological element, carries new expression beyond the limitations of efficiency towards a new symbolic meaning in the visible nature of its geometric form. Within a maximum physical volume parameter half the size of a standard New Orleans residential lot; students designed and fabricated vessels that consider the relationship between geometric surface attributes, like accessibility and 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 encoding3 them in surfaces of small-scale physical artifacts.
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ISBN
978-1-944214-49-4