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Monday, June 7, 2010
From time to time we'll gather some of the coastal debris that have been cluttering our desktops, bookmarks, inboxes, newsreaders and post queue for months (years, in a few cases), and bundle them together into a single post. It'll be a rush job.
The U.S. Geological Survey reviews the proposal to build sand berms along the Louisiana coast to prevent oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill from reaching interior marshes.
Lebbeus Woods has proposed “the construction of a terrace along the six-kilometers of The Malecón, which is dedicated to public recreation, a type of urban park or abstract beach cantilevered from The Malecón over the sea. Shelter from the sun is built into the layers of each structurally independent terrace segment, which rests on heavy steel hinges such as those used for modern drawbridges. The independent segments can be built one at a time, and also shaped to the curving line of the roadway, so that their ensemble is continuous. Most importantly the segments can be designed to accommodate differing recreational needs along its six-kilometer extent; for example, a set of terrace segments serving one neighborhood could be very open, while another, serving a different neighborhood, could provide more layers of shelter and semi-enclosed spaces.”
From Smout Allen's Augmented Landscape:
“The estuaries of Essex form a liquid edge to the county. This fragile boundary, which extends and retracts with the ebb and flow of the tide, reinforces the connection between the sea and the land. The proposal responds to the current thinking on a managed realignment of the coast, removing hard sea defenses such as sea walls and embankments that prevent the natural landward movement of the salt marshes, and allowing the land to be flooded by the incoming tide. Returning land to salt marsh encourages brackish vegetation and establishes the flood plain as an environmental bugger. A shallow plate is inserted into the intertidal zone, lying low on the horizon. The plate beds into the mud flats, with its extremities in the retreating tide and reaching up to the higher grass land beyond.
“Three territories are formed: oyster lanes fed by nutrient-rich runoff from the salt marsh and high tide, grazing land, and a market. The panorama is framed and partially concealed by the tilted reflected edge to the marketplace, which reaches out endlessly between the sea and sky.”
In Turenscape's Qinhuangdao Beach Restoration project, “a heavily eroded, badly abused and decaying beach has been ecologically recovered and successfully transformed into an aethestically pleasing and well-visited place, demonstrating landscape architects can professionally facilitate the initiatives of rebuilding a harmonious relationship between man and nature through ecological design.”
