Delving into how a sustainable future for New York City might realize itself, we were tasked with targeting an area at risk within one of the five boroughs. These locations could be anything vital to the city such as food storage, at risk neighborhoods (nycha), power plants or critical infrastructure. Once a location was chosen it would be analyzed through scientific data (like expected sea level rise) along a mile long transect cutting through the landscape. It was expected that the data would lead to some solution architecturally or environmentally.

Inspired by the recent (and costly) renovation, I chose La Guardia Airport as the site of my intervention. My research showed that the majority of the runways would be under water or would be greatly impacted by high rates of storms within the next few decades. I saw the airport as a piece of critical infrastructure that needed to be operational at all times. This led me to basis of my proposal that could be broken into two parts: Rebuild and Resist. These terms (in relation to the airport) could be summarized into rebuilding the airport to safer standards and using established engineering techniques to resist the rising waters. However the scale of such a project would be immense both financially and in construction time. This led to a staggered solution where flood walls would be built around the site in three distinct stages based on the storm surge heights. The wall would have the ability to increase its height at a later time. In the two earlier stages the runways would additionally be transformed into pontoons so they would always stay above the water line, a solution made possible by the continued advancement of A.I. software controlling aircraft.

Fall 2018

Critic: Signe Nielsen