Inspired by the formation of the craters on the moon, the landscape is dappled with a pixelated management system that engages the primordial form, the circle, but only from above. Within the earth, the forms become more than that. They become and organizing strategy for engagement with the current infrastructure of the grid. The juxtaposition of the circle as an organizing element is the ability of scalar flux. The square grid gives no hierarchy of place or focus. The cratered landscape becomes one that drinks the water from the sky deep into its skin and holds the excess. At times, the craters become dry and become a place of recreation, congregation and education.
Over time, the perfect circles will morph and change with the impacts of wind, water, and people. The impressions made by man are metaphorically embodied within the deep indentions in the earth. The surface becomes more pixelated near the River to collect the influx as it relates to the failing levee.
MEMPHIS. August 2024. The levees have failed but the landscape becomes a sponge to the influx of water. The river breaks free of its confines the explore new lands, to seek crevasses, to explore the depths of the city, into the basements, into the low lands, finding the weak points and breaking into them. After years of being straightjacketed and corsetted, the river breaks free... but we are prepared. The land is prepared. We survived the flood of 2024.
According to weather predictions, the Mississippi is anticipated to flood furiously in the year 2024. Ninety seven years after the Great Flood of 1927. The way of thinking of "protection" needs to change. This landscape becomes an opportunity to explore alternative strategies of managing floodwaters. We need not confine and constrain but respond to this fluctuating landscape. The dogma of urban design over the past century has been to subdue the natural systems and lay a formal grid upon the landscape. Instead, we should be building systems that respond heavily to the existing and potential landscapes that lie beneath. This project will be an exploration of surface, from shallow to deep, from hard to soft, a sectional study of the city.
It all collides. Years of study of formal language, datums, axes, and hundreds of sectional sketches, I feel at home in the depths of the city. The sewers become portals into my imagination as I explore their potential. This landscape will become a symbiotic ecosystem of biological creatures and the water that surrounds them.