Hac-a-Frac is a call to arms for repurposing the more than 430,000 active and abandoned hydraulic fracturing wells across the state into a decentralized aquifer storage, filtration, recovery, and quality monitoring network. Created via deployment of an open-source gas well conversion kit, the network would be fed by the ever-increasing stormwater runoff resulting from suburban sprawl, providing resilience against the extremes of flood and drought and an awareness of the otherwise invisible hydrology beneath our feet. With an appearance referencing the drilling derricks that once littered the Texas landscape, Hac-a-Frac acts as a functioning memorial to past ecological damage and a beacon of our progress toward remediation. 

This project is the result of HKS's annual Design Fellowship, a firmwide design charette that fosters the cross-pollination of designers across the firm's offices in order to propose creative solutions to the big issues facing our planet. The topic of the 2020 design fellowship was the health of Texas' many watersheds. Teams worked on their submissions, part time, remotely before meeting up in Dallas to present the projects.

“Turning potentially prosaic infrastructure into a memorial or monument through the gesture of the large vertical elements and repetition is an incredibly strong way of taking what could be a fairly pragmatic response to a very pressing problem and turning it into something more.”
— Roy Cloutier (Designer, Professor & Texas Architect Studio Awards Juror)

- Displayed as part of the European Cultural Center’s (ECC) 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

- 2021 Texas Architects Magazine Studio Award Winner