Eidetic Waterscapes aims to reveal the site’s sense of history, imagination, wonder, and playfulness.  An eidetic memory is an exploration of the photographic traces of an experience that can be recalled with stunning clarity.  We intended to harness the potential for architectural experiences to transcend literal or symbolic memory and evoke smells, sounds, and spatial conditions which emanate from a visitors past in the form of nostalgia and deep recollection. Water – in its many  experiential forms – mists, curtains, pools, flowing, rushing, spilling, dripping – has the potential to be a narrative force and provide the spatial and temporal moments where the qualitative and experiential qualities of the architecture and landscape can recall memories from the visitor’s past that were transformative, impactful or full of deep meaning.  

The design for this new stormwater retention facility seeks to unite new urban active recreational programming with a functional and interactive stormwater infrastructure.  Using a combination of water storage, aeration and filtering typologies the design makes the stormwater infrastructure demonstrative, educational and part of the visitor’s poetic experience of the building.  High volume water cisterns, water aeration towers, rain curtains, and constructed wetlands are integrated into the building envelope and create unique spatial conditions which transcend just aesthetic and begin to address the place of memory and knowledge within our urban environment.  Each infrastructural intervention is coupled with monitoring and data output systems with embed the building with informative text and streaming information.  Live-time monitoring and stormwater alert applications marketed to cell phones are be employed to connect the building with users after they return to their own homes. 

The organization of the building grows from the interweaving circulation of people and water. Stormwater is absorbed into the building in the same way that people from the surrounding neighborhood filter in to experience a full range of day and night programs for the community. The circulation of building visitors as they partake in the many activities is designed to expose and educate the public as to how the wastewater system works in Brooklyn, and what effect they have on it. Seasonal programmatic and weather conditions alter the way the facility is experienced and used - as spring precipitation fills the cisterns or summer drought conditions empty them, the architecture reveals the potential to understand the connective links between water and our environment.

completed as a collaboration with David Seiter of Future Green Studio.