Well, Ive been toying with the idea of combining the two topics and developing a typology that can be used along the destructed gulf coast that combines the reconstruction of levees along with housing. This angle of approach to my knowledge, has not been researched and developed. My initial research discovered numerous dissertations on the reconstruction of levees - everything from the design to the study of the soil. Of course, there are projects dealing with the development of housing, along water, or in low-income stricken areas. I guess what I am trying to discover is a way for this project to be successful and produce a piece of work that not only can recatagorize the definition of a levee, but in fact could be the future of the new orleans coast. Ive looked at sustainable design, and and of course implementing water in various ways - both specifically into a project, and also into a city. Culture, History and other factors influence the shape of the project as well. What are your thoughts of the road I am heading down?
The utlimate outcome of my thesis would produce a levee that intigrates inself as housing and housing that integrates itself as a levee - if that makes sense.....hmmm..... okay, ill post more as my idea becomes clearer.
here in louisville we've had some developments in which individual projects, in order to more fully connect with the river, have chosen to remove parts of the flood wall and integrate a new flood wall or levee condition as part of their design. usually requires some fairly tricky negotiation with the corps of engineers, but the results have been good. also requires design of a transition and reconnection with adjacent existing flood wall/levee conditions. projects include our new waterfront park by hargreaves, a couple of parking garages, the new muhammad ali center by lee skolnick/beyer blinder bell/bravura, and my masters thesis.
a difference you might encounter is that a lot of levees are on public or corps of engineers' land. this raises issues both of gaining rights to build on land dedicated for storm protection (in some cases also considered park land, protected wetlands, etc.) and the ethical issue of coopting a public amenity for private/semiprivate use.
of course, since this is a school project, you may be able to get by all of these issues and tackle it purely as a design problem, but they are things to consider anyway.
here are a few projects that you might want to check out...they are not the same idea, but very similar conceptually...
lebbeus woods did a project in havana, cuba that is a "man made beach" that folds up to become a sea-wall to protect the city during hurricanes...it is featured in his book "radical reconstruction"
also, there was a dutch firm that built some houses that were integrated into a soundwall that borders a major road...i can't recall the name of the firm, i'll try to find it and post it
Wasn't there just a news item posted recently that referred to an article that described a house in a landslide zone with big garage doors on the uphill and downhill sides so when a landslide occurred the owners could open the garage doors and let the boulders roll right through their house and on down the mountain? I seem to recall reading that but dang I'm bleary today.
Steven post some pics of your thesis so we can see how you handled it!
actually if there was more building on and near levees and the water's edge was more central to the life of the community, they may have been built differently than they were and the funding to maintain and improve them may have been kept in place.
as it was the levees were sort of marginalized and funding went to squeaky-wheel issues (like war). the levees existed and they appeared to be in good shape to most of the public. only the experts really heeded the red flags. integrating building with levee could improve attention to the levee's soundness and maintenance. certainly doesn't seem like it would hurt.
I had a studio project my second year where we had to design a high end car dealership on a site with a piece of the levee on it. A lot of people ended up relandscaping the levee or building on top of it, but very few actually incorperated into the building itself, because of the strict rules we had to follow about the levee and how exactly we were allowed to mess with it. I'd be interested to see how you convince people to live in/under the levee, considering that one side of their "home" (the flooded side) would need to be completely without natural light. Am I understanding the project correctly? I'm intrigued
lb, my thesis was different from what cmdace has suggested in that i didn't propose a building at/on the flood wall.
instead, my modification of the flood wall was part of a larger urban design proposal, mirroring our eastern waterfront park (by hargreaves) with a new one on the west side of downtown. the flood wall solution was to treat the whole new landscape as a tilted table of sorts, rising from the water's edge to a point higher than the elevation of the current top-of-flood-wall. this got its top edge up high enough that, when i got close to the first street (about 400-500 feet back from the water), i was able to tuck a storefront commercial building up underneath the new landscape.
like i said, it was part of a larger proposal for our west downtown and not the primary focus of the project. i'll dig around for some pix to post.
architphil - i am trying to locate radical reconstruction, and will have it in my hands within a week..
seannola ... my idea is to change the way we think about a 'levee' - for example, a section might read as a wall of the level comming from the ground, folding up, and creating spaces that accomadate parking where there is no light, and as the wall moves up become a barrier between the water and land, then forms into the facade of the building. Now how this works with the culture of new olreans, and along various different situations is a problem i have yet to move towards. but this notion of protection/livability/affordability is something i want to look into.
Now here's the problem. My thesis advisor feels that althought this idea of levee+housing is interesting, he doesnt want it to become strickly an engineering problem of seperating water from people. I agree. I just need more angles to approach.
How about some more projects dealing with this seperation between protecting and livability - waterfront projects.
i think that is a great and very interesting idea...
of course the issues aren't just engineering...but solving quite a number of problems. i am sure incorporating a new type of "floating" house (similar to a number of waterfront communities on the west coast.)....and how can they incorporate it with a levee...
looking forward to seeing and reading some of the results...
two projects you might look to for further 'out there' thoughts on already out there thinking are paolo soleri's 'lean linear city' proposals and yusuke obuchi's 'wave garden'. soleri is a relatively radical eco-urbanist who's visions often extend far beyond the present but are continually explored here and now through arcosanti his desert urban laboratory and his many writings. check out www.arcosanti.org for 'quaderno 9: lean linear city' publication. the piece was written specifically addressing development in china but he recently presented it as a plan for reconstructing the gulf coast after katrina. it seems people will always build along the water regardless of the red flags. soleri offers an elegant solution to do so equitably, efficiently, sustainably.
yusuke obuchi has a fantastic proposal for a renewable power plant/public park off the coast of southern california that not only educates people of the earth's power but rewards them for positive interaction with it. http://www.ndm.si.edu/EXHIBITIONS/TRIENNIAL/content/OBUCHI.html
hopefully katrina and our rising environmental conflicts can at least now inspire reactions to restore more harmonious relationships with the natural world. good luck with bringing out there here.
i downloaded it...
of course since i am at work...i did not get a chance to READ it...
but a question...
did you account for the storm surge? or just rising waters?
looked interesting, i will have more educated questions as i look at it.
likewise. I am downloading it at the moment and will give it a read this week. The tsunami safeRhouse by the Harvard TSI was a good proactive solution to flooding in Sri Lanka. most importantly it was built.
I am hoping that a few proactive solutions to the issue of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast actually get implimented and don't end up as 'design exercises'.
Your project sounds really good, and I am going to download it in a minute. I lived in New Orleans all my life before college so I thought I would "weigh in" with a couple points:
- someone said "new orleans coastline" somewhere, so it is important to note that the levees in N.O. area on the river, and that N.O. is not supposed to be a coastal city. The coast has only recently (post-1890s) moved closer to the city, because the levees on the MS river have caused erosion as silt that sustains the delta is washed out into the gulf and salt water encroaches into the marshes (causing their deterioration) and lowering our defenses against storm surge from the gulf.
- also, levees have caused some parts of n.o. to actually become lower elevations below sea level. Again, the silt is denied to the area behind the levee, and as the land is kept dry, there is more subidence than there is in other places (I'm not from a geology background, so I can't really explain this).
- there is a developer trying to build condos adjacent to the levee right across the parish line near the Orleans/Jefferson Parish border. He has not gotten any resistance from the Corps, because he is a certain distance away from the levee, but residents do not want multi-unit housing near there neighborhood of exclusively single family homes. I don't know if the project is formally very interesting (probably not), but you can do a google search for the guy's name (Santopadre?), and possibly find something on nola.com
I know you are done, so these comments probably came a little late.
Can't wait to download it and see what you came up with!
thanks for downloading it guys... please weigh in!
waitlisted - i dont know? yousendit allows 25 total download, but by the response, i don't think that's been reached. try it again, and if it doesnt work, ill be sure to re-up it. thanks.
Possible Thesis ... Levee + Affordable Housing
Well, Ive been toying with the idea of combining the two topics and developing a typology that can be used along the destructed gulf coast that combines the reconstruction of levees along with housing. This angle of approach to my knowledge, has not been researched and developed. My initial research discovered numerous dissertations on the reconstruction of levees - everything from the design to the study of the soil. Of course, there are projects dealing with the development of housing, along water, or in low-income stricken areas. I guess what I am trying to discover is a way for this project to be successful and produce a piece of work that not only can recatagorize the definition of a levee, but in fact could be the future of the new orleans coast. Ive looked at sustainable design, and and of course implementing water in various ways - both specifically into a project, and also into a city. Culture, History and other factors influence the shape of the project as well. What are your thoughts of the road I am heading down?
The utlimate outcome of my thesis would produce a levee that intigrates inself as housing and housing that integrates itself as a levee - if that makes sense.....hmmm..... okay, ill post more as my idea becomes clearer.
sounds like an interesting problem to tackle.
here in louisville we've had some developments in which individual projects, in order to more fully connect with the river, have chosen to remove parts of the flood wall and integrate a new flood wall or levee condition as part of their design. usually requires some fairly tricky negotiation with the corps of engineers, but the results have been good. also requires design of a transition and reconnection with adjacent existing flood wall/levee conditions. projects include our new waterfront park by hargreaves, a couple of parking garages, the new muhammad ali center by lee skolnick/beyer blinder bell/bravura, and my masters thesis.
a difference you might encounter is that a lot of levees are on public or corps of engineers' land. this raises issues both of gaining rights to build on land dedicated for storm protection (in some cases also considered park land, protected wetlands, etc.) and the ethical issue of coopting a public amenity for private/semiprivate use.
of course, since this is a school project, you may be able to get by all of these issues and tackle it purely as a design problem, but they are things to consider anyway.
here are a few projects that you might want to check out...they are not the same idea, but very similar conceptually...
lebbeus woods did a project in havana, cuba that is a "man made beach" that folds up to become a sea-wall to protect the city during hurricanes...it is featured in his book "radical reconstruction"
also, there was a dutch firm that built some houses that were integrated into a soundwall that borders a major road...i can't recall the name of the firm, i'll try to find it and post it
Wasn't there just a news item posted recently that referred to an article that described a house in a landslide zone with big garage doors on the uphill and downhill sides so when a landslide occurred the owners could open the garage doors and let the boulders roll right through their house and on down the mountain? I seem to recall reading that but dang I'm bleary today.
Steven post some pics of your thesis so we can see how you handled it!
Haven't we learned our lesson on building near levees?
actually if there was more building on and near levees and the water's edge was more central to the life of the community, they may have been built differently than they were and the funding to maintain and improve them may have been kept in place.
as it was the levees were sort of marginalized and funding went to squeaky-wheel issues (like war). the levees existed and they appeared to be in good shape to most of the public. only the experts really heeded the red flags. integrating building with levee could improve attention to the levee's soundness and maintenance. certainly doesn't seem like it would hurt.
Course i can get a hell of a good look at a t-bone steakby sticking my head up a bulls ass, but i'd rather take a butcher's word for it.
lovely, but i don't much care about your hunting-or-gathering predilections, ag. what does it add to this conversation?
I had a studio project my second year where we had to design a high end car dealership on a site with a piece of the levee on it. A lot of people ended up relandscaping the levee or building on top of it, but very few actually incorperated into the building itself, because of the strict rules we had to follow about the levee and how exactly we were allowed to mess with it. I'd be interested to see how you convince people to live in/under the levee, considering that one side of their "home" (the flooded side) would need to be completely without natural light. Am I understanding the project correctly? I'm intrigued
Make sure you have a diving board in your thesis.
lb, my thesis was different from what cmdace has suggested in that i didn't propose a building at/on the flood wall.
instead, my modification of the flood wall was part of a larger urban design proposal, mirroring our eastern waterfront park (by hargreaves) with a new one on the west side of downtown. the flood wall solution was to treat the whole new landscape as a tilted table of sorts, rising from the water's edge to a point higher than the elevation of the current top-of-flood-wall. this got its top edge up high enough that, when i got close to the first street (about 400-500 feet back from the water), i was able to tuck a storefront commercial building up underneath the new landscape.
like i said, it was part of a larger proposal for our west downtown and not the primary focus of the project. i'll dig around for some pix to post.
some great point of views.
architphil - i am trying to locate radical reconstruction, and will have it in my hands within a week..
seannola ... my idea is to change the way we think about a 'levee' - for example, a section might read as a wall of the level comming from the ground, folding up, and creating spaces that accomadate parking where there is no light, and as the wall moves up become a barrier between the water and land, then forms into the facade of the building. Now how this works with the culture of new olreans, and along various different situations is a problem i have yet to move towards. but this notion of protection/livability/affordability is something i want to look into.
Now here's the problem. My thesis advisor feels that althought this idea of levee+housing is interesting, he doesnt want it to become strickly an engineering problem of seperating water from people. I agree. I just need more angles to approach.
How about some more projects dealing with this seperation between protecting and livability - waterfront projects.
Thanks for the advice, will post soon.
i think that is a great and very interesting idea...
of course the issues aren't just engineering...but solving quite a number of problems. i am sure incorporating a new type of "floating" house (similar to a number of waterfront communities on the west coast.)....and how can they incorporate it with a levee...
looking forward to seeing and reading some of the results...
cmdace18...
two projects you might look to for further 'out there' thoughts on already out there thinking are paolo soleri's 'lean linear city' proposals and yusuke obuchi's 'wave garden'. soleri is a relatively radical eco-urbanist who's visions often extend far beyond the present but are continually explored here and now through arcosanti his desert urban laboratory and his many writings. check out www.arcosanti.org for 'quaderno 9: lean linear city' publication. the piece was written specifically addressing development in china but he recently presented it as a plan for reconstructing the gulf coast after katrina. it seems people will always build along the water regardless of the red flags. soleri offers an elegant solution to do so equitably, efficiently, sustainably.
yusuke obuchi has a fantastic proposal for a renewable power plant/public park off the coast of southern california that not only educates people of the earth's power but rewards them for positive interaction with it. http://www.ndm.si.edu/EXHIBITIONS/TRIENNIAL/content/OBUCHI.html
hopefully katrina and our rising environmental conflicts can at least now inspire reactions to restore more harmonious relationships with the natural world. good luck with bringing out there here.
have you put in that diving board already?
WELL..... its done...
Officially done with the Thesis. Crit is over. Here is my final book.
I'm yousendingit right now, I'll post the link shortly.
Its about 96 MB - so save it , then delete it ...
Please post your thoughts.
Thank you
CD
For those of you who have the patience to DL it and take a peek, thank you very much in advance.
Cheers
CD
cool! i downloaded this a.m. will look when i get a chance later tonight or tomorrow a.m.
i downloaded it...
of course since i am at work...i did not get a chance to READ it...
but a question...
did you account for the storm surge? or just rising waters?
looked interesting, i will have more educated questions as i look at it.
likewise. I am downloading it at the moment and will give it a read this week. The tsunami safeRhouse by the Harvard TSI was a good proactive solution to flooding in Sri Lanka. most importantly it was built.
I am hoping that a few proactive solutions to the issue of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast actually get implimented and don't end up as 'design exercises'.
Cheers
C.
Your project sounds really good, and I am going to download it in a minute. I lived in New Orleans all my life before college so I thought I would "weigh in" with a couple points:
- someone said "new orleans coastline" somewhere, so it is important to note that the levees in N.O. area on the river, and that N.O. is not supposed to be a coastal city. The coast has only recently (post-1890s) moved closer to the city, because the levees on the MS river have caused erosion as silt that sustains the delta is washed out into the gulf and salt water encroaches into the marshes (causing their deterioration) and lowering our defenses against storm surge from the gulf.
- also, levees have caused some parts of n.o. to actually become lower elevations below sea level. Again, the silt is denied to the area behind the levee, and as the land is kept dry, there is more subidence than there is in other places (I'm not from a geology background, so I can't really explain this).
- there is a developer trying to build condos adjacent to the levee right across the parish line near the Orleans/Jefferson Parish border. He has not gotten any resistance from the Corps, because he is a certain distance away from the levee, but residents do not want multi-unit housing near there neighborhood of exclusively single family homes. I don't know if the project is formally very interesting (probably not), but you can do a google search for the guy's name (Santopadre?), and possibly find something on nola.com
I know you are done, so these comments probably came a little late.
Can't wait to download it and see what you came up with!
I tried to download it a couple times, but got an error each time.
Has anyone been able to open it?
thanks for downloading it guys... please weigh in!
waitlisted - i dont know? yousendit allows 25 total download, but by the response, i don't think that's been reached. try it again, and if it doesnt work, ill be sure to re-up it. thanks.
CD
14.1 kB, but what's the file format? i added .zip, but 7z and winzip wouldn't open it.
.pdfs. mine opened fine. but 90-some pages! that's going to take some time to check out.
WHAT?!?!? 90 PAGES? WTF!!! What is thesis again? is it for Phd or MAsters?
Masters from the University of Florida
actually i think my undergrad thesis was at least as long.
my grad thesis, however, had no book. only drawings and models.
this makes for great 'procrastination' reading ...
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