Used in some of the world's driest places, fog-catchers can turn atmospheric moisture into potable water, effective on scales small and large – it's used by the South African Namib Desert beetle as an evolutionary trick to stay hydrated, and by a Chilean brewery to make beer. The HydroForest Honorable Mention proposal calls for a community-run fog-catching system in the famously foggy San Francisco, where residents can be responsible for their own moisture-trapping canopy in a local public space.

HydroForest, by Difei Chen and Ted Ngai (Advisor, RPI)

The HydroForest is a project that attempts to address climate change, namely the water crisis in California, through a crowd sourcing urban intervention strategy of implementing low-tech fog collectors to create what we call Community Owned and Managed Public Space (COMPS). This strategy takes precedence in how urban trees are managed in many cities, where residences can take responsibility of a tree pit in front of their properties and create their own public space. The main element of the design proposal is a fog collection device that uses a large canopy shape to condense the immense San Francisco fog. The canopy is low cost / low tech and can be inserted into existing tree pits to create public gathering spaces.

In order to address the fundamental water crisis in California, finding new water sources such as through this fog collector is only a minor part of the solution. The key issue is to address the “single-use” water culture. The key part of the design proposal is to develop ideas of how water can be “up-cycled” and continued to be used in various ways. To test this idea, a larger site is chosen to be the test field in which water that has been collected are stored, used, up cycled, and reused. The site thus becomes a test field where the local community can develop a new water culture to face the coming crisis.

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From the judges:

"Interesting student work, could use some technical tightening but still a compelling vision." – Peter Zellner of Zellner Naecker Architects

Check out the image gallery for HydroForest's complete presentation.

Click here to see the other winners in both the Pragmatic and Speculative categories!