Water Index

Design Strategies for Drought, Flooding and Contamination

Seth McDowell

• Publisher: Actar
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781638409076
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In the wake of an escalating global crisis with water, Water Index is the first critical inventory and analysis of innovative architecture, landscape architecture and design solutions to address the rising, disappearing, and contamination of water. As an ecological disaster complex ferments in contemporary architectural discourse, design competition briefs, conference topics and journal themes optimistically call for designers to reconcile or reimagine the relationship between water, architecture and city. Anxiety is elevated by the onslaught of extreme weather in the form of super-storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, and droughts whose frequencies and intensities continue to increase. Couple the ever-present exposure to disaster with scientific data that suggests a future characterized by climate change and population growth, and then we have the ingredients for a full-fledged paranoia: the perfect motivation for absurd, expansive and radical building projects. Water Index, examines three hydrological tragedies (flood, contamination, and drought) through strategies that offer methods for controlling, escaping, or adapting to the vital natural resource. Water Index is a collective vision of the future that provides solutions for every continent and spans the disciplines of urban design, landscape architecture and architecture. The book works to create an enduring manual and manifesto for water development and design in the twenty-first century and to acknowledge crisis-initiated design as an important trajectory for architectural discourse. Water Index highlights a moment when designers have linked formal concerns with social, ecological and political agendas offering solutions for expanding global problems.

Table of contents

• A Hydrological Tragedy in Three Acts
• Act One: The Rising
• People and the Rising Sea
• Catastrophe
• The Delta Works Project
• The Spectacle of Water and Machine: The ideologies at Work in the Bonnet Carre Spillway Openings of 1937 and 2011
• Hydropolis
• Governors Island Park
• Connections on Uncertain Ground
• Aranzadi Park
• Swamp Thing: Smart Grid, Smarter Water Management in New Orleans
• Watersquare Benthemplein
• Act Two: The Contaminated
• The Bacteriological City and Its Discontents
• Bringing the Serpent's Tail Into the Serpents's Mouth: Edwin Chadwick and the "Sanitary Idea" in England
• Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• Whitney Water Purification Facility + Park
• Seeping Boundaries: Informal Infrastructures of Dirt, Demolition, and Sewage in the West Bank
• Dendritic Zoning: Establishing a New Urban Gradient in the Garden State
• A Green Sponge for a Water Resilient City: Qunli Stormwater Park
• Shanghai Houtan Park: Landscape as a Living Sistem
• Vitondale Reclamation Park
• Parallel Networks
• Water Core Home
• Detoxi-City
• Act Three: The Disappearing
• The Urban Spring: Formalizing the Water System of Los Angeles
• Reconstructing the Void: Owens Lake
• Draining the Oasis
• Sea Tree
• Winton Wetland Restoration
• Lima Beyond the Park
• Wash: Urban Hydrological Networks for Resilient Cultural Ecologies
• Immaterial Water