Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront

Museum of Modern Art, New York Until 11 October 2010

Creating wetlands around Manhattan could protect the city from rising waters. Credit: ARCHITECTURE RESEARCH OFFICE/DLANDSTUDIO

Within the next 40 years, projected sea-level rises of up to a third of a metre threaten coastal cities, including New York. By 2100, rising sea levels could inundate 21% of Lower Manhattan at high tide and warmer ocean temperatures could bring more frequent hurricanes, accompanied by storm surges 7 metres high.

On show until October at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are five proposals for shielding low-lying areas of the city from encroaching waters. Each addresses a different zone, from Lower Manhattan to the New Jersey coast, using principles that have global applications. Rather than relying on defensive barriers, such as levees and sea walls, the local design teams participating in Rising Currents suggest using wetlands, artificial islands and living reefs to absorb water and attenuate waves.

In the project Oyster-Tecture, Kate Orff and her team from the urban design studio SCAPE/Landscape Architecture plan to seed oysters in the waters of the Bay Ridge Flats off Brooklyn to recreate a long-lost natural oyster reef. The SCAPE project also encompasses the Gowanus Canal, a former industrial waterway polluted by pesticides and heavy metals. Oyster beds act as a natural filtration system, and could clean millions of litres of harbour water each day — a single oyster can filter 3 litres of water an hour.

“The project doesn't require a billion-dollar investment, just biology in the form of the oyster,” says Orff. A model of Oyster-Tecture, a rope and timber “mosaic landscape for marine life and people” populated by wooden birds, turtles, fish and human figures, has been hand-knitted by the Brooklyn-based Bergen Street Knitters.

A dredged-up oyster shell sits beside Matthew Baird Architects' model of 'Working Waterline', a scheme for the low-lying lands of Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Kill van Kull, the tidal strait that separates them from Staten Island. The company proposes creating an artificial reef and breakwater by sinking thousands of 75-centimetre-high recycled-glass 'jacks' (shaped as in the game) into the sea bed. Accumulated sediment, explains ecologist and artist Nim Lee, would host algae and create habitats for marsh grasses and marine life.

Local warehouses and piers could be converted to recycle the necessary materials: New Yorkers discard nearly 3,000 tonnes of glass each week, of which only around half is recycled. Bayonne's 'tank farm' of industrial containers — used in an infamous 1960s 'salad-oil swindle', in which a commodities trader conned banks out of US$150 million by pretending the mostly water-filled tanks were full of soybean oil — could be turned into a sewage-fertilized algae farm producing algal oils for biodiesel as a project by-product.

Water overflow is a persistent problem in New York: thanks to outmoded sewers, more than 100 billion litres of raw sewage and polluted storm water are discharged into the harbour each year. In their project 'A New Urban Ground', Architecture Research Office (ARO) and designers dlandstudio suggest filling the streets of Lower Manhattan with 'greenways' — freshwater wetlands and saltwater marshes that act as sponges. “We didn't envision it to be an apocalyptic scene of nature overtaking the city,” says Adam Yarinsky of ARO. “It's very much about the city perpetuating, not diminishing.”

Population growth is another factor to take into account: New York City is projected to grow by 800,000 people by 2030. Extending the city into the water is the goal of 'New Aqueous City', which covers Sunset Park, Bay Ridge and Staten Island. Designers nArchitects' solution is to build an archipelago of concrete islands connected by inflatable storm barriers that accumulate silt and provide resilience against storm surges. In 'Water Proving Ground', LTL Architects propose a series of landscaped finger-shaped piers for the zone that includes Liberty State Park and the Statue of Liberty.

Curator Barry Bergdoll of MoMA hopes that the projects will be realized: “I don't want them to become like [French architect Etienne-Louis] Boullée's late-eighteenth-century paintings in which a seemingly impossible future is projected. We want them to percolate into real projects or into public policy.”