Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab

Faculty Design Award, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2020
Innovation Award, American Institute of Architects, 2019
Editor’s Choice, Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Awards (Research), 2019
Impact Award, CCA Center for Impact, 2019
Columbia University GSAPP Incubator Prize, 2019
Architect Magazine R+D Award, 2018
Exhibited at Designing Material Innovation exhibition, 2017
Selected for Catalyst Program, Buckminster Fuller Institute, 2017

Project Leaders: Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones

The Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab is a prototype for a new kind of resilient coastal infrastructure. It merges expertise from design, advanced digital fabrication manufacturers, and marine ecologists to imagine a floating architecture of the future that can exist productively with its surrounding environment.

This prototype, which builds upon five years of applied research at California College of the Arts, consists of a floating breakwater structure that incorporates an innovative, ecologically optimized fiber-reinforced polymer composite substrate with variable topographies that perform both above and below the water. On the top, the topography is engineered to channel rainwater and produce watershed pools for intertidal or terrestrial habitats. Underwater, the hull’s peaks and valleys vary in size to provide habitats for different types of invertebrates. Water flowing along this underwater landscape brings plankton and other nutrients into these “fish apartments,” helping to promote ecological diversity. In large masses, this biological growth can help attenuate wave action and reduce coastal erosion, one of the primary impacts of climate change and sea level rise. The vessel includes attachment fittings on the underside to suspend future prototypes and further develop the wave attenuation potential of the optimized substrate.

The prototype was deployed in San Francisco Bay in August 2019. It is currently moored in the Port of Oakland’s Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, where it serves as a floating research platform for developing ecologically optimized substrates for wave attenuation. It also serves as an environmental demonstration project and interfaces with public education and community engagement efforts sponsored by the Port of the Oakland.

See also:
Optimized Ecological Substrate research
Buoyant Ecologies San Francisco studio
Buoyant Ecologies Oakland studio
Buoyant Ecologies Maldives studio

Press Coverage:
Dezeen
Hyperallergic
Undark
Smithsonian Magazine
Fast Company
Architect Magazine
Redshift
Architect’s Newspaper
Business Insider

 

Project Credits:
Project Leaders: Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones
Design Team: Taylor Metcalf, Georine Pierre, Jared Clifton
Marine Ecology: Benthic Lab, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories — John Oliver, Kamille Hammerstrom, Daniel Gossard
Fabrication: Kreysler & Associates — Bill Kreysler, Josh Zabel
Maintenance and Deployment Consultant: Ted Buhl
Naval Architecture & Engineering: Tri-Coastal Marine — Andrew Davis
Deployment Team, CCA: Piper Alldredge, Vishnu Balunsat, Joshua Eufinger, Viviani Isnata, Mithila Jagtap, Cassady Kenney, Cristian Laurent, Pete Pham
Deployment Team, Port of Oakland: Bill Morrison, Donald Ockrassa, Kevin Nekimken, Sean Wheels, Greg Skeen
Administrative Support: Dustin Smith, Amanda Schwerin, Karina O’Neill, Laura Ng, Sarah Lowe, JD Beltran, Wes Miller, Tracy Tanner
Project Sponsors: Miranda Leonard, Kreysler & Associates, Ashland Reactive Polymers, Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9, Port of Oakland, CCA Center for Impact
Photography: Architectural Ecologies Lab, Mike Campos (aerial photos)

Presidio Culvert Reef

Project Leaders: Evan Jones, Margaret Ikeda

Since 2018 professors Margaret Ikeda and Evan Jones have been working in Crissy Marsh in San Francisco’s Presidio to to promote habitats for oysters and other marine organisms in preparation for a new culvert within the marsh.

The project represents the final phase of the Doyle Drive redesign of the 101 freeway which includes connecting the Tennessee Hollow Watershed to the marsh and expanding the marsh inland to almost double it’s size. The Presidio Trust sought to tie the ecologies through two new sixty foot long culverts and came to the Architectural Ecologies Lab to look at the potential to increase the available habitat along these new hard edges.

Using parametric software, the Architectural Ecologies Lab designed a series of plates which built upon AEL research projects looking at optimized substrates for marine invertebrates  previously tested in Monterey Harbor and the San Francisco Bay, and currently part of the experiments deployed at the Float Lab in Middle Harbor Shoreline Park. Through the creation of diverse habitats along these new walls, an ecological connectivity can be facilitated to the new marshland.
In partnership with longtime collaborators, marine biologist at Benthic Lab in Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (John Oliver and Kamille Hammerstrom) and advanced polymer fabricators at Kreysler and Associates (Bill Kreysler and Joshua Zabel) two series of experimental plates were designed to understand the extent of the presence of oysters in the marsh.

AEL Research Fellow Sean Cunningham (CCA March ’19) worked throughout the project to adapt these digital workflows to the new plates. The first phase involved the generation of ten variable experimental substrates which comprised the research phase of the project. Variations in this phase included the addition of crushed oyster shells and whole shells onto the surface to study the effect of various surface materials.

With consultation and monitoring of Benthic Lab, these floating experiments were deployed into the marsh under floating glass buoys and able to recruit hundreds of oysters within the marsh over the course of nine months.

The success of creating oyster habitats on these plates formed the basis of the next phase of the project which involved working closely with the contractors to texture the culvert walls and design attachment ledgers to install the next series of plates.

These latest series of plate design, finalized during the pandemic lockdown, were installed in the finished culvert in early 2021. Four variations were designed which explored variations in surface rugosity, larger peaks and valleys and variable hole surfaces. A total of 32 Plates were constructed at Kreysler and Associates, using CNC routed molds and layers of fiber-reinforced polymer. The design of the attachment ledgers allows for the panels to be moved based on the ideal locations of oyster habitats and has ample attachment points for further panel research and explorations of alternate materials.

Visualizations of the plates for research purposes were created by Yitian Ma (CCA BArch ’22) and overall visualizations of the culvert by Marina Rosolem (CCA March ’20). Christine Mann from Benthic Lab is working to compile the results of the Floating plate experiments for future research publications.



Project Credits:
Project Leaders: Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones
Design Team: Sean Cunningham, Yitian Ma, Marina Rosolem
Marine Ecology: Benthic Lab, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories — John Oliver, Kamille Hammerstrom
Fabrication: Kreysler & Associates — Bill Kreysler, Josh Zabel

Public Sediment for Alameda Creek

Honor Award, American Society of Landscape Architects, National, 2019
Honor Award, American Society of Landscape Architects, New York Chapter, 2019
Urban Design Merit Award, AIA California Council, 2018
Best of Design Award for Analog Representation, The Architect’s Newspaper, 2018
Selected for Resilient By Design bay Area Challenge, 2017

CCA Faculty Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, and Evan Jones in collaboration with SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Arcadis, Dredge Research Collaborative, UC Davis, Cy Keener, and TS Studio

 

Public Sediment was developed for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, a design competition that brings together local residents, public officials, and local, national and international experts to develop innovative solutions to the issues brought on by climate change in the Bay Area. CCA faculty Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, and Evan Jones participated in a multi-disciplinary team on a year-long research and design collaboration focused on the Alameda Creek watershed in the East Bay. The design proposals built upon an earlier research phase and were presented to the public in May, 2018.

Our team proposes that sea level rise adaptation must happen upstream. Public Sediment for Alameda Creek unlocks the creek to feed downstream baylands with sediment and sustain protective tidal ecosystems as the climate changes. Tidal ecosystems are protective infrastructure that cushion the urban edges of the San Francisco Bay. Yet the Bay Area’s tidal ecosystems—its marshes, mudflats—are at risk. These systems require sediment to grow vertically in response to sea level rise – without sediment, our baylands will drown. Low sediment supply and bayland drowning represents a slow but devastating scale of loss that threatens ecosystems, recreational landscapes, and places hundreds of thousands of residents and the region’s critical drinking water, energy, and transportation systems at risk. To creatively adapt to this challenge, our team has focused on sediment, the building block of resilience in the Bay. Our team proposes to actively intervene in this ecological transformation by Designing with Mud and Making Sediment Public.

Public Sediment for Alameda Creek is a proposal to address the challenge of sediment scarcity along the vulnerable urban edges of Fremont, Union City, and Newark. To bring sediment to the baylands, we look upstream to Alameda Creek, the largest local tributary that feeds the Bay. Our proposal aims to redesign this waterbody to create functional systems that sustainably transport sediment, engage people, and provide habitat for anadromous fish. Our proposal moves beyond the tidal edge to span four geographies (uplands, creek, baylands, and bay).

We propose to Unlock Alameda Creek and link the creek with the baylands. The proposal provides a sustainable supply of sediment to baylands for sea level rise adaptation, reconnects migratory fish with their historic spawning grounds, and introduces a network of community spaces that reclaim the creek as a place for people, building an ethos and awareness around our public sediment resources.

The AEL team led the development of a central component of the proposal, the Living Levee. The Living Levee is a multibenefit strategy for revetment design that integrates ecological principles within an interlocking concrete module that helps limit erosion and support the surrounding ecosystem. Holes of variable size provide spaces for vegetation to grow and establish root structures in the soil, while also providing cover for fish along the channel edge and variable, multiscalar habitats for animals and humans that enhance biodiversity and support the local food web.

 

Project Credits & Collaborators:
AEL Team: Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones, Georine Pierre, Carlos Sabogal
SCAPE Landscape Architecture (team lead)
Arcadis
The Dredge Research Collaborative
TS Studio
UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Design
UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
Cy Keener

HOW WE HEAR NOW

How We Hear Now is a participatory, collective artwork presented by The ECOPOESIS Project, a multi-year initiative led by the Architectural Ecologies Lab and MFA in Writing program at the California College of the Arts. The project was initiated in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in lieu of the spring 2020 ECOPOESIS symposium/workshop gathering.

How We Hear Now invites participants to engage in audible changes in their environments—to record and transmit how, as humans moved into isolation, nonhuman ecologies have grown noticeably more audible during the COVID–19 pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders. Each participant constructed a sound recording of their environment on April 22, 2020, the fiftieth anniversary Earth Day, and provided a description of ecological or cultural factors. The audio recordings and environmental descriptions are compiled into a layered stream of sound and text, a visual and aural landscape of ecological observations collected during this unique time. The individual contributions meld together with a visualization of seismic data collected on April 22, representing the concurrent geological sound occurring at a planetary scale. The call for participation was re-issued for Earth Day 2021, expanding the artwork to include additional contributors.

How We Hear Now emerged in a space called “in lieu of” – in lieu of a physical gathering of people, how can human understandings of the environment be shared in a time of isolation.  Where Virginia Woolf’s notion of ‘street haunting’ (1930, essay of the same name) describes the stepping outside from the interiority of the home into the roiling anonymity and connectivity of the modern city, the reality of the pandemic opens a range of new sensory aspects towards the environment.  Encouraging reflections on the materiality of environmental experience, this project acts as a transmitter collecting and sharing these through observation, sound, and text.

Each iteration of How We Hear Now is unique. The sequence and overlap of individual contributions varies with each instance of the artwork, producing new patterns, rhythms, experiences, and unanticipated connections between the individual recordings and voices. This video above contains 45 minutes of How We Hear Now, providing a glimpse of the collective voice that emerges.

How We Hear Now is a collaborative exercise in ecological thought and emotional response. It offers an open-ended field of text, recording and visual patterns to create an immersion space of reading and listening. With no beginning, end, or prescribed sequence, it simply asks to consider how do we hear the world now?  These different narratives of environmental experience from the same day offer viewers/listeners a prompt to consider their sense of environmental presence and its complex nature. On another level, the project is an open framework that can be transformed for future iterations, to different circumstances, and still open for additional participatory input. 

From June 25 to July 10, 2021, How We Hear Now was installed at the San Francisco Ferry Building.


Project team: Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, Chris Falliers, Patrick Monte, Vishnu Balunsat, Margot Becker

Creative Direction, Coding, and Design: Patrick Monte

Technical Assistant, Ferry Building Installation: Samuel Higgwe

Contributors: Erik Adigard, Rob Bailey, Amy Balkin, Vishnu Balunsat, Michelle Boyd, Rita Bullwinkel, Civyiu Kkliu / Robert Machado, Kevin Claiborne, William Cook, Ellora Daley, Alicia Escott, Christopher Falliers, Isha Fathmath, Garth Fry, Guillermo Galindo (aka gal*in_dog), Edith Garcia, David Gross, Lindsay Haddix, Shy Pacheco Hamilton, Gregory W. Hurcomb, Evan Jones, Wioleta Kaminska, Adam Marcus, Christie McGee, Sarah Meftah, Marc Northstar, Denise Newman, Helen-Maria Nugent, Catie Newell, Colin Priest, Kaus Raghukumar, Leslie Carol Roberts, Sharan Saboji, Alex Schofield, Shobha Shivakumar, Ross Simonini, Allison Smith, Ignacio Valero, Michael Wertz

#ecopoesis #howwehearnow

 
Ecopoesis 2020 Graphics_horiz-pixels.jpg
 

The Ecopoesis Project

“We are and were always, always doing Ecopoesis, and the trouble is, we were doing it unconsciously. Blake says that a religion is a poem that people start believing in, and we've been subjected to all kinds of religions about what the so-called natural world is—it's an inert object, you can manipulate it.... Ecopoesis is the most important architectural project I've seen right now, and I get around. I hesitate to say, 'on the planet' because I don't know the whole planet, but now that I've hesitated let's say it: Ecopoesis has planetary significance."

— Timothy Morton

ECOPOESIS is about re-thinking and re-imagining how people see and feel their own ecologies and their roles in times of climate change.

ECOPOESIS gathers humans together for a meal or coffee to establish shared, collective contexts and understandings, about local wisdoms, about questions, about anxieties – around ecological awareness and climate change.

ECOPOESIS is about models – about how we use words and forms to make mental and physical models of our worlds.

ECOPOESIS is about sharing our models – through sharing our process – through discussion and dialogue, through language and form making.

We believe in the power of gathering – to create a collective context and vocabulary, to see paths forward for humans and more-than-humans alike.

The practice of ecological storytelling by writers, designers, and artists produces texts, objects, and speculative representations often towards a polemic and often in isolation by discipline. The history of ecological storytelling, from paleolithic cave dwellers’ depictions suggesting a unity with nature, to utopian promises and dystopian warnings, illustrates an evolving sense of human relational identity to nature. Within the context of evolving philosophies and ecologies, The Ecopoesis Project at California College of the Arts is a multi-year sequence of collaborative, interdisciplinary gatherings exploring front-line concerns around ecology, climate, and spatial expression. As our everyday lives are increasingly suffused by the impacts of climate change and climate chaos, The Ecopoesis Project explores the language, syntax, diction, form, media, and representations of ecological uncertainty.

The Ecopoesis Project is a collaboration between CCA’s MFA Writing Program and Architectural Ecologies Lab, offering a place for interdisciplinary discussion of ecologies as form and language.

 

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

  • Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, and Chris Falliers, “Ecopoesis: Ecological Gatherings Towards Multi-disciplinary Solidarity.” Creative Activism: Research, Pedagogy and Practice. Elspeth Tilley, ed. UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2022 (forthcoming - in press)

RELATED TALKS & PRESENTATIONS

  • Association for the Study of Language and the Environment, annual conference EMERGENCE(Y), 2021. “How We Hear Now: Spatial Practice and the Materiality of Ecological Stories.” (Leslie Carol Roberts and Chris Falliers)

  • Keynote, International Conference for Ecological Arts Therapies, “Ecological/Earth-Based Arts Therapies: International and Multi-Cultural Perspectives”, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2020. “How We Hear Now.” (Leslie Carol Roberts and Chris Falliers)

  • International Feminist Journal of Politics Annual Conference, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 2020. “The Ecopoesis Project.” (Leslie Carol Roberts)

  • Maldives National University, Maldives, 2019. “The Ecopoesis Project." (Leslie Carol Roberts)

  • Ganges, France, 2019. “The Ecopoesis Project.” (Leslie Carol Roberts)

  • University of California Santa Barbara, “Next Earth: Teaching Climate Change Across the Disciplines” conference, 2019. “The Ecopoesis Project: Advocating Logics of Future Coexistence.” (Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, and Chris Falliers)

Project Credits:
Ecopoesis Chairs: Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, Chris Falliers
Project Assistants: Vishnu Balunsat, Jared Elizares, Anise Aiello
Graphic Design: Ryan Legaspi
Staff Support: Matthew Tedford, Dustin Smith, Mike Rothfeld, Leah Kandel, Sarah Meftah, ShawnJ West, Johnny Galvan
Sponsorship: CCA MFA in Writing Program, CCA Architectural Ecologies Lab, CCA Architecture Division, CCA Humanities & Sciences Division

Optimized Ecological Substrates

Project Leaders: Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones

The focus of this ongoing research collaboration is to develop and monitor contoured, digitally-fabricated fiber-reinforced polymer composite substrates that, through geometric variation, provide upside-down hills and valleys that can serve as habitats for invertebrate animals. These underwater topographies are optimized to create multi-scalar habitats that encourage settlement of different invertebrate species that contribute to the biological diversity of the marine ecology.

The research challenges conventional notions of “fouling”—the unwanted accumulation of marine life on the underside of floating structures that is commonly seen as a nuisance. Instead, this project seeks to invert that premise, proposing that optimized cultivation of fouling communities can promote broader ecological biodiversity, attenuate wave action, and reduce shoreline erosion, thereby helping to mitigate the effects of sea level rise on coastal communities. Potential applications of this highly performative material include floating structures, seawalls, and other erosion control structures.

Since 2014, the collaborative team of designers, ecologists, and manufacturers has produced nearly two dozen prototypes that have been installed underwater for monitoring and documentation. The success of these prototypes has informed the design and construction of the Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab, a larger prototype deployed in Oakland’s Middle Harbor in 2018, as well as habitats for native oysters in development at San Francisco’s Presidio.

 

Project Credits:
Project Leaders: Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones
Marine Ecology: Benthic Lab, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories — John Oliver, Kamille Hammerstrom, Daniel Gossard
Fabrication: Kreysler & Associates — Bill Kreysler, Josh Zabel
Project Sponsors: Kreysler & Associates, Ashland Reactive Polymers, Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9, Port of Oakland

Public Sediment - Research Phase

CCA Faculty Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, and Evan Jones in collaboration with SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Arcadis, Dredge Research Collaborative, UC Davis, Cy Keener, and TS Studio

Public Sediment is one of ten projects selected for the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, a design competition that brings together local residents, public officials, and local, national and international experts to develop innovative solutions to the issues brought on by climate change in the Bay Area.

Public Sediment proposes to invest in ecological infrastructure and its protective value. Yet the Bay area’s ecological infrastructure—its marshes, mudflats, and coastal edges—are at risk. The slow and methodical subsidence of the Bay’s tidal wetlands is a catastrophe of tremendous proportion not just for ecosystems, but for communities. Combined with sea level rise, this subsidence exposes hundreds of thousands of residents and the region’s critical drinking water, energy, and transportation infrastructure to tremendous risk. To creatively adapt to this challenge, our team proposes to focus on sediment, the building block of resilience in the Bay.

Public Sediment proposes to actively intervene in this ecological transformation by designing with mud. We propose to connect the uplands and the lowlands with a series of sediment actions. We will harvest and retrofit dams, unlock tributary channels, and test new methods of mud placement that use currents to effectively move sediment in the Bay. But this is not enough. We must make sediment public. To do this, we propose a series of connective paths, outdoor floating mud rooms, and sensing stations, that link vulnerable neighborhoods with the Bay and engage youth in monitoring of the environment—visualizing climate change in their backyards.

We propose three scales of Public Sediment, each framing a distinct action to catalyze social and ecological resilience, with mud, in the Bay. These projects are called: Pilots for a Future Bay, the Bay Cushion, and Unlock Alameda Creek.

For more info on the final design proposal that Public Sediment presented at the conclusion of the competition, see this link.

 

Project Credits & Collaborators:
Buoyant Ecologies / AEL Team: Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones, Georine Pierre
SCAPE Landscape Architecture (team lead)
Arcadis
The Dredge Research Collaborative
TS Studio
UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Design
UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
Cy Keener

Antarctica Poetica

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Professor Leslie Carol Roberts
Chair, CCA MFA in Writing Program

My ongoing research and writing work focus on how we place ourselves in a landscape and what we do when we get there – with a particular lens on places deemed wild and free. While my first Antarctic book looks at the region through the lens of the humanities – The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica (Nebraska) and starts a conversation about how we know and understand The Ice through story – subsequent books will broaden and expand on this lens. I have lived in and around the Antarctic for more than three months and have documented The Ice and the people and their activities through extensive photography. My expanded Antarctic project, Antarctica Poetica looks equally at the political science of the region as well as the poetics. There is perhaps more political writing than poetic writing about the region which is, in and of itself, bizarre. The peculiar way humans identify with the poles – since the time of the Ancient Greeks – continues to fascinate me, from stories of how the poles are “holes” leading to worlds within worlds, to global political regimes that allow any traveler to make landfall on the continent and to travel about without passport or currency. Late 20th century political protest and legal work to create a commons of the Antarctic and the recent moves to create a marine sanctuary in the Ross Sea equally drive my inquiries, as does my own obsession with the materiality of human exploration through ephemera such as postcards, brochures, books, and other printed matter.