New Portfolio Site!

Hello hello!

Sorry for the long hiatus! Thesis has come and gone, which means my time at MIT has ended as well. I am now living in Berkeley, CA, attempting to recover from the past 3.5 years. Part of that process is a new website with my design and photography work. Check it out at:

www.bucksleeper.com

It is still being populated, so be sure to check back!
Buck

Fresh from the Maldives

Immediately after arriving in the Maldives my laptop died with a quiet finality. As such, I was unable to post but spent the time instead writing and drawing in my notebook and exploring with my camera. I have just arrived in Paris after spending some time in Dubai, Italy, and briefly Switzerland, and will be here for several days before going to Amsterdam for a week to check out their long heritage of dykes and dams.

The Maldives was a total success- I managed to visit 6 islands in my attempt to discover the unseen economies that support its tourist industries, and scoured its shores for evidence of marine erosion and the many strategies to combat increased coastal vulnerability. Perhaps most fascinating is the discovery that nobody in the Maldives seems actually much concerned about the prospect of global warming. There are, for many people, more immediate concerns, such as increasing agricultural yields, curtailing political corruption, and attracting international investors. But in the long term, most Maldivians seem to have sufficient faith in the adaptability of the islands through the growth and deposition of coral. However, many islands have been developed to the point where they are no longer adaptable, either because they are entirely capped in concrete, or because the encroachment of boats and buildings have devastated the local reefs. Additionally, I was told several times by officials that the Maldives is actually trying to tone down the impending disaster rhetoric, as it has been scaring off potential developers.

A few pictures:

Goods are loaded into the upper warehouse of a store near the commercial

port in Male'. Nearby, fish and fruits and vegetables also arrive by boat from

local islands.

Concrete tetrapods (those shown here are a gift from Japan in 1988) protect
the coast while allowing waves to circulate through, thereby promoting cleaner
harbor waters and reducing displacement as wave action moves around the pods instead of
just against them.

The Maldives is essentially a closed system. All garbage is either reused, recycled,
or displaced to Thilafushi (a nearby reef) where it is pushed into the ocean to
form new land for industrial and manufacturing use.

Flood Gates

The Bonnet Carre gates, viewed from below

A crane on rails is used to open and close individual sluices

A water meter reads as high as 25', three less than the storm surge during Katrina

Swimmers below Highway 10

Lake Pontchartrain

A communications station inside the Spillway

About 12 miles north of New Orleans, a portion of the upper bank of the Mississippi gives way to 350 crane operated sluice gates, forming the massive entry point of the Bonnet Carre Spillway. The spillway is effectively a 7600-acre channel shaped basin linking the river to Lake Pontchartrain, allowing flood waters to be bled off the Mississippi before they inundate the city downriver.

Since 1937, the sluices have been opened only nine times (not during Katrina), typically for a period of 30-60 days until the water levels have receded to safe conditions. Otherwise, the spillway is open for recreation and game habitat, with the understanding that it could be called into action at anytime. When we visited it earlier in the week, it was almost entirely uninhabited, with the exception of a few people fishing, a car load of kids swimming under highway 10 (which crosses the site on raised pylons) and an abandoned radio-controlled airplane club runway. Otherwise, the landscape is dotted with bulldozers, evidence of the common practice of borrowing fill from the spillway to shore up the city's levees or individual homes. The beauty of this arrangement is that as excavation expands the basin, the spillway becomes more effective, and the levee defenses of New Orleans are correspondingly improved.

The precedent it sets from an architectural point of view is pretty compelling: in an otherwise flat environment, the strategic excavation and deposition of ground material can have dual benefits. Depending on flood conditions, a the Bonnet Carre could then be used to collect sediment that could be dredged and repositioned as fill or fertilizer, thus creating a landscape-scaled machine for land production. In the Maldives, I imagine an island that has been pocketed with channels and pools open to the sea that could collect coral broken during the two annual monsoons. Once loaded onto barges, the material could be sold to area resorts looking to raise their own islands. In calmer parts of the year, these pools could be employed to raise fish, or collect freshwater. These landscapes would be fantastic, and might themselves constitute a new type of tourist destination piggybacked onto an expanding market of territorial expansion. Twice a year the island would be flooded and systematically dredged and sold. Hotels rooms would be twice the price.

Google Earth view of gates on North bank of Mississippi River

The 7600-acre Spillway, connecting the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain

Making It Right

New Orleans' Industrial Canal which toppled its levees to flood
the Lower 9th Ward during Katrina. The levee, on the right, has since been replaced.

Thom Mayne's Float House. Built by students at UCLA and trucked onsite.

The Lower 9th Ward, partially reconstructed by Make It Right.

Reconstructed levee, viewed from inside the Lower 9th.

The Brad Pitt pet project "Make It Right" has been working diligently building homes in the flood ravaged Lower 9th Ward. The organization has several agendas, primarily to reconstruct a residential fabric, provide advocacy for local homeowners, and to design and build a series of single-family housing prototypes. That there are 30 constructed homes and 12 more coming on line in the next 6 months is evidence of their great success, but I wonder if they don't suffer from too many decision makers in the progress.

The general premise of the project was to invite a consortium of domestic and international architects, some quite well known (Shigaru Ban, Frank Gehry) to submit designs for a catalog, from which locals pick a design and tailor it to their specific preferences before construction. Such modifications considered include window placement, siding type and color, overall footprint, and layout. While intrinsically I value the participation of the home owner, I wonder if their involvement doesn't compromise other architectural agendas of the project relating to performance, form, and aesthetics. That's me speaking as an architect. From the perspective of the owner, I wonder if having a Frank Gehry around doesn't make your journey to homeownership that much more problematic, as particular ideas about programming and form which make them archtecturally interesting are not necessarily consisent with your own ambitions or lifestyle.

The real potential (and success so far) of this project is its position as an urban laboratory. As a collection of carefully crafted and considered projects, Make It Right can deploy envelopes, materials, and mechanical systems in an effort to produce a building that is perfectly tuned for Lousiana's heat, humidity, and flood danger. But if that's the case, let's stop looking at it within the context of social activism and simply allow the crisis of Katrina to be the subtext for its existense. I suppose I find the vernacular predilections of the region to be too restricting to the design process: Make It Right is certainly progressive, but it is restrained so far to variations on local construction techniques and types. The most avante garde of the built projects is Thom Mayne's Float House which he built in California with a team of students at UCLA. The Float House is built to act as a boat, rising up on its concrete and polystyrene deck on two steel pins in the event of another break in the levee. The primary flood aversion strategy of homes in the New Orleans region is to literally raise them above the worst-case-scenario level. I met a man in the French Quarter who's sister had rebuilt her house in New Orleans East sixteen feet off the ground. The Float House presents an interesting compromise: at three-feet above grade it can maintain a close connection to the social fabric of the community, but during an emergency switches modes passively to protect occupants and property.

Moving forward, the concept of a forming an institution dedicated to the production of prototypes could be applicable to the immediate problems of the Maldives. I can imagine a school or a series of workshops attached to a materials manufacturing plant to design and deploy prototypes to resorts and remote islands, quickly fine tuning designs before scaling up to a national relief effort. Many thanks again to Make It Right for showing me around their project in New Orleans.

Tall Wall

Just a few quick pictures from the Lake Borgne Barrier on the Industrial Canal outside of New Orleans. More later.

In the French Quarter

A few thoughts:

I spent my first full day in the oldest part of New Orleans, the French Quarter, and it has become increasingly clear that to get a better sense of the larger water management issues I'll have to wait until tomorrow when I pick up my car. In the French Quarter buildings are built directly on the street with occupied ground floors, evidence that the original settlement was built on higher ground to begin with. Areas that are prone to flooding (such as the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans East, and St. Bernard Parish) developed later with the advent of A. Baldwin Wood's Screw Pump in 1913. This highly efficient device stabilized water levels throughout New Orleans, opening further land to building as well as reducing instances of Yellow Fever and Malaria. Though pumping technologies have been instrumental in the rapid expansion of the city, a complete dependence upon them renders it fatally vulnerable in the event of any sort of failure.

A very wet Bourbon Street.

Today's findings are largely anecdotal, but I have tried to track down primary source materials that back them up:

1) It's especially interesting what happens to land ownership during a crisis. In parts of Indonesia and the Maldives, the 2004 tsunami wiped out large parts of coastline from which residents were relocated, and in their absence, these areas were redeveloped into lucrative beachside resorts. In New Orleans, legislation from the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Development Administration establishes criteria for which a property can be seized, demolished, and sold if considered to be 'blight' or a 'public nuisance.' Such violations include chronic vacancy, failing to meet housing code, and unsanitary living conditions. This is a diffucult precedent considering Katrina and Rita destroyed 350,000 homes. With many homes left standing or being rebuilt by individual owners, the resulting sites are irregular but ubiquitous. This amorphous space could be the city's primary architectural task; rather than attempting to simply redesign the single family home, a systematic and scalable deployment of parts might define the next architectural paradigm for the city, even as it conforms to and celebrates existing fabric.
More on housing blight available in the ORDA code enforcement handbook.

2) Of course the big news here is no longer Katrina, but the Deep Water drilling platform which exploded on April 20th. Evidence of this massive catastrophe in the heart of New Orleans is subtle- a group of tourists wearing "spill baby spill" tshirts, and at Broussard's restaurant, the kitchen was out of the local fish entrees.

3) On June 3rd the White House demanded that BP finance much of a project to create large sand berms to top the oil from coming ashore, which BP has resited by claimin it is a hurricane relief project. By all estimates, the 50-100 miles would do both... Both the White House and the governor's office would be wise to leverage the conditions of this current crisis to protect the city from the next one. The project is estimated to cost $360 million.

Tomorrow I have three main events:

First, a visit to the Bonnet Carre Spillway, which is a 7600-acre basin to collect water in a surge event: excavated soil becomes the base material for expanding area levees. Win-win. When not in use (it has been activated 9 times since 1937) it acts as habitat and game reserve. Win again.

Next, a local resident suggested I drive St Claude Avenue to explore a cross section of the neighborhoods most affected (and still affected) by Katrina's flooding.

And finally, I have several appointments in tall buildings to take some pictures from their upper floors. Very classy.

There are a lot of these, but then again, I'm looking for them.

Last Resort: New Orleans Day 1

(June 05, 2010)
And so begins the traveling component of Last Resort. The premise of this project is at first quite simple: locate coastal regions at risk from rising sea levels, investigating effects upon the urban landscape and the reaction as manifested through architecture and infrastructure. This is not a project about maintaining the status quo, but leverages a radical future landscape as the primary instigator for the exploration of new architecture types. With that in mind, I am equally interested in exploring emerging technologies in energy and building as well as the integration of economies to facilitate a more resilient mode of development.

A drainage canal in Kenner, Louisiana visible just before landing at the Louis Armstrong Airport.

The reclamation or defense of livable coastal territories has historically fallen into one of two categories: the “mega” (think the Aswan Damn, or the Thames Barrier) sponsored by the state; and the “micro” (typically individual houses), supported by individuals and proliferated through an open market. I will travel to five locations at significant risk to inundation: New Orleans, the Maldives, Dubai, the Netherlands, and San Francisco Bay. As I am writing, we have just reached our cruising altitude of 37000 feet enroute from San Francisco, where I am starting my journey, through to Chicago, and then New Orleans. That my research is contributing the problem at hand is not lost on me. I submit that my willingness to burn this much fossil fuel is not an affront to environmentalism, but indicative of a larger issue: ecological profiles are changing rapidly throughout the world, and even a complete (and unlikely) reversal of CO2 emissions might be too late.

Interstate 10, with New Orleans Skyline and Superdome visible center background

I know that sounds horribly cynical, but for the time being there is no better way to gather a wider image of what is at stake. Though coastal landscapes of the 22nd century might be radically different than they are today, with some foresight and a dash of creativity, they might be completely awesome, more attuned to their specific environments, and free from dependence of fossil fuels. Through the projection of a catastrophic condition, it is possible to produce prototypes for immediate implementation in areas already at risk.

With the generous support of the Schlossman Foundation and Kohn Penderson Fox's 2010 Traveling Fellowship, I will research and photograph a series of small scale projects, such as the Dutch Duravermeer floating houses outside of Rotterdam and the Make It Right houses in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, as well as large scale infrastructures including a man-made island for 150,000 climate refugees in the Maldives or the 2-mile long surge barrier on Louisiana's Inner Harbor Navigation Channel.

Upon returning to MIT in the Fall of 2010 I will focus my research on the Maldives, synthesizing my findings into a proposal for an incremental intervention that will anticipate a territorial demise. And so Last Resort has hijacked Fake Buildings, which has been my design and photography blog throughout grad school. Check back for periodic updates. My schedule is as follows:

June 5-10: New Orleans
June 19: Get married (!)
July 1-14: the Maldives
July 14-17: Dubai
July 26-August 8: the Netherlands
August 8-26: San Francisco

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Inundated

Just a teaser!

But, more to come as soon as the semester winds down. Right now I am finishing up my last studio (!) with Nader Tehrani, on the design of an architecture school in Melbourne. Next up: thesis! My thesis, entitled "Last Resort?! A Tour Guide to Crisis in the Maldives" will be a probe into several architectural typologies for a sinking nation, with a specific interest in resort architecture. I'll be going in July, for two weeks!




Sorry the second image isn't larger, but here's the text:

Last Resort is siutated in the Republic of the Maldives, a low-lying island nation in the Indian Ocean. At an average height of one meter, the Maldives is projected to be entirely inundated by the year 2100. The conflation of rising sea levels and a burgeoning population provokes architectural intervention at a national scale.

The primary design project of this thesis is an exploration of aquatic urban programs, focusing on the resort, to faciliate a response to crisis that is strategic in the short term and enduring in the future. Last Resort adopts impending catastrophe not as a mandate for future “solutions” but as an opportunity to radicalize current paradigms.


The Maldives, a small nation of 350,000 in the Indian Ocean is best known for its white sand beaches, but it is quickly becoming the poster child for global climate change. With an average height across 1200 islands at only 1 meter, it is positioned to become the first state toppled by environmental catastrophe.

In May of 2009, The New York Times reported Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed’s proposal to create a sovereign wealth fund with which he plans to buy land elsewhere and move the entire nation. However, to move the Maldives is to abandon their economic and cultural heritage: without the warm oceans and resort-laden islands that drive tourism and fishing, the country would be unrecognizable.

This thesis will investigate the specific conditions of Male’, the Maldives capital city-island, using it as a base condition from which to generate architectural interventions formulated upon the impending crisis of sea level change. Those conditions are not limited simply to “problem” of catastrophe, but extend to encompass the “culture” of climate change as well. Soneva Gilli, a local resort island, will serve as a site for smaller interventions.

That Male’ is a dense, multi-programmed urban environment makes it ideal for speculation on the effects of climate change; I submit that it might be approached as an urban laboratory. Male’s population of 103,000 people on 1.9 square kilometers results in a density twice that of Manhattan, and reveals already the current (and accelerating) crisis of housing and territory shortage. In 2004 the Maldives began an expansion three miles to the North, on the artificial island of Hulhumale. Created by dredging material from the bottom of the seabed, as was done at the Palm Island and World developments in Dubai, the Maldives hopes to create a new community on a relatively higher (2 meters) piece of land that will house 80,000 people; it is an inadequate replacement for Male’ in terms of capacity, and is insufficient in dealing with the longer issue of continuity of the state.

Furthermore, the Maldives primary economic sector, tourism, might be leveraged as the crucial link to the international community, bringing an influx of foreign capital and culture into the equation. Traditionally tourism in the Maldives, as in many resort towns, has seen super-elite hotels placed in the most remarkable territories while the indigenous population base is relegated to marginal lands and squalid conditions. In a future where territory is incredibly scarce, this is a relationship that bears reexamination.

STAGE ZERO

Another semester down...almost. Yesterday was the final review for Mark Goulthorpe's Stage Zero studio, which involved designing sound stages and other program for Plymouth Rock Studios in Massachusetts. My project is below, along with its written "manifesto..."

December 2010: After only 4 months of construction, Plymouth Rock is nearing completion on Pod Zero, an experimental redeployment of traditional studio programs and a large scale digital fabrication prototype. Typically, film studio place each of its programs in a separate building, achieving a certain degree of autonomy and privacy but denying entirely the social and intellectual exchange that might occur between teams. As we have seen in the Gensler master plan, Sound Stages, post production, utilities, the central rock theater, and administration offices are proposed as a series of objects in the landscape. By creating small, isolated nodes, this traditional approach is redundant in terms of its mechanical and vehicular infrastructure, as well as an excess amount of envelope exposed to the difficult new england weather.

Pod Zero proposes linking the disparate stages of production: the shoot, the edit, and the premiere, into a single unitary and continuous building. Each of these buildings is conceived of as a series of structural bays running along the existing topography to minimize cut and fill and utilize the ground's thermal mass. Each bay is orchestrated parametrically through a generative components model which controls for figure, span, structural depth, roof and wall slope, orientation to prevailing winds, and aperture for view and solar gain, responding plastically to the requirements of the programs encased within.

By twisting the building sectionally, a variety of structural and spatial typologies are produced, morphing from shear wall, to pitched roof, to moment frame. The sloping surfaces produce the raked floors of the auditoriums, provide sheltered outdoor areas, and permit light and ventilation into the central court. The frames are manufactured in three or four components out of fiberglass in area nautical fab labs, limited in size by the 100x150 foot mills used by boat manufactures, They are airlifted or trucked into place as required. There are two primary types of connections between pieces: fixed to carry moment or pinned to the extent that they are structurally viable (no more than three hinges).

Each unique element is created from a mold of milled polyurethane foam or a through a reusable rubber formwork over a customized frame. Monolithically cast fiberglass floor plates rest on shelves integrated into the primary columns. Each element is designed with stairs, seating, and infrastructural plugs premilled into their form, shifting labor and time from man to machine. Operable ETFE pillows negotiate the non-planar geometry between bays, with interlayers for shading and thermal insulation when necessary. Each program has specific relationship to the parametric model. The sound stages require a clear span of up to 150 feet, and are almost entirely opaque to reduce solar gain because of their heavy heat load from internal lighting equipment. The roof is deployed to open to the north and west, capturing indirect light and ventilation. The sound stages are designed with an interior skin of rubberized acoustic gills, which, when opened between shots, can help quickly cool the space and reduce the need for artificial lighting. Each stage is served by a scene shop, which contains all ancillary programs, such as costumes, electronics, and storage. These spaces are open directly to the structure, but maintain their orientation towards the North for passive lighting. At the end of the building, the width narrows to accommodate a block of administrative and production suites. Connected underground to the primary sound stage, it is from here that each individual film is managed and produced. On the courtyard side, the structural bays rotate to define a series of private and shared office suites. On the forested side, the aperture contracts, blocking light and noise for a flexible galley of rendering rooms. Throughout the building, individual columns can be expanded locally to accommodate fire stairs and elevators. Throughout the complex, the hollow structure doubles as utility shafts and ventilation ducts.

Each building has at its middle a program related to the cultural production of film: a series of theaters for premiere events, a conference hall and gallery for guild conventions, and a public mediateque devoted to cinematic theory. The three buildings together form the Pod, which shares an underground loading dock, thus minimizing paved surfaces on site. Above this service area the ground flows through the central courtyard in a pixelated derivation of the existing topography; square fiberglass planting basins creating discrete outdoor platforms that collectively shape an amphitheater for 1000 people. This central space and its adjacent programs provides a social anchor for Pod Zero; mediating between the relative isolation required of the sound stages and collective creative potential of its tenants.

FLIP

I'm in the process of finishing up my final project for a photography class this Fall with Anne Whiston Spirn. My project is called Flip, a brief photographic essay of the Fort Point neighborhood in Boston. Click through for the full story.

http://web.mit.edu/bsleeper/www/index.html