Projects
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53.3
Reconnect
Competition
Concept
2011
We propose to flood the study area to take false creek back to its 1898 boundary, burying Pacific and Expo Boulevards, a portion of Main and Quebec Streets, and Terminal Avenue in CO2 harvesting vehicular traffic tunnels. The resulting 9 meter tall, 6 km long extension to the existing seawall is thickened so that in addition to retaining earth and water, it is also occupied by a monolithic wall of 3 story tall waterfront row housing, fronting directly onto false creek. We propose that the city act as the developer for this new market housing typology, and that profits are used to fund the flooding and other elements of this design submission. The seawall foundation is furnished with a massive geoplate heat exchange system, providing heating and cooling to not only the study area, but to all of downtown Vancouver.
Flooded developable land area is replaced by an archipelago of 800 islands of various sizes. Larger islands are fixed, and become new homes for the Vancouver Art Gallery, the currently planned Great Northern Way Campus, and other large cultural and institutional programs. Smaller islands float, and are occupied by a variety of green industry and commercial programs. Bike and pedestrian traffic occurs along a flexible network of 1500 retractable, detachable bridges, which span across the archipelago, linking the islands to each other, to the seawall, and to the existing urban fabric. Islands and bridges have the ability to organize and re-assemble in various ways in response to solar orientation, market demands, symbiotic relationships with other islands, the weather, and any number of other internal or external stimulus. Material and cargo are ferried by boat.
Each of the smaller islands is furnished with a micro-living machine. Sewage is naturally processed over time through anaerobic process in the basement of each island (in tanks, by microorganisms), and then, after it loses odor, through aerobic process by the introduction of increasingly complex bio matter ecosystems (within pool gardens that surround each island). Floating islands make a slow yearly itinerary through false creek, picking up waste and gathering additional plant and animal life at seven bio-depots (which are also conceived of as residential point towers); at the conclusion of the yearly itinerary, the sewage collected is completely degraded and safely discharged into false creek, and the islands return to the sewage depot for another load. Micro-living machines on the 800 islands proposed can metabolize the sewage output of roughly half of the inhabitants of the City of Vancouver. -
