Performative Landscapes

_______________Galveston Bay, Texas 2007

Design Team: David Newton

Concept_

All along the Gulf Coast, from Houston to New Orleans, the problematics of building in littoral areas, in soft wetland meshwork spaces, are emerging and being confronted by planning and design strategies that employ fragmentational and anti-ecological thinking to disastrous effect/affect. These defunct urban planning and architectural design strategies essentially set New Orleans up for the disaster that Hurricane Katrina would cause in 2005. Counter to this anti-ecological approach, Performative Landscapes seeks to develop soft infrastructural systems that explore the material and organizational models afforded by wetland systems/meshworks in the creation of a coastal planning strategy that seeks interrelation, inclusion, and hybridity in contrast to exclusion, fragmentation, and homogeneity. What new social, legal, spatial, and economic organizations will emerge from a serious and prolonged engagement with the wetland meshwork, its material logics, its organizing logics, and its use as machine for pollution reclamation, erosion protection, wildlife farming and habitat, as well as, eco-tourism?

At the edge of Houston’s dense urban mat, suburban and industrial clusters flake-off and fragment into the undeveloped countryside each securing a moment of partial autonomy until the dense mat driven by its market forces can eventually catch-up, absorb these forward deployments, and dispatch yet others further ahead. Like viral particles hop-scotching through a body, these clusters advance, projecting the city’s material and spatializing logics into the dense ecological webs of the coastal wetlands, replacing multi-performative ecological infrastructures with the mono-performative mineralized tissues of the modern city. In this exchange soft systems are traded for hard. The spongy wetland floor meshworks are replaced by hard mineralized strata like asphalt, concrete, and compacted earth. Slowness (soft surfaces) is exchanged for speed (hard surfaces), and in so doing so is erosion, flood, and pollution protection, as well as, scenic beauty and wildlife habitat. This dynamic ensues on a programmatic level, as well, as field logics are supplanted by exclusionary fragmentation, or as the categorization diagram moves from a logic of gradients, systems, and blends to one of hard boundaries and homogeneity.

In the last 30 years the Galveston Bay area, along the Gulf Coast of Texas, has lost over 30,000 acres of wetland from a multitude of human activities in and along the bay. With this sobering reduction in wetlands, pollution in the bay has risen to dangerous levels as storm water run-off, no longer filtered or detained by wetland meshworks, is conducted directly into the bay by the city’s hardened surfaces (streets, parking lots, roofs). The result is a massive degradation of coastal wildlife, commercial fishing revenue, quality of living, and human health along Galveston Bay. This dynamic is not isolated to Galveston Bay, but can be found throughout coastal areas along the gulf. The importance of developing innovative design strategies based off ecological thinking is therefore paramount if post-modern urban projects are to prosper in coastal areas. This project therefore situates itself in this milieu and seeks to rethink urban infrastructure/urban fabric as an organism for water purification, retention, and celebration.