Barry Bergdoll is changing MOMA for the better. With Rising Currents his vision of the museum as a proactive "research laboratory" takes a big step forward. Like any fledgling it bobbles a little. Hybridizing two "glocal" political issues, the $787 billion stimulus package and rising water levels due to global warming, this research cluster charged 5 teams, made of up New York design firms, to consider unique conditions around the Hudson bay and New York City water front.

The work that came out of it has many merits, they are expansive visions, all beautifully physically modelled  and create engaging animated diagrams. The documentation brings these conceptual designs into the world to be examined in some level of detail. In reading the fine print and looking at the projects themselves, there are moments of brilliance and some unfortunate liquified thoughts.

LTL seems nostalgic for the robust urban futures we experienced before the recession. They depict research center's and amphitheaters, essentially a low-lying wetland that becomes the kind of urbanized entertainment and parkland that is being developed along the Brooklyn Waterfront today. The best part of their proposal is a farmers market that unifies local produce with regional farms -- doing what small local farmers markets are already doing in all the five boroughs.

Mathew Baird's boards are rife with small type, so small that it was unreadable from afar being kept behind the layers of people craning in. His "soft infrastructure" and glass reefs seemed sure to keep the industrial heritage of the bay alive and the feet of any beach goers bloody.

Kate Orf of Scape created possibly the most feasible design solution to the problem by utilizing underwater muscle and oyster nets to mitigate storm surges and filter the water. This kind of low impact response has the kind of environmental hacker ingenuity that would be good to see in all the work.

ARO, maybe because they came a little late to the game, developed lower Manhattan into a sponge. They quite literally created a new water run-off system, diverting rising tides to wetland areas. At first glance the sectional drawings and small renderings look like images of a bucolic lower urbanized edge, the site plan however leaves one's jaw open, lower Manhattan has been sucked up by the salty bay waters, with ARO's wetland "sponge" expanding to roughly the size of prospect park being dispersed into the Hudson. 

nArchitects redeveloped the waterfront creating a kind of suspended Dutch seaside village. Problematically though, rising tides would flush the low-impact "green" waste-water plantings back into the bay. The best part of their proposal are island water-barriers in the Hudson. These storm barriers provide an archipelago for residents to explore and visit. 

In some ways what is left out from the show is the truly big move (like Koolhaas' suggestion to fill in the Charles river for Harvard's expansion) it's this aversion to the Bob Moses of plans that makes me fear that New York's architects have lost the stomach for urbanism. Will we be left to the whims of bureaucrats mapping out "populations." Maybe what this kind of disaster calls for are Burnham scaled ideas, lets see em.