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.

The Functionality is pleased to publish this article by our friend Kevin Brodkorb, an architect and contractor working in Denver, Colorado, the western edge of America's "tornado alley."  The enormous swath of agricultural land and prairie stretching from Eastern Colorado to Kansas, Texas to the Dakotas has always been famous for its violent storms: towering thunderheads roll off the eastern Rockies and cross the plains almost daily during late summer afternoons.  However, dangerous hail storms, lighting storms and tornadoes have increased in frequency with the recent advance of global climate change, in some cases causing the destruction of entire towns like Greensburg, KS (since rebuilt as a model sustainable community).  Kevin and others have endeavored to leverage digital and gps technologies to achieve greater efficiencies and customer service in the face of these disasters, helping to fill increased demand for repair services that these storms cause. 

  Thunderhead over Denver, CO (Photo credit: Tom P. Beresford)Last year Colorado had one of the most damaging summer storm seasons in over two decades.  Our small locally based roofing company in Denver struggled to keep up with the increase in roof work and we faced serious competition from “fly by night” contractors looking to make quick deals in the area.  We needed much faster tools to both measure and estimate the costs of each roof we repaired, so we began to investigate satellite and aerial photography as a way to measure roofs. We developed software that uses these images to automatically generate scaled roof plans, and with a little artistry and experimentation, we were soon able to provide an accurate material takeoff for a roof within a tolerance of one percent of actual required quantities.  Our software includes functionality for designating colors and slope for each different type of roof element (hip, ridge, eave, etc.) and parses their total measurements automatically into a takeoff which can be used to directly estimate costs.  

Satellite Roof Area plan and material takeoff
A major problem in the roofing industry comes from “fly by night” contractors who arrive in a city after a storm, repair roofs, and then ship out, leaving the customer with no one to contact if their roof fails.  Our goal is to combat that negative stereotype by staying put in Denver with a permanent contactable location and to deploy our new software to measure and estimate roofs on a scale that is potentially global in reach.  Our second goal is to utilize local resources and hire local contractors in each region we enter.  Using local resources not only insures a more sustainable business model, it also provides jobs to local knowledgeable contractors instead of flooding the market with foreign contractors as with most “fly by night” operations.

Current global weather patterns also continue to grow in intensity and these storms are having larger and more prolific impacts on urban centers.  Having the ability to stay put in Denver and provide roof measurements hours after a storm hit 1000 miles away allows us to keep up with growing demand.

(Article Courtesy Kevin Brodkorb)