Riprap Ram DamDigitally Textured Earth for Ecological Shoreline Restoration

A significant question posed for our urban shorelines is how we might repair the lost biodiversity and ecologies in our edge conditions while simultaneously seeding resilient shorelines capable of holding back the forces of rising water in urban developments. As an urban case study our research studio examined The Gowanus Canal, a post-industrial canal in Brooklyn, NY which experienced dramatic ecological alterations during the Anthropocene. Throughout the 19th century, the agricultural creek of the Gowanus Canal, once laden with bi-valves and other brackish wildlife, was dredged, channelized, and lined with industrial buildings for shuttling goods and services between the growing urban municipality and greater port system. Contemporary cleanup efforts for this shoreline edge are predicated on the introduction of vertical steel piles which unlike riprap or other masonry-based shoreline reconfigurations, further neuter the possibility of biodiversity and life of the economic condition through their flattened removal of joinery and rustication. This research studio, Riprap Ram Jam, investigated the use of robotically formed, concrete stabilized, rammed earth masonry towards a semi porous reconstruction of the urban edge conditions. The studio took the fundamental position, by its choice of rammed earth blocks, that the ‘uniform static sustainable edge’ is a problematic aspiration of the late Anthropocene that privileges sustainability of the urban edge and monetary waterfront investments over larger bio-diversity. By contrast, the digital stereotomic process investigated within the studio repositioned masonry as a constructed edge ideology that has the benefits of endemic rustication and porosity for the space of wildlife – a construction process that inherently decays and changes over time bringing ecological succession into the construction and formation consideration.