Reclaiming the Ground: An Integrated Design Studio Pedagogy for Flood-Resilient Urban Waterfronts

This article presents an integrated design studio pedagogy for flood-resilient urban waterfronts that employs groundscape strategies, treating the ground as an active design medium to generate hybrid structures integrating landscape, architecture, and infrastructure. Implemented at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design (Fall 2024), the studio challenged students to transform North Little Rock’s flood-vulnerable riverfront by replacing conventional levee infrastructure with ground-based public architectural interventions. The study adopts a pedagogical case-study approach, examining a studio cohort in which all projects were developed under shared site conditions, design constraints, and instructional frameworks. Five assignments progressed from collaborative precedent analysis to individual technical development, integrating computational modeling, performance simulations, and expert consultations across structural, envelope, MEP, and site engineering. Student work is analyzed through comparative sectional diagrams and selected in-depth project studies to evaluate how groundscape functioned as a shared solution type for multiscalar integration. The results show that groundscape operates productively when tested against specific site constraints rather than deployed as a generalized esthetic. In response to flood elevations, degraded ecology, and limited public access, students developed distinct ground-based operations—such as embedding, lifting, and integrating flood walls as spatial thresholds—demonstrating architecture’s capacity to mediate between civic space, environmental performance, and flood protection. By situating groundscape within a problem-oriented pedagogy, the study consolidates modernist, postmodern, and contemporary groundscape discourse and demonstrates how architectural education can engage productively with climate-adaptation challenges.