![]() ![]() ![]() The shoreline here has badly eroded over the last few decades, and waves now crash just a few feet away from the lawns of waterfront homes. Walking along the coast of Tottenville, it is easy to see why this neighborhood is in dire need of protection. The final step will be a beach replenishment, spreading 21,000 tons of newly dredged sand across the Tottenville shoreline. The four largest breakwaters will also create reef ridges extending out into the bay, providing shelter for fish and other marine life, including an oyster colony installed by the Billion Oyster Project. The breakwaters will include hundreds of specially designed concrete features that mimic tide pools and marine habitats. SCAPE is coordinating the entire construction process, which is expected to be completed in 2024. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The landscape architecture studio SCAPE designed the Living Breakwaters after winning funds from the Rebuild By Design competition, an initiative created by the U.S. “That provides scour protection and a structural foundation for the stone, so it doesn’t settle into the bay and collapse over time.” ![]() “They get installed in kind of a jigsaw puzzle, Tetris formation, where they are all side-by-side, up against each other,” said Kevin Robinson, the project manager for Weeks Marine, which is constructing the breakwaters. Each 22-foot-long marine mattress, held together by a geosynthetic mesh and weighing roughly seven tons, is gently lowered into the bay by an equilibrium crane and guided into place by underwater divers. When complete, this $107 million project will stretch along a mile of shoreline, blunting the impacts of waves, erosion, storm surges and sea level rise - while also providing an important habitat for marine species.įrom a 250-foot-long barge moored in the shallows of Raritan Bay, workers are now slowly and methodically placing more than 1,100 stone-filled mattresses into the water, creating a foundation for the first two breakwaters. This September, the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery began work on the Living Breakwaters, a series of eight enormous rock piles that are being installed off the coast of Tottenville. Get more information on the Buckminster Fuller Challenge here.On the southern tip of Staten Island, New York City’s latest project to address climate change is now slowly rising from the sea. The project was chosen from seven finalists. Orff will accept the prestigious Fuller Challenge prize and a $100,000 cash award on behalf of the Scape team at a celebration in New York on 20 November. As climate change impacts threaten shoreline populations, Living Breakwaters hopefully represents a paradigm shift in how we collectively address climate risks, by focusing on regenerating waterfront communities and social systems, and enhancing threatened ecosystems.” Chosen from seven finalists Kate Orff of Scape said, “We are so honored to be the 2014 Fuller Challenge recipient – Fuller was optimistic about the future of humanity and deeply believed in cooperation as the way forward. The Living Breakwaters project integrates components ranging from ecologically engineered “Oyster-tecture,” to transformational education around coastal resiliency and the restoration of livelihoods traditional to the community of Tottenville in Staten Island, while also spurring systemic change in regulatory pathways at the State level. The project team understand that you cannot keep back coastal flooding in the context of climate change, but what you can do is ameliorate the force and impact of 100 and 500 year storm surges to diminish the damage through ecological interventions, while simultaneously catalyzing dialog to nurture future stewards of the built environment,” said Bill Browning of Terrapin Bright Green, a 2014 senior advisor and jury member. It is on the one hand an engineering and infrastructure-related intervention, but it also has a unique biological function as well. ![]() “Living Breakwaters is about dissipating and working with natural energy rather than fighting it. Living Breakwaters has unique biological function The project by the New York based landscape architects is also one of the Rebuild by Design winners and was published in Topos 87 on “Coastal Strategies”. The comprehensive climate change adaptation and community development project Living Breakwaters by Scape / Landscape Architecture has been selected as the winner of the 2014 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, “socially responsible design’s highest award”. ![]()
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