Architect 2014-03.pdf

72
CENTER
ARCHITECT THE AIA MAGAZINE MARCH 2014 WWW.ARCHITECTMAGAZINE.COM
The Gowanus Canal Sponge Park
you want to do? Do you want to be an architect
or a landscape architect?’ They were forcing me
to choose. And I thought, ‘This is wrong!’ ”
In 2005, Drake founded Dlandstudio,
which now has eight employees from a mix of
backgrounds. (Over the years, she’s employed
staff with expertise in the fine arts, astronomy,
religion, biology, and graphic design.) “I
thought I could figure out a way to work across
disciplines and create a design think tank
within practice,” she says. “I wanted to make a
lot of changes to the standard way of operating
within the urban world.”
Consider the firm’s vision for the
Gowanus Canal Sponge Park, which provides
a system of open space designed to absorb
and remediate stormwater. Here, wetlands
act like sponges, with plants and engineered
soils leaching heavy metals and toxins out of
contaminated water. But the plan is more than
just environmental. It integrates hydrology,
ecology, land use, and cultural preservation.
Sponge Park includes community amenities,
like a green walking path and the Pilot Street-
End Sponge Park that leads to the canal off 2nd
Street. The street-end park will create a muchneeded
public space while using things like
bioswales to mitigate polluted runoff.
The complexity of Drake’s multilayered
design is matched only by the complexity of
the politics underpinning the project. Multiple
agencies—federal, regional, and local—
maintain ownership of the Gowanus Canal,
and Drake has worked for years with all of
them on developing this plan. “There are 200
permits that we have to get for any project on
the waterfront, and that’s even before you get
to construction,” she says.
Indeed, her firm’s work is as much about
politics as it is about design research and
development. “Designers don’t always operate
with the consideration of the way the political
system operates, or even the way the electoral
system operates,” Drake says. “The political
process involves figuring out the agendas of
all these agencies and how my project actually
helps them. That’s when you can start to get
things done.”
This fall, construction will finally begin
on Sponge Park. “We’re going to have the first
street-end bioswale in New York City,” Drake
says. The intention is for this street-end park
system to become a prototype that can be used
on other streets throughout the city.
DLANDSTUDIO HAS ANOTHER prototype
project now underway in New York, this one
targeting stormwater runoff from raised
highways. Called Highway Outfall Landscape
Detention (HOLD) System, this modular
prototype has been installed at three sites
in Flushing Bay and the Bronx. The ultimate
The Gowanus Canal Sponge Park
goal, Drake says, is to export the system to
other cities. The firm has a patent pending for
the HOLD system as well as for Sponge Park,
and has trademarked both names as a way of
creating a potential revenue stream. “It’s so the
pain and suffering that I’ve gone through can
have some economic reward,” Drake says.
Dlandstudio has also tackled the issue
of rising sea levels, collaborating with New
York’s Architecture Research Office (ARO) for
the Museum of Modern Art’s “Rising Currents”
exhibit in 2010. Their proposal, called “A New
Urban Ground,” suggests a way to revamp the
hardscape of a city to manage rising coastal
waterways. The firms proposed an adaptable
system of porous green streets capable of
draining precipitation, as well as allowing an
influx of water to come in, but then get out,
quickly. Fiberoptic cables and other hardware
that currently live beneath the streetscape
would be moved below sidewalks and placed
inside underwater vaults accessible via hatches.
“That releases the street to become a permeable
open space,” Drake says.
Stephen Cassell, AIA, principal at ARO,
reached out to Drake for the exhibit because
he had heard about Sponge Park. “Susannah is
good at throwing lots of ideas out on the table,
some direct evolutions of what you’re working
on at the time, others complete right turns. It’s
a creative process that allows you to reframe