landscapes and instruments

instrument table This diagram allows me to be specific about a...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:03:40 -0400

instrument table

This diagram allows me to be specific about a certain triad that defines a landscape instrument: form, effect, and activity something takes part in. When used with a drawing- a section for instance- this diagram type allows me to encompass all three aspects of an instrument as they occur in a landscape. In addition, when multiple tables are used for the various instruments in a landscape it allows the designer to understand and choreograph certain patterns that occur in a landscape of instruments.

correlation wheel This diagramming technique allows me to...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:02:25 -0400

correlation wheel

This diagramming technique allows me to correlate different cyclical landscape processes through time. Each activity is indexed in the key and then played out across a year for a specific place. This allows me to zero on the specific activities and their relative levels of intensity at a given moment in time. This technique could be used for any activity and at any specified temporal scale. It enables the designer to attempt a landscape choreography in a specific way, and when tied to a spatial representation it makes clear the relations between objects and processes.

Limitations of this technique are that it is general- it assumes all activity occur along a similar rhythm and scale. For instance, this diagram shows that sedimentation and soccer games are occurring in a similar way, whereas sediment deposition is constant but soccer games are singular events occurring along a schedule.

shape channel model this model was developed to allow me to...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:56:51 -0400

shape channel model

this model was developed to allow me to study pattern and shape. I built it to be changeable, with a number of pits, basins, flushing canals, and dredge pits built in, and I could add smaller elements such as wing dams and pole fields throughout the canal.

The results were surprising and instructive, showing the effectiveness of combining certain elements such as clustering poles alongside wing dams to alter depositional patterns.

limitations of this tool are due primarily to the fact that sediment itself cannot be scaled. Additionally, it takes a long time- the model was approximately 6’ long and needed to be run for approximately 8 hours to get a good distribution of bed load sediment.

Matlab Scripting I worked with Dr. Rosati, Director of the...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:55:42 -0400

Matlab Scripting

I worked with Dr. Rosati, Director of the Coastal Inlets Research Program US Army Corps of Engineers, to adapt and apply this script to function as a sediment and shoaling calculator that can be localized along a given section of a navigable waterway.

This tool allows be to be highly specific about the amount of sedimentation that will occur in a given place over a specific period of time, as well as the amount of sediment that bypasses that specific zone. This has enabled me to establish a dredging period for each of the main deposition points along the canal. The Euler method uses simple algorithmic scripting which accounts for change over time- sediment that is deposited effects the rate at which future sediment will be deposited.

Limitations to this tool include the inability to dealt with shape, both changes in shape of the channel as well as the effects on currents, such as the formation of helical currents around bends in the channel.

Integrated Environmental System I used IES as a more...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:54:13 -0400

Integrated Environmental System

I used IES as a more comprehensive testing of the effects of specific design elements on the hydrodynamics of the canal. IES is three dimensional and so allows me to consider the effect of the dredge pit, dredge trough, and settling basin at specified depths on the flow dynamics of the canal.

This allows me to get highly specific about effects of design elements on flow rate over time which correlates to sedimentation.

Limitations include not accounting for sediment in any way- IES is essentially testing air moving through a form. This is useful for understanding the effects in plan and section over time, but does not allow me to approximate sediment deposition in any way.

tas ambiens I used tas ambiens to test the effects of different...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:52:38 -0400

tas ambiens

I used tas ambiens to test the effects of different distributions for design elements on the two-dimensional hydrodynamics of the Riachuelo canal. This tool enables me to rapidly test multiple scenarios including sewer overflow events, shape changes to the canal edge, and the distribution and sizing of wing dams.

I used this tool to help me to quickly estimate the ideal distribution, size and shape of wing dams in various scenarios including mean flow rate and storm events.

Limitations include the two-dimensional aspect to the hydrodynamics and the relatively low fidelity of the results.

This instrumental profile of the canal follows the orange line...

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 11:50:43 -0400

This instrumental profile of the canal follows the orange line cutting through the center of the canal on the master chart. The vertical scale is exaggerated 10x to emphasize the sectional richness and interactions beginning in the deep sediment up to the top of bridge and building structures. The different hatches indicate different materials- existing sediment, future sediment to be maintained at a new depth, sediment to be mined from the dredge zones. Also indicated are the various water levels (high/low tide, regular flood stage, extreme flood stage) and they are related to each other.

These sections are an attempt to explore and represent the way...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:39:49 -0400

These sections are an attempt to explore and represent the way that instruments make landscapes. Every object drawn is imagined as an instrument with a form, an effect, and an activity it takes part in (the instrumental triad, which I will write about soon on the blog). For this, new techniques (the diagrams I’m working with, as well as the stacking of the instrument tables and the sections themselves) are used to examine the specificities in the creation of space over time through instruments.

In this case, the city lagoon is shown in three sections:

top: a rainy fall day, elevated water levels in the riachuelo from a moderate sudestada weather event, dredging is occuring, sewers are overflowing

middle: a warm midwinter weekend day during the late morning, birds from Patagonia are along the rio de la plata estuary and visiting the riachuelo, no hyacinth are in the canal due to the season, people are beginning to trickle over to the racing soccer stadium for a match in the early afternoon.

bottom: a hot summer day, no dredging is occuring and sediment is starting to stack up near the dredge pit, seasonal plantings are in place along the tow path, benefitting from the composting facilities along the canal

These sections rely heavily on several techniques I’ve...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:29:50 -0400

These sections rely heavily on several techniques I’ve been working on for this project. The instrument table (which I’ll try and post about and then relink here), a much refined version of the correlation wheel (which I’ll post soon also), and stacking the sections one on top of the other. All of these techniques allow me to be highly specific about space, illustrating that it is never the same when conceived as an instrumental landscape.

The instrument table relates the form (which it points to with the red line) to a series of effects (along the top) and activities it takes part in (along the side). The simple table I have used here, when lined up with several instruments along the bottom, suggests that certain patterns and ways of analyzing and imagining the landscapes created start to emerge. Admittedly, I didn’t totally get there yet, but there seems to be enough there to warrant pushing further.

The correlation wheel has been adjusted to this place at this time to allow me to understand, both through specification and observation, what is taking place there at this specific time. In this case, the brownish color is the canal fluid (hardly water!) and the section shows how the Old Avellaneda Bridge is repurposed and put to use as a dredger. This in turn animates the canal and creates the possibility to harvest materials but also to go to a soccer game, get to work on time, or even have a mate (a popular social tea-like drink in Argentina) in the shade.

Tierra Plastica plan of the Riachuelo. For a description of the...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:18:29 -0400

Tierra Plastica plan of the Riachuelo. For a description of the thinking and enlarged versions of each of the four charts, please click on each of the charts below.

chart 1, chart 2, chart 3, chart 4

I divided up the plan of the canal in to charts, meant to...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:14:29 -0400

I divided up the plan of the canal in to charts, meant to emulate some of the aesthetic and technical specificity of nautical charts. These were printed on Tyvek, meant to be ready to send to the canal itself with one of the small boat operators.

The description of this drawing is similar to this. This area at the mouth of the canal actually is not changed greatly, as the tow path zone in this area is already well designed and accessible. Most of the changes have to do with the canal itself- the new crossings near the mouth and landings for those structures and the eddying of people it will create in the tow path as well as two important sediment trap zones- the settling basin and the dredge trough. These are the lines of last defense, meant to trap the remaining sediment that makes it past the dredge pit.

One important design decision is to make the Old Avellaneda Bridge itself the final instrument for dredging. The transporter bridge is a famous and beautiful landmark and is the object of an effort by these people to refurbish it and protect it. It used to be used to transport cars and pedestrian across the canal, one bunch at a time, as well as providing a walkway along the top, accessible by elevators. I am proposing a sort of poetic inflection of this history, to put the bridge back to work at the service of the locals, the industrialists, and the tourists of the area by outfitting it with a clamshell bucket that moves along the old platform track, reaching down into the river, pulling up the offending, beguiling materials at the bottom, and depositing them in barges along the water’s surface. The walkway at the top would be reactivate and the bridge lit. The dredging could be timed with major social events, such as the opening of soccer season, to provide a temporary pontoon bridge across the surface of the water from Avellaneda to La Boca or back again.

A similar description to this drawing. However, there are two...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:02:03 -0400

A similar description to this drawing. However, there are two elements here that are important. One, to the left and shown as “the [Buenos Aires] garden” is a beer garden, bicycle shop, and composting facility modeled on the Canal Nest Colony along the Gowanus Canal. This is one of the two main composting facilities along the canal and serves the Buenos Aires side. It is serviced by a horsehead jib crane and near the old rail line that will move the materials to the “city yard” site further in the city where the majority of the processing will occur. This site is chosen as the beer garden/bicycle shop because of its location on the bike network and the available space it offers, as well as the programmatic diversity and intensity that may attract revelers.

On the south side is the “Avellaneda City Garden”. It serves the south side of the canal, which is the municipality of Avellaneda, with a similar composting operation. It also contains an experimental concrete plant, where concrete is produced from a small percentage of the contaminated sediment in the canal and used in the ongoing construction projects in the river basin. The “experimental” part comes in because the site is testing scalability of the operation. It is already known that the “cement-lock” technology can produce good, strong concrete from contaminated sediment.

Yellow is sewer overflows, blue is the new bicycle...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:45:56 -0400

Yellow is sewer overflows, blue is the new bicycle network outside of the tow path zone, which always contains a bicycle connection. The red line is the canal profile line (keyed to the profile drawing), the grey/white lines in the canal are the navigable parts of the channel, the dashed lines in the channel are the dredge pit, maintained by the crane in the center of the ovals. The city lagoon is a new definition of the bulkhead, creating more space that is highly maintained and intended to absorb and filter the stormwater from the sewers during overflow events. The city lagoon contains several boardwalks at various heights, some of which are covered during high tide or storm events.

Trees reach back in to the city along the streets that provide either a boat or bridge crossing to serve as a signal. Boat crossings are created in conjunction with a new system of wing dams which serve to recruit the entropy of the river to keep the navigable portion of the channel clear without additional dredging outside of the designated zones. The shape, placement, and size of these were decided based on context and the experience they would provide and then modeled and tested for their effects on water flow using Tas Ambiens and IES-VE to understand the computational fluid dynamics.

Soccer fields, paths, and tree clusters create focal points of social activity, and the trees work with the infiltration zones (simply hatched with dots) to provide habitat for birds and help with stormwater infiltration.

Chart 4, showing the last mile of the redesigned canal. No new...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:34:58 -0400

Chart 4, showing the last mile of the redesigned canal. No new crossings are created here, because there already exist several bridges that provide good pedestrian access. However, plantings and infiltration zones (indicated by the green swatches) are created to create microclimates, visual cues that reach back in to the city, and slow the rush of stormwater in to the canal during a storm.

This is a new drawing called an “operations map”,...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:30:35 -0400

This is a new drawing called an “operations map”, intended to help me systematically analyze and understand the spatial implications of the specific material remediation operations of canal water filtration and sediment dredging. For a while some version of this drawing was embedded in the “action map”, but it grew too messy to be useful.

In this drawing green shows the distribution of composted materials created from the harvesting of floating aquatic plants being used to filter water in the Riachuelo Canal. The lines are scaled to indicate quantities of material being moved, mostly along the street grid, an old rail line (shown by the thick, black, dashed line) and the canal itself. Red indicates the known sewer outfalls; where they are clustered (indicated by the red rectangle) is seen as an ideal site for a major filtration intervention. Brown areas indicate the parks and plazas that will receive the compost. Purple-black indicates the canal itself.

Purple indicates the sediment that will be trapped. The purple lines are scale to indicate quantities of sediment that are trapped in different ways at specific sites- each with a name and estimated quantity. The gray trapezoid in the Rio de la Plata indicates the location and size of the new “camalote” confined disposal facility to be used for port expansion as sediment is disposed. The black round dash indicates the route the barges will take, under the guidance of the Port Authority, to place the contaminated sediment geotubes. The thick white dashed line indicates the current general discharge of sediment and the white dashed arc indicates the area that is contaminated by the discharge. This enlargement of contaminated area adds a huge burden to the operating cost of the Port Dock Sud because all dredging undertaken in that zone- 640,000 m3 per year- must be treated as contaminated waste. One major goal of this project is to reduce that number by 95%. The dredge quantities, periodicities, and types of sediment for each of the three main deposition sites over an 18 month period are indicated by the new graph along the bottom. My calculations are not sufficient to verify this (at all!) but they do indicate that the 95% goal might be possible given a strategy that treats the sediment and contaminated water as a material in its own right, not something to be discharged.

In addition to implicating the port and the canal upstream, the Tierra Plastica project links together all of the public spaces in the Riachuelo drainage basins that have plants through the compost production and distribution system. This is shown in the diagram on the bottom left corner of the page. This creates a third riparian spatial eco-type of a similar scale to the existing Avellaneda Nature Preserve and the Buenos Aires Ecological Reserve. These are the extremely large brown areas at the edge of the drawing. This third type is distributed, heavily worked, and ornamental. All three are highly productive, artificial, potentially dangerous, and tied directly to the waste and excesses of the urban system

This image is the final iteration of the action map drawings...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:06:38 -0400

This image is the final iteration of the action map drawings I’ve been working with for a while here. A few small changes, such as using a circle cut-out of the background aerial to indicate commercial/residential centers (as opposed to industrial), have helped to make the map clearer. The industrial areas are lighter zones on the aerial, the surface infrastructures are darker aerial zones. Brown indicates parks and plaza space in the city. Green are the areas of extension strategically important to the Riachuelo design. Pink is the canal itself as well as the 40 meter setback on either side. Blue lines indicate the new Buenos Aires bicycle network; dashed is existing, solid is proposed as part of this project. The little tick marks by the labels over at the mouth of the river indicate depths, each tick mark is 1 meter. Orange lines in the pink zone are boat crossings, blue lines are bridge crossings; for each, dashed is existing and solid is needed.

I’ve also added phasing to this drawing and eliminated the operations diagrams from this drawing. It was too messy and confused two different (albeit it related) issues: connections existing and needed, and spatial implications of material operations of contamination remediation. For the second set of issues, I’ve ended up creating a separate, related drawing called an “operations map”.

Test 2 This is the second configuration that I have tested....

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:14:08 -0400

Test 2

This is the second configuration that I have tested. Based on the previous run this one eliminates the additional sediment basin and instead uses 3 dredge pits, pole fields, and wing dams.

Results: I will maintain a dredge pit at the top and bottom of this section of the river, and pole fields will work in conjunction with the wing dams. The effect of the pole fields were the most surprising- they seem to discourage sedimentation for a while and keep the area behind the wing dam free. This is interesting because poles are an element that will serve many purposes in the design- navigation beacons, holding monitors, lights, allowing me to string wires, sediment fences, chain link fences, acting as piles for walkways. They are a form with many effects, and grouping them, especially in conjunction with specific shapes in the canal such as a wing dam, provides even more effects.

Riachuelo Landscape as Material Assemblage This drawing is...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:06:00 -0400

Riachuelo Landscape as Material Assemblage

This drawing is attempting to illustrate the material networks of the canal landscape along two axes: clastic detritus and hyacinth.

The clastic detritus, a fancy name for sediment, implicates the entire watershed along the canal corridor. The design accelerates and concentrates depositional processes at three points- the dredge pit, settling basin, and dredge trough. These different sites allow for the concentration of differing types of sediment- based on the modeling tests, each element collects different types of sediment in different ways. The trough and pit collect large sediment (sand), and the settling basin collects mostly silt and clay.

There is also a transfer point and the sediment is barged out to the new ‘camalote’ confined disposal facility. The collecting and dewatering of the sediment in the canal after being placed in barges offers a chance for the creation of new bridges, new sights, and new smells. One area that needs to be resolved is the placement of the concrete batch plant that will use some of the contaminated sediment as fine aggregate.

The hyacinth is collected and moved on small barges to wing dams that also act as loading points. This material is then dewatered and then trucked to the composting sites- the City Yard and the Train Yard. Here the material is composted and worked and eventually distributed for use in planted areas throughout the city.

Results measure. It is crude (as the whole model is), but this...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:28:32 -0400

Results measure.

It is crude (as the whole model is), but this kitchen scale measures down to the gram is precise enough to help me establish proportional deposits that I will collect from the channel after the 2 hour tests have been run. The point is not so much the precision (although I am attempting it with the resources at hand) but rather the establishment of a synthetic instrumental working method, one that aims at precision by combining digital and analog models and interrogates the differences and alignments that result.

Analog Channel-Shape Model. I’m painting the model black...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 15:23:46 -0400

Analog Channel-Shape Model.

I’m painting the model black because the sand is a light brown. It will help me see and document the results. The flow will be controlled with a small filter fountain pump placed in the end basin (which in reality would be the “Cuatro Bocas” turning basin, just past the Riachuelo and squarely in the Port Dock Sud facilities). The water will be pushed through a 1/2” inside diameter vinyl tube. I wanted the biggest one possible to approximate a slow, even flow of the kind in the Riachuelo (as opposed to the same amount of water shooting through a tiny pipe at high velocity).

The design goal for the sediment aspect of the project is to design a channel-sediment regime that ends up with no sediment in the basin where the pump is. This would suggest that I am trapping all of the sediments of the Riachuelo within the Tierra Plastica project.

The significance of this concentration means a reduction in the total amount and dispersal of contaminated sediments that must be dredged, treated, and confined by the Port- a major value added and hopefully validating the economic expenditure necessitated by the proposed changes.