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Metropolis Editors, Natural Habitat, sustainability, sustainable architecture

METROPOLIS Introduces Natural Habitat, a Sustainable Homes Video Series

The series debuts with a tour of a tranquil upstate New York retreat designed with Passive House principles.

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For her project, Intermediary Softness, RISD Assistant Professor Debbie Chen, working with graduate research assistants including Alexandra Croft, created a water-collecting structure at RISD’s Tillinghast Place. The lightweight structure’s shingles, which Croft contributed to the design and fabrication of, dance in the wind, directing water into small catchment pouches.

July 9, 2025

Alexandra Croft’s Seapunk Design Rethinks Waste and Water

Blurring the lines between land and sea, the RISD master’s student explores waste systems through a sensorial, nonlinear, and ecologically attuned design practice.

By: Alice Bucknell

A sensitivity to the senses, the affective registers of nonlinearity, and the complexity of transitional spaces—environmental and otherwise—characterize Alexandra Croft’s (M.Arch RISD, 2025) design practice. From speculative-fiction seapunk communes that deal in oyster reciprocity to gargantuan gill-shaped rain-capturing pavilions moored on disappearing beaches, Alexandra’s work and interests oscillate across architecture, art and design, inhabiting—much like her preferred site of coastal regions—a murky in-betweenness.

Courtesy Alexandra Croft

Challenging Traditional Water Infrastructure

Croft’s “coast-to-coast” perspective manifests in projects that tackle waste systems, flood futures, water infrastructure and the need to imagine beyond the linear-progressive “crash” course of the Anthropocene. Her work as a graduate research assistant for Assistant Professor Debbie Chen on Intermediary Softness (2023–2024)—a gossamer fabric-shingle pavilion for holding rainwater on RISD’s own beachfront property—make the case for a softer “catch-and-release” response to the stubborn bureaucracy of many water infrastructure projects, which supports her interest in the scale. Alongside Good/Poor (2023), a sculptural installation that riffs on the American Framing pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale to challenge rigid binaries in wood construction, Alexandra’s work embraces a material sensitivity, exalting in the pleasures and possibilities of becoming fluid and open to adaptation.

Courtesy Alexandra Croft

Ecological Methods of Construction

Meanwhile, Ground Unit (2024) and The Cloyster (2023) radiate outward to a system scale, embracing new social and ecological frameworks for surviving with—not against—the rising tides and resources panic brought on by anthropogenic climate change. Ground Unit digs into the urban noir of waste systems in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, offering a kind of pneumatic soil bank that breathes in contamination and breathes out remediation. The Cloyster, set along the ever-expanding salt marshes of New Bedford, Massachusetts’s Acushnet River, dabbles in a speculative seapunk living co-operative, rewiring notions of private property into a community land trust within the briny embrace of a changing planet.

After she graduates, infrastructural intrigue and watery persuasions may lead her on to a postgraduate summertime venture in Belgium, where she hopes to further deepen her study of carbon-conscious earthen construction between liquid and land. By embracing the choppy current of our environmental future, Croft’s practice will remain buoyant wherever it takes her—and us—next.

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