Young Designers Shape the Future of Water

Equally inventive is a project by Clemson graduate architecture-and-health design student Roshan Jose, who also takes cues from insects to model an ecological response to water pollution and stormwater management. Based on the science around water’s inherent health benefits, Pooling is a community hospital and health campus with extensive on-site water retention ponds. A natural filtration system composed of native plants and sediments is populated by endangered Carolina heelsplitters—mussels that clean fresh water—offering the center’s users and local residents a large recreational swimming pool. Jose’s imagination of an integrative multispecies ecosystem, limiting structures on-site to provide habitats and a healthy environment for people and other species, would be a fantastic principle to adopt in building and zoning codes more generally.

Similarly, Elisa Sofia Castañeda’s Gulfport Lagoonas project for an undergrad Mississippi State architecture studio looks at the role of shoreline ecologies and wildlife for climate resilience. Supported by a grant from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the studio participated in the Gulf Research Program to research resilient, sustainable solutions for the region. Castañeda reimagines the shoreline as a series of blue lagoons that improve stormwater protection and water quality, and promote ecotourism. Here too, oysters, fin fish, and other marine species gain new habitats through installation of specially designed breakwaters that also prevent soil erosion.

Like Roshan Jose’s Pooling, SUNY University at Buffalo master in architecture student Yau Wai Lam’s One Riding Center makes a point of limiting the built-up area in the design of an equestrian center adjacent to the Kensington Expressway. Lam’s design weaves in underground retention tanks, wetlands, a rain garden, a septic tank for horse manure, permeable pavement, and landscaping to filter stormwater, balancing the effect of architecture on the natural environment. The equestrian center structure itself forms a sound barrier to the highway, and landscaped ponds step down to produce a calming white noise for horses and visitors. The environment even takes into account fine granular details such as thermal comfort for the horses, softness of the ground for their foot joints, easy drainage of manure, and remediation of odors for the community.

And if we don’t succeed in keeping Earth inhabitable, Oripods by Parsons interior design master’s student Sanjana Gopalakrishnan hedges bets and gives us two options. The modular habitat system is imagined as deployable on Earth and on Mars. Composed of a central core with greenhouses fed by freshwater reservoirs and filtration tanks, it orients comfortable living spaces around a closed-loop system in which families can survive in unusually harsh conditions. It’s sobering that Gopalakrishnan’s context is this world’s heavily polluted Hindon River in Uttar Pradesh, India, as well as life in the otherworldly parched craters of the Red Planet. But through her injection of plant life and origami-inspired forms, she makes the conditions appear potentially attractive, even if the edible plants produced in the algae-and-turmeric biomass have a slightly radioactive quality.