Rockaway’s Housing Superstorm brings together concerns for coastal neighborhoods in New York City that are under threat from both rising sea levels and processes of gentrification. The report follows the three-part journey of the project: firstly designing community workshops, supported by the community organization RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity); secondly, developing a public space plan that connect areas of housing—in particular public housing—with Jamaica Bay; and thirdly, in the context of predicted sea level rises, forming longer-term spatial strategies that address needs for repair, elevation, and relocation.

While many questions were posed through the semester, one concern repeatedly reemerged: From planning the project to editing this report, we consistently asked how we can develop fair and meaningful conversations that can empower the communities we worked with. This report describes our endeavors to achieve this.

The project was initiated by the Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gary R. Hilderbrand; it was generously supported by David Luberoff and Chris Herbert at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies; and it was made possible through a collaboration with Jeanne DuPont at RISE (Rockaway Initiative for Sustainability and Equity).

Read this report in full on issuu.

The jury highlighted “the unique and rigorous pedagogy of the project, the representation of a highly collaborative and empathetic study culture as well as the recognition of the urgency of coastal adaptation projects in the context of contemporary regulatory environments.” You can see more about the winning entry here.

The award is part of the Barcelona International Biennial of Landscape Architecture, led by Marina Cervera. The Ribas Piera jury included Gary Hilderbrand, Huang Wenjing, Luis Callejas, Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda, and Hayriye Eşbah Tunçay.

[Image credit: Cover of book featuring tapestry by Rachel Clements, 2023]

This drawings are developed from a keynote address to the I.A.L.E. (International Association of Landscape Ecology) annual conference in Milan (2019) and subsequently developed as a keynote lecture at the Architectural Association (A.A.) in London (2021). Many thanks to Antonella Contin, David Grahame Shane and the organizers of I.A.L.E. and to Alfredo Ramirez at the A.A. for the invitations. I am also grateful to Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim at Harvard Graduate School of Design for the opportunity to develop the research further, including the drawings for a book chapter, for a forthcoming book they are editing.

The symposium aims to illuminate the transformative effects and driving forces of emerging educational practices, and to foster a dialogue among international researchers and educators in the field of architecture.

Amidst our growing awareness of changing environmental conditions, the Post-Anthropocene provides a context for radical, speculative, hitherto unfamiliar, ethical, ecological and experimental architectural practices. But what are the implications for architecture itself, how does architecture need to be recontextualized to cope with the uncertainties of the climate crisis? It seems time to renegotiate past forces of architectural education and to develop an appropriate vocabulary to capture and document its effects. In doing so, we aim to shed light on the multifaceted dimensions of the outcomes of teaching practices and provide insights that can guide future pedagogical approaches.

It has been initiated by a working group, including: Antonella Contin (Politecnico di Milano), Alfredo Ramirez (Architectural Association), Christina Geros (Royal College of Art), Dorothy Tang (National University of Singapore), Gareth Doherty (Harvard University Graduate School of Design), Sandip Patil (CEPT University), Tim Waterman (The Bartlett, University College London), Yu Ye, (Beijing Forestry University). Partners to date include: Arup, Furtherfield, Local Works Studio, Sandwich Club (Rosie Martin), and POoR Collective (Larry Botchway).

Seed funding for the collaboration has been provided by the New Research Centre of Spatial and Digital Ecologies (University of Greenwich).