Amphibious Architecture

A couple years back, we posted on a collaborative project between The Living, Chris Woebken, and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic. The now completed Amphibious Architecture project seeks to captivate participants by immersing them into the ebbs and flows of aquatic ecosystems…

image credit: Natalie Jeremijenko

A couple years back, we posted on a collaborative project between The Living, Chris Woebken, and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic.  The now completed Amphibious Architecture project seeks to captivate participants by immersing them into the ebbs and flows of aquatic ecosystems — areas that are generally under-explored and under-engaged in the public realm.  Installed in the East and Bronx Rivers in New York City, the glowing flotilla consists of sensors below the water and lights above.  The sensors monitor water quality and fish presence, and the lights react to the information being collected by their gatherer counterparts below the water.  Anyone can text message the sensors to receive real time information about the status of the river.  This urge to make the invisible visible to the public is compelling, overlapping a myriad of social and ecological networks throughout the city.

The team further describes the aim of the project as such:

Instead of treating the rivers with a “do-not-disturb” approach, the project encourages curiosity and engagement. Instead of treating the water as a reflective surface to mirror our own image and our own architecture, the project establishes a two-way interface between environments of land and water.

image credit: Natalie Jeremijenko
You May Also Like
Read More

The Urban Rookery

Rookery: a colony of breeding animals, generally birds. A rookery is generally reserved for a colony of gregarious…
Read More

Amy Haigh’s Interworlding Objects

London-based interdisciplinary designer and storyteller Amy Haigh has produced for her diploma work at The Royal College of Arts, London a series of clever objects that cross the species divide and question the anthropocentric as well as the ontological boundaries of objects in general.
Read More

Buildings + Germs

... architecture and more specially buildings, are rather poor opponents against pandemics. Urban planning seems to have a shot, but buildings - their scale, their materials, their systems, are weak at best and more likely a fool's errand; wasting time, effort and money to combat a foe they cannot defeat at exactly a time when resources are slim.