09/16/06
Jakob Rosenzweig
New Orleans, LA
I think this project is great! I especially like the way in which many of the project's elements were designed to have more than one purpose. One example being the revetments themselves: they serve their primary purpose, to protect the city from rising flood waters, but they also welcome habitatation, which the current revetment design paradigm by the Army Corp does not (perhaps out of a desire to eliminate variations in the revetments' cross sections). Another good example of a design element with two purposes are the piles. They serve their structural purpose, pinning the floating revetment down into the ground or the river floor, but they also help to protect the earthen revetments from eroding away by capturing some of the sediment travelling down the river and using it to establish a smoother gradient of hydraulic river forces. That seems much safer and stronger than the one-size-fits-all design that we see all over Southeastern Louisiana today. Besides, all of the rich sediment in the river is flowing uselessly into the bottom of the Gulf when it should be depositing somewhere back on the continent, raising the delta lands above sea-level.
09/14/06
Jess Guernsey
New Orleans, LA
I really like the force diagrams! This project makes a good case for the argument that New Orleans can have a safe flood infrastructure system without sacrificing the city's long-time cultural connection to the river.
05/24/06
Yu-Ju Lin
New Orleans, LA
At New Orleans, the city grows along the Mississippi River. However, through time the connection of the city and the river is chopped by the levee to protect people from floods. Levees are protected by the revetments (a facing as an invisible fortification to sustain the embankment) to avoid scouring the bank. The installation of revetments turns the Mississippi River into a constraint channel.
Revetments are placed where the habitation is located. By virtue of extending the relevance between revetments and habitations, a series of increased-width revetments are proposed to bridge the missing connection of the city and the waterfront where the city started from. By extending the revetment and reaching into the city, a habitable bend of revetment is created. The Mississippi River is brought back to the city with living revetments.
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