Last week, we spent Friday evening on a wonderful cruise of New York harbor with the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Architecture and Design and the Center for Architecture. They teamed up to promote the Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront show that's on view at the museum until October 11, an exhibition that addresses the threat to New York posed by global climate change. With harbor water levels predicted to rise by at least two feet by 2100, MoMA and its sister institution P.S.1 commissioned five interdisciplinary teams to re-imagine the harbor and soften the impact of climate change on its ecosystem. Our cruise was a wonderful opportunity to see all five sites up close with narration from the architectural teams explaining their visions.
The trip departed from the South Street Seaport and after a quick jaunt under the Brooklyn Bridge—one site for Olafur Eliasson's wonderful New York City Waterfalls project of 2008—we chugged toward Liberty State Park, passing the Queen Mary 2 on the way:
In the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, LTL Architects explained the importance of carving out more public waterfront green space in shallows that are at high risk of complete inundation by 2100. We then cruised down to the Kill Van Kull between Bayonne, New Jersey and Staten Island. There, Matthew Baird Architects, envision the area moving away from heavy industry and global shipping and toward a future as a regional economic hub powered by a deeper, dredged waterway and sustainable energy sources.
We then sprinted down to the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge as the sun started to set, to hear nArchitects ambitious plans for "New Aqueous City," a proposed floating mixed-used neighborhood with baffles against storm surge. The renderings are wild.
Still trying to imagine a commute from a floating apartment to Times Square, we cruised up past the mouth of the Gowanus Canal and onward to Governors Island, where SCAPE Studio plans to use "oyster-techture" to reintroduce bivalves to clean the ecosystem and provide new habitats in the form of oyster reefs.
The evening ended where it began with a view of Lower Manhattan, the site of Architecture Research Office's proposal to "soften" the edges of that neighborhood, re-linking the waterfront to the city and mitigating the effects of occasional storm surges that are predicted to increase in intensity as the ocean warms.
While there aren't currently plans for another tour exactly like this, there is one scheduled for Tuesday, June 29. The cruise will feature a group of poets as well as Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design and organizer of Rising Currents, who will interpret the harbor in their own—presumably poetic!—way. Tickets area available online.
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