Gadgetory

perky and sandy wiped out thousands of homes businesses and city infrastructure in the aftermath the Department of Housing and Development set up a task force to rebuild the city a Dutch water management expert joined the force and launched a contest called rebuild by design to promote innovation and provide resiliency with the hope that the winning designs would make the city less vulnerable in the face of the next disaster so water management is very complex water does exactly what it wants it goes everywhere so you can protect let's say your own house but then the water just goes to your neighbors when I started in working in the US the first question I got from our reporter was okay mister ofing are you gonna you know save New York by building a storm surge barrier next to the Verrazano Bridge and that idea is it was it I think it's exactly the problem we all face all over the world we want simple solutions we want the silver bullets which is the wrong approach because there is no silver bullet when it comes to water if you would embrace water as part of your life as part of the economy in their culture you will come up with a multitude of solutions that all together form a comprehensive plan the competition invited designers scientists engineers thinkers and leaders to reinvent Solutions and safety measures for the New York New Jersey region out of 148 entries the six winners balanced local needs with aesthetic and functional value the first thing we said to the teams in their design phase was stop designing the first thing you have to do is build a coalition and don't design for them but you know work with them to get to a design that's inclusive of this community that also builds in the needs and the understanding and the capacity of that of the neighborhood and informed by the process your design one of the most ambitious projects is the big you effective system designed for Laura Manhattan which was hit hard by the hurricane the team proposes to shield the low-lying region from floods and future storms with elevated beams and pavilions with folding doors the big you will stretch across ten continuous miles and provide social and environmental benefits to a high risk region yes what the idea is that the big you is almost like a chameleon that it changes character and color every time it encounters a new neighborhood in the East River Park it's really like the pack terrain races towards the highway protecting the pack from the noise of the highway but also protecting the city from from flooding then as you move down and you get under the FDR the elevated highway in some places we have placed pavilions with galleries or marketplaces inside them they've had these sleeves so that they're always open there's always space between the pavilions but in the case of a flood out of these sleeves giant doors can come out and and create a continuous flood barrier through our dialogue with the local communities that even though the the big U is one continuous effort it really changes character all the time so you'll never be able to see it as a big piece of infrastructure rather it's the social infrastructure of that community that really changes its character in its in its appearance we owe it to these communities we owe it to ourselves and our our next generations to make a better place I think in the end if you look at it what a city is all about is a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures a lot of definition a letí's coming together in a restricted space to try to maximize the possibilities for each and every individual to unfold themselves to express themselves and what we try to do with the big U is to really in a way turn this public participation process into something that actually improve the design something that generates designs something that generates diversity something that generates surprises we are in a very intelligent smart competitive region we have the mines here we have the hearts here if the understanding we don't have an excuse not to create a better region ah there's only one way forward