Shifting

This is Long Beach, Long Island. Flat, watery & fragile, its edges shifting whether we like it or not, eroding, building land, and occasionally brought back from natural disaster by conservationists to its "natural" state. Like most water's edge sites on Long Island, this place was inhabited by humans, reconstituted, dredged, paved, jettied, bulkheaded and stabilized. Certain sites are left "natural" like beaches for human pleasure. When a storm blows over and washes miles of this beach away, it is promptly rebuilt with sand that had been deposited in the "wrong" place.

The lives of Long Beach are fascinating. People who live near the coast have a stronger connection to the land and water, and it brings a sort of cadence to everyday life. The rise and fall of tides, the telling winds, the threat of a storm, the weathering of everything from the salty air. It is a microcosm of the long sandbar that is Long Island, although LI has been developed so much that living just slightly inland can destroy any intuition of living on an island.

My first architectural project on the water is becoming a laboratory of renewable energies and sustainable manipulations of water for human needs. This structure will take salty water from the Bay to a rooftop pond where it will be heated by solar thermal tubes, turn to steam and condense into a channel leaving the salt and minerals behind. When enough water has been purified and collected in the channel, it becomes a waterfall off the side of the building into a tank below, alerting the inhabitants to the progress of the system. The water is then potable and the salt collected is the kind of sea salt that gourmet food stores sell at high prices.

This is a new architecture for Long Island in which the building (working with its inhabitants) makes its own sea salt, cleans water, produces its own energy with photovoltaics, grows its own food (there are herb and vegetable gardens), and uses geothermal for heating and cooling.