Bachelors’ Thesis: The Wild East
This was my UVA bachelor’s thesis. I researched and designed the project in my final year. The subject was the rising sea levels in the Chesapeake Bay. I proposed that shorefront communities should run into the sea rather than away from it. Predominantly through modelmaking, I explored an architecture that first allowed the transition of materials from house to boat, and then created a craft that fostered community whilst at sea.
“[I began by] gathering satellite images of shorefront houses that are most immediately at risk, I have narrowed them to 3 categories. The first [left] is high density, almost always with a typical coastline, as this is the easiest for developers to build a traditional American suburban home, with a pier in the backyard and a street out front. The second [middle] is low density, still with a typical coastline. The final one [right] is low density, with geographical features, sand bars, marshes, or spits of land that create a staggered or nonlinear progression from land to water.”
Above on the left is a scanned sketch of the material negotiation of the amphibious stage. An upland house (purple) would give material to the lowland house more at risk (orange). The orange house benefits from the slipway being made cheaper and quicker, and the purple benefits in that the slipway is already there when their own house is eventually in danger. Right is an early model of how the construction phase might appear. The house materials are being ferried to the slipway, and the house is kept standing as an empty hulk.
The sadness of this project is that it was primarily a model-based exploration. The staged, high resolution images of the models were lost on my previous laptop. I only have a few informal photos of them taken on a phone.
Top shows the initial stage - the challenge building a watertight craft in the first place. This is where the satellite studies at top of page became most useful. I was able to say confidently that most at-risk houses would have access to a pier or a skeleton pier, or a liminal marshland that would facilitate a tidal slipway. A tectonic V-frame is assembled using the skeleton of the pier, and a stereotomic craft is built within. The V-frame will become the floating enclosure, and the crafts are the rooms within.
The second stage shows a fully developed V-frame that supports its own weight and the craft within. The system is still anchored to the ground, suspended under arches for greater stability during construction. In this stage the crafts may travel nearby, leaving the enclosure for a night or two. The craft are not merely lashed to the sides of th V-frames. Instead, the craft now have foil pontoons - for stability underway - and the foil arms lock the craft snug against the V-frames (second stage detail drawing). Once the owner has added a propulsion system in the third stage, the enclosure may be independent of the land. Still anchored off the coast, perhaps, as others from the old land community is still in the first stage.
Finally, the system sets sail around the chesapeake. The owner is able to travel indefinitely now, with sails aloft and a keel hung below. Masts are put in, to hold the sails as well as provide extra strength to the now long V-frame structure. The room crafts have multiplied, some are for sleeping, some for storage, some for traveling.
Shown here are models of the first and second stage, relative to the drawing above. The craft have a half that is primarily flat, at 45 degrees. This side rests onto the V-frames of the enclosure.
And below are the models of the boats, the small craft that would be contained within the V-frames, the rooms within the enclosure.
“This project began as a revision of naval architecture. Last semester’s research class, I was focused purely on the boat as a home, without considering the city it might be in. The city in question became the Chesapeake Bay, which is rapidly sinking. By gathering satellite images of shorefront houses that are most immediately at risk, I have narrowed them to 3 categories. The first is high density, almost always with a typical coastline, as this is the easiest for developers to build a traditional American suburban home, with a pier in the backyard and a street out front. The second is low density, still with a typical coastline. The final one is low density, with geographical features, sand bars, marshes, or spits of land that create a staggered or nonlinear progression from land to water. More importantly than any of this, perhaps, is the cultural relationship that we as humans have with the water. The richest relationship on the East Coast that has existed to date is that of the 18th and 19th century, when fishermen, sailors, and scoundrels set sail for months at a time. Leaving wives and children at home, these seaside towns kept their windows faced out to the infinite horizon, searching for a speck.”
“What was home for those sailors? Home is the weather you’re in, and hearth is the boat. The daily journeys are that of the sun and waves. Corridors are ladders. Roomy is not having to hunch. Sun is light, but it is also deathly heat. There is no immigration at sea. There are no government induced enclaves. There are countries and cultures, the individual wooden worlds. Sea is the blender. The ethnicities and proclivities of ancestors define your trinkets and your behaviors and those you let stay aboard for one more meal, they do not necessarily define your place.”
“The final driver of this project began as a polite disagreement between Erin and I, she pushed me to think outside the boat. We eventually realized that seeing the world that this thesis lived in as two sided, land and sea, flattened the indeterminist potential that setting sail has. Instead, to convince those afflicted by sea level rise to run into the waves and not the hills, I have designed a process in which the landlubber melts down his stable home and builds a new domesticity at sea. Over many moons, architecture is rethought. The beginning of air and end of water is all that matters. The heavy hearths abide by the rules of buoyancy, they lay along this horizontal divide. The light frame, free to go where it wants, stretches vertically above and below. Drawing up stencils of ribs and stretching a skin of fiber and resin between them, a home has been created, cutting through the water at bow and stern yet bulging to bear whatever the creator has decided. By throwing a tarp over the frames and putting a bed below decks, there is a spectrum now between exposure and enclosure. There is another spectrum here; community and isolation.”
“Your uphill neighbor in Dares Beach supplied a considerable amount of material to help build your drydock, so that she could make her shell in it once the water crept beneath her door. She helped you transfer wood from your house, and she even let you stay in hers when it was too cold for the single layer of polyfiber you had laid down to keep you warm. Years later, in a rough storm, a lone shell-boat hails you for assistance. It’s that same neighbor. Informally indebted to her, you let her stay within your shell, hooking her boat up alongside the ones you worked hard to muster. Yes, the foils hold them tight against the ribs of the shell, but you wait for the light to vanish from her portholes until you quit anxiously peering out of yours and allow yourself to sleep. Morning comes, the woman’s boat, and all four of yours are still there between your two masts. You knock on her hatch and suggest breakfast above decks, hoping your low tone will lose the gesture to the wind. Better keep the rope knife strapped to the outside of your pants. Fruit and coffee on the floating platform, two precious commodities in the Bay, you idiot. She senses your discomfort, and asks only for a few days of grain as a favor before deciding that it’ll be calm enough to voyage back to her own shell - which she said is hopefully still anchored off Onancock. Watching her boat get smaller, you feel an embarrassment start to rise. Maybe let the next one stay a little longer, you idiot.”