Yanyi Liu

Fall 2024, MIT Core III Studio
In collaboration with Zachary Rapaport.
Instructed by J. Jih.

Boston has a history of creating land with infill. Our site follows this lineage and was built with dredged materials that forms a linearized shoreline.

In face of sea level rise and increasing storm events, the linearized shoreline is vulnerable to damage and endangers the east boston neighborhood to flood. To improve coastal resilience and protect the east boston neighborhood, the project dissolved the linearized shoreline and created vegetation-based habitat to mitigate wave and tidal impact.

The project deploys two strategies to create the coastal habitat. It first relocate dredged materials and a field of piles to augment the ground condition. The rocks and piles act as vertical barriers and attenuate wave energy. Next, the project cultivates vegetation attached to the rocks and piles to provide a soft barrier. The project grow salt marsh on the upper tidal region, rock weed at the intern tidal, and floating kelp unit at the sub-tidal region. Layers of vegetation thrive under and above water and create quiescent zones where other littoral creature grow and thrive. Barnacles, oysters, and snails cling to the reef formed around the piles while fishes swim through and across the underwater kelp forest.

Model photos on the beach
We adopt a topology of the piers in response to its common presence in the Boston harbor. But different from a typical pier that obstructs the waves, the pier is split to two edges and remains open in the middle to bring water in. The involuted pier reimagines our site to be inhabited by both human and non-humans, creating a built environment that is not on top of or next to the water, but a shared littoral habitat where creatures coexist.

Four pavilions spread across the interior of the involuted pier, forming a light-touched constellation of buildings on the littoral. The four buildings facilitate agricultural production, public access to the waterfront, and coastal habitat regeneration.

The buildings follow a binary construction system, composed of an infrastructural foundation and kits-of-parts enclosure. We acknowledge that a project of this scale requires an intensive construction process. We imagined creating a more sustainable and resilient building system that (1) reduce use of toxic chemicals and promotes using biogenic materials, (2) minimizes energy consumption and carbon emission, and (3) enables repair and maintenance in response to accelerated weathering and deterioration in the coastal environment.

These interests led us to engineer the material choice of each part of the construction system and arrive at a split between the foundation and rest of the buildings. The project proposes concentrating the most energy consumption to building a concrete piles foundation. The piles with sloped footings are infrastructural and are able to remain structurally sound in extreme events such as floods, storms, and regular tidal cycles. The concrete piles and footings are multi-functional as they not only support the buildings but also provide habitats for underwater creatures. Built with pores and carved out recess, the concrete serves a perfect base for growing reef. The concrete piles function as part of a ground-source heat pump and extract heat from the ground to heat and cool the buildings above.

The rest of the buildings follow a kits-of-part assembly logic and utilizes off-the-shelves materials. In a coastal environment that accelerates weathering and deterioration of building materials, the building has a shorter lifespan and is by no means precious. Rather than trying to stop and slow down the deterioration with coatings and chemicals, the building embraces decay and welcomes maintenance and repair. Following the Right to Repair spirit, the structural component and entire enclosures are made of Off-the-shelves dimensional lumbers, hardware, and SIPs, ubiquitous materials that are affordable, sustainable, and available in time of crisis.

Design of assembly prioritizes mechanical joints and techniques such as dowel lamination and sister joints to enable replacement of part of a building component without jeopardizing the entire structure. The light-touched construction system brings people to the project at its onset and beyond. The project encourages engagement from the neighborhood as the light timber frame structure with SIPs does not require specialized expertise and could be assembled by a few people with minor training. Needs for regular repair allows the building staff and visitors to participate in the repair process and cultivates a sense of belonging and ownership to the space, culminating to social and ecological stewardship.