Chadwick Bowlin
In the face of anthropogenic climate change, I believe that landscape architecture and urban planning can contribute to a more resilient future. This requires centering those most affected by the reprocussions of environmental injustice and social inequity. Through my work, and with my studies, I plan to contribute to a future that is just as equitable as it is sustainable, by increasing access to ammenties such as natural environments, public space, and public transportation
Cover Photo: Physical model from “Welcome Home”
PROJECTS
Welcome Home
Imaginative Inclines
A Labor of Love
Bringing Culverts to (De)light
Personal Drawings
Fall 2022
Spring 2023
Spring 2022
Fall 2021
2017 -
Welcome Home: Invoking Sense of Place and Negotiating Land Ownership During Climate-Based Retreat Harvard GSD, Landscape Architecture III: Third Core Studio (Fall 2022)
Possible Flowchart of Housing Options
‘Welcome Home’ anticipates future community displacement due to sea-level rise and asks questions as to where displaced residents may go, how their movements may impact inland property owners and how residents will cope with the grief of leaving home. In doing so, it grapples with the difficult and complicated notion of home in climate migration, for displaced and receiving communities alike. Central in this exploration is retaining a sense of ‘home’ and dignity for migrating communities, providing them with choices in their relocation and the opportunity to stay close to, and even share, what they loved about their previous home site. Receiving communities negotiate the migration into their communities, and even properties, offering a variety of densities and amenity access aligned with existing conditions of undeveloped or underdeveloped areas and the relocating individuals’ priorities and previous memory of home. Inundated sites are reconfigured. Roads are realigned and boardwalks created to allow access to personalized follies for public and private use. Materials that remain physically form and establish new public spaces, places to remember and to make new memories. At both sites, the idea of a private home is dissolved into a more elusive notion of a place with no boundaries.
Left: A diagram showing the extent of anticipated SLR of 6’ in Wareham, MA, as well as the two site locations Above: A flowchart menu with various housing options for residents displaced by SLR
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Top left: Proposed Site 1 plan, the coastal site, along with closer details and sections of wetland restoration and boardwalk ‘follies’ where houses once were Top right: Proposed Site 2 plan, showing the four new housing typologies for displaced residents, as identified in the renderings and flowchart, along with section
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Top left: Photos of the interactive physical model, pulling apart to demonstrate current versus future proposed conditions. A combination of laser cutting and 3D printing was used. Below left: A photo of the interactive model being deconstructed and used to explain Site 1 Above: A flowchart diagram explaining the material flows that convert inundated properties to site furnitures
A critical piece of this project was the use of the interactive physical model. Demonstrating the dynamics between sea-level, land, and material construction, this model was intended to show several decades of transformation within the same model. The physical model had three portions, two of which were interchangable into the third, static piece. The existing conditions are represented by a combination of darker chipboard building footprints, land contours of bristol, and ocean levels of tinted acrylic. The lower part of the existing model slides away, to be replaced by the proposed model. This part of the model contained removable “follies” 3D-printed in PLA, a higher ocean level from 6 feet of SLR, and a boardwalk of darker chipboard. The remaining inland buildings are kept in place, to demonstrate the protective factors these interventions give.
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Furtherest above: Renderings demonstrating the deconstruction and transformation into a memorable landscape of “follies” for displaced residents to return to. Directly above: Rendering of a first-person view, out the window of the four different housing typologies: “Beachside Village”, Waterside Suburb, “Eco-community”, and “Co-habitation”
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Imaginative Inclines: Slope as Generative and Accessible in Charlestown Harvard GSD, Landscape Architecture IV: Fourth Core Studio (Spring 2023)
Despite one in 4 U.S. adults having a disability that impacts major life activities, disability is still rarely at the forefront of climate resilience and disaster planning efforts. With an increase in heat waves, flooding, and other climate disasters, the number of people with disabilities will increase, along with the disparities experienced by those who already experience disability. How can an urban design in Charlestown provide recreation and care everyday, while simultaneously act as climate disaster infrastructure when needed? Using slope, which is usually a barrier to access, as a design parameter, Imaginative Inclines speculates a more inclusive, resilient, and enjoyable Charlestown in a variety of topographic and spatial contexts. From an ADA-compliant 20:1 slope, to a dramatic 4:1 or 2:1 slope, inclines become the technology for new programming. The intersecting challenges of climate change, inclusion, and accessibility, create novel opportunities for daily community-building and critical infrastructure during climate disasters.
Left: A abstract grid of typologies that demonstrate different creative uses of slope Above: A site master plan that demonstrates the designed corridors, which serve simultaneously as emergency evacuation infrastructure and accessible routes. Darker orange gradient demonstrates a higher elevation.
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Above: A detailed axonometric section of one of the streets in the proposal, demonstrating the variety of access and emergency interventions, all with different topographic conditions. Right: Two vignettes of interventions mentioned in the axon, being used by people, with a description, slope requirements, and key functions related to the interventions.
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Left: A timeline and series of sections demonstrating the hypothetical flooding impacts of a major hurricane storm surge on Charlestown Top Right: Images of the physical model, a series of 3D-printed bricks with varying slopes that I observed during the site visit of Charlestown. Above: Images of the bricks during the final presentation being used as visualization tool when explaining the proposed interventions
Similarly to my project “Welcome Home”, I used an interactive physical model to explain this project during final review. Since my project uses slope as a tool for recreation and access, I wanted reviewers to see this common measurement three-dimensionally. A series of orange bricks, all of which demonstrating different surface slopes that were observed in Charlestown, were 3D-printed and used as a supplemental visualization tool. For example, a 12:1 brick was used to demonstrate the slope of the accessible corridor, which corresponds to an ADA requirement. When I became a Core 1 teaching assistant the following semester, these bricks became a teaching tool for incoming landscape architecture students to help them better visualize common slope gradient ratios.
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Above: A stakeholder diagram which demonstrates the importance of thinking of access as a universal experience. Half of the drawing is a map with descriptions of distance, explaining distance limitations for those with varying impairments. The bottom half of the drawing is collection of characters in street view, with varying levels of ability in the moment, depending on their circumstance.
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A Labor of Love: A Cemetery for Cooperative Greif Harvard GSD, Landscape Architecture II: Second Core Studio (Fall 2022)
This design proposal for a cemetery for Franklin Park, in Boston, MA, confronts the labor of cemetery management as an oppertunity for loving, ritual-based programming. The manual labor that is put into maintaining cemeteries constitutes a large part of the operational costs of a cemetery, and often uses maintenance regimes that are environmentally unsustainable and impersonal. “A Labor of Love”, invites community members and mourners alike to become part of the seasonal labor that is required to upkeep the cemetery, uplifts their work, and allows this labor to express the deep love mourners had for their loved ones in life. During the construction of this cemetery, structural elements of the demolished facilities would be used to construct “labor pavilions” throughout the site. These become rest spots, tool storage, and even contain a small amphitheater. Managed meadows, with seasonal labor and commemoration rituals of flowerpicking, butterfly releases, cutting and occasional sowing, constitute a major portion of the design. During the fall, the meadows are cut low, and if needed, sowed, in preparation for the next year, another community and maintenance labor ritual. During the winter, other portions of the cemetery embody this ritual of labor: terrace paths containing designated snow collection areas with catch basins regularly highlight the labor of shoveling. As the snow melt thaws and freezes, an “ice terrace” forms between the drain outlets and the pond.
Above: A circular year-by-month diagram demonstrating the seasonal divisions of labor, based on labor contingency. Each contingency is represented by a ring; the thicker the ring at a specific month, the more labor required by that contingency. Ceremonies and other seasonal rituals surround the diagram. Left: A diagram showing the derivatives of demolished structures infomed the design of the “labor pavillions”
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Site plan fon “A Labor of Love”. Light green areas indicate managed meadow areas. Above: A diagramatic matrix of seasonal labor and occupation based on three different landscape types: upland forest, managed meadows, and ice terraces Above: Renderings of community members and maintenance workers collaboratively performing labor as ritual through through the seasons. In order, there are images of “winter snow-shoveling”, “spring flower-picking”, “late summer mowing”, and “fall tree-pruning”
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Above series: Photos of the physical model created of the proposal. White “labor pavilions” are represented with folded paper, while colored pins represent intended labor ritutals in different parts of the model. Blue, green, red, and yellow are representative of winter, spring, summer, and fall, respectively. Model was produced using a CNC routing machine.
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Above: Seasonal section-perspectives of the different landscape typology patterns, and how they affect seasonal foliage, blooming patterns, and labor occupation.
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Bringing Culverts to (De)Light: Versatility, Interactivity, and Other Pleasures Harvard GSD, Landscape Architecture 1: First Core Studio (Fall 2021)
This design of Herter Park, in Boston, MA, proposes daylighting existing culverted streams, and creating a system of artificial wetlands to treat water before entering the Charles River. It also adds flexible programming in and nearby these infrastructures. This is meant to encourage users to embrace a hybrid of infrastructure and recreation, and re-establish themselves and their neighborhood as part of a larger urban ecosystem. A major design intervention included a new amphitheater, which is graded slightly lower than the nearby parking lot and park space. During a major storm event, or a wet season, this amphitheater would flood, and store stormwater which would otherwise remain untreated or cause localized flooding. Parking lots in the design serves multiple functions when not used for parking, including sports programming, flexible larger community events, and directing stormwater from surrounding impervious areas into the wetlands. Other programming throughout the park includes expanded community gardens, bike and pedestrian trails, and a swimmable area created from treated streamwater from a culvert and diverted riverwater.
Left: Pictures of a prototype model, demonstrating a bridge crossing over a wetland condition. Hand-sculpted. Above: Existing subbasins in the surrounding Allston context, derived from planning documents. These basins were used to speculate the origins of culverts located in the park.
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Above: Proposed site plan, and indicated transects. Darker water areas in within the project suggest water with higher particulates, while lighter areas indicate lower levels of particulates due to remediation wetlands.
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From left to right: Smaller scale transects of the community garden, the floodable apitheatre and multi-use space, and recreational boardwalk and sports fields.
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Above: Sections taken from smaller transects, seen on page 14, with additional occupational context
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Personal Drawings Spring 2017 - Current
As a hobby and as an exercise, I often watercolor places that around around me, or that I visit, from Boston to Barcelona. Since my first drawing course in 2017, I have done at least a few dozen paintings of landscapes in my travels. This hobby has made me appreciate the smaller details of the landscapes, and also how to abstract plant and landscape forms.
Left: A picture of a watercolor drawing of mine alongside the landscape being draw, the Hollywood Hills, in the background. Above: Watercolor of a one of the gate into Harvard Yard, April 2021.
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The Charles River, viewed from the Esplanade, Boston. July 2021.
Park Güell, Barcelona, July 2017.
A park in Sacramento, CA. July 2020.
A village in the northern Spain, July 2017.
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