■ Fluid Fluid pertains to landscape structures designed to flexibly accommodate the cyclical and seasonal fluctuations of water flow, as well as the management of water volume, frequency, and velocity.
Water is equally a life sustaining and an erosive force. Subject to weather cycles, with seasonal variations ranging from rains to hurricane, and from drought to floods, water flow is unpredictable. Fluid pertains to landscape structures designed to flexibly accommodate the cyclical and seasonal fluctuations of water flow, as well as the management of water volume, frequency, and velocity. In this chapter, structures and materials are discussed in terms of their capabilities to retain, infiltrate, control-release, and attenuate flows in order to prevent soil erosion, conveyance of pollutants, or flooding. Conversely, the capture and conveyance of water flow is examined in terms of the potential to create habitat, as well as recreational and visual amenities. Within Living Systems, water as a resource, a medium, and a fluid relates to every chapter topic: Stratify regulates permeability; Digestive biodegrades water pollutants; Translate monitors pollution or storm surges; and Volatile displays water’s ephemeral phases, such as mist and fog. In this chapter, all of the projects featured are associated with peak flows during storm events. However, each exemplifies a different type of flow dynamic ranging from large water bodies to small streams, from linear river flow to surface flow in urban areas. The projects demonstrate different site conditions and different scales: from urban to coastal riparian, from small lots to entire river sections.
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Within urban and suburban environments, landscape is typically engineered to convey water rapidly away from built structures to prevent interior flooding and to clear exterior circulation surfaces. Current design, planning and policy regard the dynamic of flows differently due to several major concerns. One concern is the conveyance of polluted surface runoff into water bodies, which necessitates onsite retention and filtration systems. While many sites comply with such municipal requirements, its landscape form is not always integrated as a design intent. The urban projects featured here demonstrate a retrofit design to inhabit the existing, dimensionally constrained urban fabric and infrastructure, as with Blackstone Stormwater Garden and SW 12th Avenue Green Street Project. The former is composed of a series of bio-swales that are designed to detain a 3-month storm event for 72 hours, consequently capturing and cleansing 90% of annual rainfall, and preventing polluted runoff from entering the nearby river. The latter features a stormwater collection and retention system that has been integrated into the existing sidewalk section. Distributed along the length of the street, the networked containers collect 60% of annual rainfall, and still accommodate circulation and vegetation. Such interventions, if deployed throughout the urban-suburban environment, can have a tremendously positive impact on water quality and flood prevention. Combined with Digestive operations and technologies, such as the newspaper nitrate treatment bioretention medium, researched by Allen P. Davis, the capacity for biofiltration can be highly efficient.
