Adaptation

THE PROJECT

Oysters are design collaborators in a visionary green infrastructure project off the shore of Staten Island in New York. SCAPE and founder Kate Orff receive the fifth OBEL AWARD architecture prize for the radical breakwaters design and community and ecosystems-driven approach to adaptation.

Living Breakwaters, the 2023 OBEL AWARD winning project, is a half mile linear necklace of near-shore breakwaters along the south shore of Staten Island in New York. A mix of stones and carefully designed ecologically enhanced concrete units are placed strategically to calm the water, reduce erosion, and rebuild onshore beaches, but also to support oysters, fin fish, and other marine species. The oysters will form part of the design of the artificial reef formation. As they reproduce, the breakwaters grow denser and able to provide more protection of the shore.

Beyond the breakwaters, the project has involved nearly a decade of educational and engagement-related programming designed to advance community stewardship, citizen science, and recreation along the water’s edge.

The Living Breakwaters concept was developed by a large, multi-disciplinary team led by SCAPE as part of a winning proposal for Rebuild By Design, the design competition launched by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) after Superstorm Sandy.

A visionary green infrastructure project, ‘Living Breakwaters’ reduces risk, revives ecologies, and connects people to the shoreline. Thus, the project tackles the full task of adaptation according to Chair of the OBEL AWARD jury, Martha Schwartz:

“Breakwaters is an ancient idea for how to protect shorelines – and the people who live close to them – by building underwater seawalls to defend a harbor or a beach from the force of waves. Kate has designed an extraordinary, modern-day interpretation, the Living Breakwaters, which will not only protect humans and revitalize the coastline of New York City, but also restore lost marine biodiversity. This is a visionary project that tackles the full task of adaptation, and which has the capacity to inspire and to positively impact vulnerable shorelines worldwide.”

See more about the project

Kate Orff

Living Breakwaters

2023 Obel Award Winner

Living Breakwaters is a post-Sandy project off the South Shore of Staten Island designed to break waves, reduce (and eventually reverse) erosion of the shoreline, and provide a range of habitat spaces for oysters, fin fish, and other marine species.

Living Breakwaters primarily consists of 2,400 linear feet of near-shore breakwaters—structures built of stone and ecologically-enhanced concrete with a variety of features such as “reef ridges” and “reef streets” that will provide diverse habitat space for marine species.

Beyond the breakwaters, the project has involved nearly a decade of educational and engagement-related programming designed to advance community stewardship, citizen science, and recreation along the water’s edge.

The project was initially developed by a SCAPE-led team for Rebuild By Design—a design competition led by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) after Superstorm Sandy. The project’s implementation is led by the NYS Office of Resilient Homes and Communities (RHC). The project is expected to be completed in 2024.

Supported by years of iterative modeling and robust scientific analysis, the breakwaters are designed to attenuate wave energy, lessen the effects of coastal erosion, and generally reduce physical risk for on-shore communities.

As part of the design process, the team performed extensive hydrodynamic modeling that included computer modeling of shoreline change, wave movement, sediment movement, water circulation, and localized water circulation around the breakwaters.

The results of this modeling indicate that the breakwaters will not adversely impact water circulation and flushing in the area nor have significant impacts on sediment movement beyond the shoreline area (where they are being designed to reduce or reverse erosion).

While the breakwaters will displace some existing bottom habitat, they will be creating new aquatic habitat as well and construction is being timed to avoid any bottom disturbance to the harbor during seasons where critical species sensitive to bottom disturbance might be impacted.

Incorporating a wide range of habitat-supporting features, the breakwaters are designed to foster biodiversity for a range of species.

The breakwaters have been designed to include features that will create habitat for aquatic species and help diversify and enhance the aquatic ecosystem.

These features include “reef ridges”—rocky protrusions on the ocean-facing sides of the breakwaters—and “reef streets”—the narrow spaces between the reef ridges—that create opportunities for refuge (hiding) and foraging (feeding) for a variety of fish and other aquatic species. This habitat diversity is further enhanced on the reef ridges through greater variation in rock sizes and the spaces between them, as well as ecologically enhanced concrete armor units and tidepools.

Beyond the breakwaters, the project has involved nearly a decade of educational and engagement-related programming designed to advance community stewardship, citizen science, and recreation along the water’s edge.

This meant engaging and working with partners through the design process, but also ensuring that the breakwaters provide opportunities for education and raise awareness of coastal risk and resilience and harbor ecosystem health once constructed.

This has informed traditional engagement as part of the project—open houses, informational sessions, community meetings, focus groups, charrettes and more—as well as less traditional engagement methods such as shore tours, pop-up engagement booths, site-specific installations, exhibitions, virtual reality (VR) experiences and digital outreach.

In 2015, RHC assembled a Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC) to provide regular input on the Living Breakwaters project as it advanced. The CAC is comprised of local and regional stakeholders representing the diverse communities of Staten Island; all meetings were open to the public. This committee was intended to serve in an advisory role, not replace direct public engagement events and workshops, which also occurred in parallel throughout the duration of the project.

Over several years, RHC and the SCAPE team also collaborated with the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) to develop classes and field trips for Staten Island schools, educating local students about 101 concepts related to coastal resilience, climate change and the Living Breakwaters project. One outcome of this process is an open-access STEAM curriculum jointly developed by SCAPE and BOP that can be used by teachers in their classes for years to come.

Supported by years of iterative modeling and robust scientific analysis, the breakwaters are designed to attenuate wave energy, lessen the effects of coastal erosion, and reduce physical risk for on-shore communities.

JURY’S STATEMENT

The ecological and social responsibilities of architecture have been a major focus of the Obel Award since its founding in 2019. The theme established by the jury for 2023 is ADAPTATION, which refers to the necessity and possibilities of architecture to adapt to a world in flux. The ecosystems, landscapes, and human structures and systems that were once intertwined with architectures of permanence can no longer be taken for granted. Instead, adaptation calls for an architecture that confronts uncertainty and acts through time so that both human and non-human life can continue to survive and even thrive.

The 2023 winning project, Living Breakwater, provides a real alternative to the walls, levees, and barriers so often built in our coastal waterways and oceans seeking to defend us from the ravages of human-induced climate change.

Living Breakwaters adheres to a different worldview in which natural systems are valued for their protective benefit. With the project, SCAPE and its founding principal Kate Orff put forward a drastically different concept of adaptation in the built environment that operates on several scales, increasing both physical, ecological, and social resilience, and which activates both human and non-human life in the design process.

The physical design of Living Breakwaters is an ingenious mix of natural and carefully modelled artificial elements that mimic naturally occurring reef formations in order to support marine life. It is a strongly science-based approach, an attempt to design to stimulate and collaborate with nature. With time, oysters and other underwater organisms will adhere to the designed structures and strengthen them and their ability to protect the shore, thus blurring the lines between nature and design.

Living Breakwaters also acknowledges that climate adaptation requires people to be on board. Humans have an active role in the adaptation process in Living Breakwaters, and Kate and her team are especially adept at motivating people and communities to become stewards of their local environment.

Architecture must recognise its ecological and social responsibilities. Living Breakwaters does exactly that. As such, this relatively low-cost, low-tech response provides a seminal example of how to design not against but with nature in adapting to the changes that lie ahead.

ABOUT KATE ORFF

Kate Orff, RLA, FASLA, is the Founding Principal of SCAPE. As the first-ever landscape architect to receive the MacArthur Foundation’s prestigious ‘Genius’ Fellowship in 2017, Orff has led a vanguard movement across the design fields to address sweeping 21st century challenges in social and environmental justice through projects, research, activism, and publications.

In 2023, Kate was named to the TIME100 Most Influential People in the world, as the first landscape architect to ever be included on the list. In 2019, she was elevated to the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Council of Fellows—one of the highest honors bestowed on landscape architects practicing in the U.S. She currently sits on the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2019, she accepted a National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, on behalf of SCAPE, and was named a Hero of the Harbor by the Waterfront Alliance. She was a 2012 United States Artist Fellow, dubbed an Elle “Planet Fixer,” and has been profiled and interviewed extensively for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, National Geographic and more.

Orff graduated with a Bachelor’s in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia with Distinction and earned a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. She is also the Director of the Urban Design Program, Co-Director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes (CRCL), and Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

Read interview

Nature is a matter of design now

2023 OBEL AWARD FOR ADAPTATION: LIVING BREAKWATERS

We need to design the natural systems of the future, according to landscape architect and winner of the OBEL AWARD 2023, Kate Orff. Her radical, collaborative approach to climate adaptation activates both human and non-human life in the design process.

“The notion of beauty needs a reboot, especially with regards to the landscape. Our current conception of beauty and pretense of control of nature has really worked us into a corner and threatened our ability to adapt to a changing climate,” says OBEL AWARD 2023 recipient Kate Orff.

Orff is a landscape architect and founding principal of SCAPE, a design-driven landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York. The Living Breakwaters project – an innovative blue-green infrastructure project – won the OBEL AWARD 2023 as the best example of adaptation in the built environment.

Oysters – a critical piece of infrastructure

When Kate Orff moved to New York City, she realised that unlike where she grew up, in Maryland near Chesapeake Bay, New York had lost its relationship to the water. So, she began studying the bays and the rivers, rather than focusing on the land or the parks as a typical landscape architect would do. Her research taught her about the importance of thriving landscapes as a form of protective climate infrastructure.

“Coastal ecosystems in the form of dunes, maritime forests, wetlands, and reefs all have incredible protective benefit. And all of those landscapes are in perilous decline. Rather than rush to erect vertical seawalls and barriers that aim to solve one threat, and create myriad new problems, we advanced a holistic approach of risk reduction, rebuilding ecosystems, and fostering coastal habitat. Oysters and community members became our engineering and design partners. Oysters can clean and filter water, they can build protective reefs, and they can help restore intertidal habitat and marine life. I started thinking about the oysters as to be essentially a piece of critical infrastructure that not only buffers waves, but brings people together with a shared purpose,” she says.

The Living Breakwaters span 2,400 linear feet off the South Shore of Staten Island, New York. The breakwaters consist of a mix of stone and ecologically-enhanced concrete units shaped like small tide pools. By attaching spat (baby oysters) to the reef structure, the goal is for these oyster reefs to encrust the breakwater and for the tide pools to become completely filled with algae and critters, explains Orff. In this way, the oysters serve as a sort of biological glue and actually enhance the ability of the breakwaters to slow the movement of water and reduce shoreline erosion, while also increasing habitat value.

Design that begets life

The Living Breakwaters are literally living and growing with marine species, which form part of the design. The project represents Orff’s approach to landscape architecture and design, in which human and non-human life intertwine in a continuous process, interweaving social and ecological infrastructure.

“The design is a collaboration between human hands and the harnessing of natural processes. There are moments where you see the obvious sculpting of a reef street or the synthetic curve of a manufactured tide pool, but over time, these things will blur into a hybrid of constructed and natural forms coming together,” Orff says.

“We have to move past this notion that design is a trendy object or a signature building or an Instagram moment. We have to think about design at a holistic, planetary scale, and think about mending the fabric of life on earth. In order to repair our living systems and to truly adapt, we have to know how species connect and interact, and we have to design systemically to tie the pieces back together. And that is an incredibly bold, creative act,” she says.

And what about beauty? Orff doesn’t hesitate:

“I find the Living Breakwaters to be incredibly beautiful. Because you can see the many formerly fragmented pieces coming together. It’s not about the thing itself, it’s about the long-term reclamation of coastal culture, livelihoods, and a revitalized harbor. We’ve seen bald eagles, seals, and whales nearby. It’s a design that begets life. And life is beautiful.”

Fabricated vulnerability

Orff’s speech quickens when she describes the many ways in which humans have destroyed the natural systems – to their own detriment.

“The physical landscapes that have sustained us since the beginning of time are imperiled around the world. In the past decades, we’ve dredged our water bodies, destroyed protective coral reefs, and we have built in vulnerable areas, on sandy barrier beaches, in wildfire-prone hillsides. We have manufactured the risks that we are facing now through burning fossil fuels and increased that risk exponentially by destroying landscapes. Buffered by insurance and driven by real estate speculation, we’ve fabricated the very conditions that are threatening us now,” she says.

The destruction has been so comprehensive that Orff is dismissive of the idea of passive rewilding.

“We cannot assume that somehow nature will just take its course and “come back.” We’ve so profoundly altered our water quality, our air quality, our soils, that all of these elements need to come together and be reset. Nature needs to be actively cultivated and actively stewarded over time. It takes a lot of effort, design, collaboration and leadership. Nature is a matter of design now,” she says.

Bridging to the future

The good news is, humanity already has all of the tools to design for adaptation, from agriculture, from indigenous practices, and from science and computer modelling. We only have to join those tools. But Orff insists that before considering adaptation, the first thing we need to do is stop burning fossil fuels and decarbonize our economy. Because adaptation does not eliminate risk; it only reduces it.

When done well, adaptation according to Orff is also about raising awareness of risk. A significant part of the Living Breakwaters project has been about involving people and providing space for political engagement and learning. The team worked with their partners at the Billion Oyster Project to develop a curriculum around the Living Breakwaters and worked with local schools on afterschool design charrettes, shore walks, and seining to discover what organisms are living in local waters.

“Adaptation is not a thing. It is not a solution or an object. Adaptation is a process, one that involves physical change or a physical piece of infrastructure but also a cultural and social transformation. It’s about putting into motion an adaptive process where people and natural system are in constant relationship to one another,” Orff says, adding:

“I never describe the Living Breakwaters as a “solution.” I talk about it as an initiative that’s building a bridge to the future. It is going to help us adapt, buffer the shore, buy us time, and bring our harbor back to life. Over time, the shoreline will be replenished with sand, the beaches will be built back, the shoreline grasses will come back, the marine life – the oysters, the shellfish, the fin fish – will come back. And over

time, people will be reconnected to the shore and understand the risks that we face. The project is not a singular gesture; it’s part of a process that’s unfolding in time and which will put us on a different, more sustainable path.”

New signs of life

The Living Breakwaters team did extensive digital modeling but also large-scale, physical modelling. They built a 1:20 scale model of the breakwaters in a wave tank the size of an Olympic swimming complex. This allowed them to test the design in different conditions to understand how all the elements would behave in different scenarios and wave velocities. Each rock and e-concrete element was painted a color to make it clearly visible to test which elements could withstand the waves, and which ones could not.

The design of the Living Breakwaters was modified over many years based on all the digital and physical tests. Now, the project is nearing the completion of construction, and already there is tangible evidence of a return of wildlife.

“We have a resident bald eagle and a cormorant colony, which is a sign of a lot of vibrant sea life below the surface. We also have oysters and clams and a whole range of intertidal life. Seals are hauling out on the breakwater rocks. And that’s exciting because it’s a sign that water quality is improving, as a testament to New York’s long-term efforts to manage pollution and sewage,” Orff says.

Coral reefs, eelgrass, and mangroves

Getting the innovative blue-green infrastructure project through politically was difficult and took over eight years of hard collaborative work. There are many laws in the United States that make it difficult to build in, around, and near the water, Orff explains.

“The Living Breakwaters project is unique in many ways because it is construction within our water bodies. We had to jump through many, many hoops and navigate sometimes hostile bureaucracies which have been built up to keep things separate. It was a challenge to keep the social, ecological, and risk reduction facets of the project moving forward in tandem. I hope this project is also a pilot for a process of how to mode, test and implement large-scale coastal infrastructure in urban areas around the world,” she says.

The project is designed and adjusted meticulously for a specific geographic context, but its core idea and vision are very much relevant to other contexts globally. The key premise of Living Breakwaters is that adaptation is both social, ecological, and physical. And that approach is highly replicable.

“In the New York Harbor, our coastal infrastructure may be oyster reefs. But in Belize, it might be coral and eelgrass, and in Kolkata, mangroves. This protective form of coastal ecological infrastructure needs to be paired with schools and social life and other forms of social infrastructure – and of course designed for protective value,” Orff says.

Awarding systems repair

Orff hopes that the recognition by the OBEL AWARD can help accelerate the rebuilding of coastal ecosystems as infrastructure and push the design of the future towards systems repair.

“Winning an architecture prize is important for a project like this which involved so many different people working together with a shared purpose. It is a true encouragement for community members, elected officials, landscape architects, ecologists and engineers to come together and develop coastal adaptation projects wherever they are,” she says. **“The time is now.”**

2022

Oysters are design collaborators in a visionary green infrastructure project off the shore of Staten Island in New York. SCAPE and founder Kate Orff receive the fifth OBEL AWARD architecture prize for the radical breakwaters design and community and ecosystems-driven approach to adaptation.

Supported by years of iterative modeling and robust scientific analysis, the breakwaters are designed to attenuate wave energy, lessen the effects of coastal erosion, and reduce physical risk for on-shore communities.

2023 Winner: Living Breakwaters