An Architectural Approach to Coastal Infrastructure

Abstract

Coastal suburbia has a complicated relationship with the ground. While public life and public infrastructure exist on the ground plane, the coastal home must be elevated from the ground on stilts to be a legal, livable space. These stilts, or columns, are dual-functioning. They are structure, but they are also infrastructure. They serve as structure for the home above, but also as a device to protect the home from climate change and rising sea levels. Their place resides within the architect’s realm of specialty—the single-family home’s structure—but are also a stepping stone for the architect to have a larger presence within infrastructural decision making, specifically decisions surrounding infrastructure tied to climate change and sea level rise. Since the beginnings of postmodernism, the architect has stood on the fringes of the infrastructural design world. City infrastructure issues are first a policy issue and second, a problem of efficiency—a problem given to engineers to solve. While this is not inherently a bad thing, the opportunities for the architect to create infrastructure that is better integrated into the ways we live are few and far between. In order to bring the architect back into discussions surrounding city infrastructure, the architect must first repurpose and exhaust the uses of the humble column. In approaching the coastal home’s structural columns as pieces of an expanded infrastructural system, climate change becomes the impetus for the reassertion of the architect’s agency, and an architectural approach to designing infrastructure begins to surface.