Delaminating Waters

Syracuse University, Syracuse University School of Architecture

Project idea

Delaminating Waters is a projective proposal for a salt shed and bath complex in Brooklyn New York. Reacting to new desalination technologies and cleaner New York waters, this proposal projects a future in which salt shed infrastructure becomes decentralized, allowing for renewed community engagement with its processes and the waters it concerns.

Project description

Inspired by historical methodologies of solar salt production, Delaminating Waters lifts the salt flats from the water, using raised desalination units to provide enclosure and massing. These units effectively split the water into its component parts, providing salt for NYC and hot water for public baths. Free from the constraints of salt production, the water becomes a walkable landscape through the use of a semi-buoyant surface. Throughout each day and month this landscape shifts, morphs, and changes, responding to the environment and linking the user to the water. This fabric of the water is then lifted to form walkways and areas are scooped out of the ocean to become baths. From hot to cold, desalinated to salty, high to low, these baths aggregate into the ocean, ultimately integrating with the very waters that they came from. Below these baths is a didactic experience in which the viewer can see and understand the many ways in which the water is seen and experienced. They stand on the very surface of the water, subject to its every change and shift. They look down at holes in the fabric of the water, marking locations where that water has been relocated. They look up at baths rid of their component salt. They look further at the process by which the water is separated, coming face to face with Delaminated Waters.

One of the greatest challenges when working with industrial architecture is finding a means of re-integrating the human scale. In this project, the challenge was overcome through the secondary program of the bath and the tectonic expression of the structure. Nestled under the industrially-scaled mass, this network of baths provides a means of experiencing the remnants of desalination. The baths allow for a didactic experience with the mechanized systems that provide both salt and water, as the user relaxes under the systems that create the means of relaxing. A conflagration of light, mass, surface, and void create a dynamic and inspirational space. The tectonic expression of the piers provides a compression of space at the level of the user, tightening the focus of the broad industrial complex and providing spaces of privacy through line of sight manipulation and massing.

Research Considerations:
Understanding the existing means through which salt is mined, shipped, and spread across the roads of New York was the first step towards proposing a decentralized system. Shown are diagrams representing extraction and shipment on the scale of the continent (left). Existing DSNY and salt shed locations within Brooklyn (middle). And finally the location and orientation of the site along with its sun path to better inform the massing of desalination units.

Proposing a decentralized salt shed system means considering the ways in which salt accumulation and its formal qualities change over time. In order to better understand these processes, I combined snow and sand to create a model that slowly melted over time. In documenting this process, I was able to reorganize the slow melting process to better represent the ways in which the salt piles would change throughout the year.

Salt changes, morphs, and eventually destroys everything it touches. In a world that values the rigid and unchanging, the entropic effects of salt contact and the textures they create are often unwanted additions to any built work. In an effort to better understand and design with these conditions, I ran pieces of paper on a conveyor belt under a mass of salt. Over time this paper was marked and changed by the salt, opening doors to interesting material and formal possibilities.

Technical information

In accordance with existing pier typologies, the pylon foundations are reinforced concrete, manipulated tectonically to form graduated squares, piercing the water and delineating space. The pylons are then rust-resistant metal and are supported on the high end of the massing by tension cables. These pylons support a rust-resistant metal structural grid that holds individual desalination units (glass, 3d printed experimental compounds, metal). Salt and water are moved from and to these desalination units via pipes supported by the same metal structural grid. The baths are constructed from exposed metal supports between pylons and a reinforced concrete mass. Concrete is used in this situation because of its high compressive strength and resiliency in the highly erosive environment that the salt creates. This strategy is continued to the salt shed, where the first 15 feet of enclosure (what the salt rests against) is concrete before transitioning to the lighter metal pylons. The roof enclosure of the salt shed is a translucent polycarbonate, providing a discourse in light between process and result.