climate

futures


On view at the Liberty Research Annex
October 17, 2024 - January 1, 2025


about
projects
  1. 22/26 Midwest
  2. Ambiguous Territory
  3. Annotation and Insulation
  4. Asutsuare Rebound
  5. Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse
  6. Becoming Biomass
  7. Bespoke Ultra-Thin Layered 3D-printed Reusable Wood-Bio-Based Formwork for Casting Complex Concrete Geometries
  8. Branch Wall: Geometrically Informed Non-Planar Toolpath and Material Deposition
  9. Deploy 2.0
  10. Detroit Cultural Center
  11. Elephant in the Room, and Other Fables
  12. Fabric-Formed Unstabilized Poured Earth
  13. Frie(s/d)
  14. Functionally Graded Additive Manufacturing
  15. Guidance for Designing and Implementing Constitutionally Valid Local Plans and Regulations to Protect Landmarked Trees, Woodlands, and Tree Canopy in Michigan
  16. Heat and Housing: Co-producing Passive Cooling Strategies and Promoting Health in Informal and Precarious Settlements
  17. Hygroscopic Envelope: Building Enclosures for Climate Adaptation
  18. In My Backyard
  19. In-Svalbard: Cold Coast Atlas
  20. Land, Foodways, and Kinship: The Case of Palestinian Villages
  21. Light Forms
  22. MiCE Architecture: Design Strategies to Mitigate Michigan Coastal Erosion
  23. Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
  24. Myco-Composite Furniture
  25. Post Rock Post-Industrial Plastic Facade
  26. re:FE Reimagining Mining Waste from a Wounded Region
  27. Shell Wall: Coupling Non-Planar Robotic 3D Concrete Printing and Topology Optimization
  28. Solar Technology Integration on Building Facades
  29. The Canopy
  30. The Lifespan Project
  31. Unfolding Forms of Conveyance
  32. Urban Climate Law Series
  33. Vertical Wetlands





MiCE Architecture: Design Strategies to Mitigate Michigan Coastal Erosion
Jono Sturt, Richard Norton, Steven Mankouche 2023

22

Dynamic Great Lakes coastal shorelands experience risks both from the immediate impacts of coastal storms, such as inundation and aggressive erosion, and from the longer-term recession of coastal shorelines. Historical and contemporary nearshore coastal development is increasingly placing substantial developed properties at heightened risk to coastal hazards, threatening in turn local economies and raising real social equity concerns. While considerable integrative scholarly work has been done addressing these broad challenges, that work has not to date accounted expressly for long-term Great Lake shoreline recession, queried whether the design of structures in high-hazard coastal settings might be improved to reduce their vulnerabilities, addressed how insurance programs and policies specifically in the Great Lakes might be influencing individual property development decisions, or evaluated whether and how Great Lakes coastal community planning efforts are addressing these interrelated questions—or might be improved by doing so.

Collaborating actively with representatives of Michigan governmental associations, researchers conducted analyses on four distinct topics, including: simplified methods for accurately mapping Great Lakes coastal shoreline movement over time; methods for improving the design and siting of coastal shoreland structures to facilitate and reduce the costs of relocation in the future; hazard insurance coverages for structures situated along Great Lakes shores, and general local knowledge of those coverages; and current coastal community planning and zoning efforts, particularly in reference to coastal insurance programs. This exhibition focuses on options for siting and designing near-shore coastal structures to make them more moveable, and more resilient generally, to coastal erosion and shoreline recession hazards in the future. In brief, we found that these design options are probably on par in terms of cost with more conventional responses—including mainly the construction of seawalls and bulkheads—and that some property owners have moved their structures back from eroding shorelines. There appears to be little coordinated effort to promote such “managed retreat” from coastal hazards, however, and virtually no work on improving the design of coastal structures to make managed retreat more feasible both technically and economically.