.
Banded Bayou
Studio / Fall 2017 / Rice Architecture / Professor Albert Pope
Houston has endured repeated so-called 100-year floods year after year. On the heels of Hurricane Harvey, with destruction at an all-time high, it is clear that the city’s attempts to shrink the natural floodplain through engineered solutions alone are not enough. The studio posits that if the floodplain cannot be shrunk, the only recourse is to withdraw. Meyerland, Houston, situated on Brays Bayou, is used as the demonstration site for a staged withdrawal from the 100-year floodplain.
Rather than propose a fixed scheme in response to the particularities of a single site, Banded Bayou focuses on the design of a comprehensive system, utilizing a level of abstraction to develop a flexible, deployable, generalized system before applying it specifically to Meyerland for a sited study. Three key scalable factors are defined: flood management, withdrawal, and densification. To address flood management the system proposes the construction of channels and canals extending perpendicularly from the bayou. This sets up an organizational approach of perpendicular orientation, creating bands framed by channels. Within each band any degree of withdrawal and densification can occur. For the purposes of this project 25%, 50%, and 75% levels are demonstrated. Withdrawal generates a new public realm in the form of a continuous green space along the bayou, producing a voided figure in the urban fabric. To densify, multi-family residential housing can be constructed at the edges of retreat, establishing new urban frontages to the water. By accommodating a pattern of shearing, the system allows bands to adjust and slide, producing a diverse cross section as opposed to a hard boundary. The result is a sheared, densified scheme withdrawing from the floodplain while introducing public green space and flood management capabilities.