Water, waterworks and water journeys in South Florida's Everglades

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of how architectural form could make the movement of water through a particular landscape evident. The project is a design of a journey through a portion of South Florida's Everglades traversed by waterworks structures which protect the region's developed land from flooding. The notion is that while the marsh has been seriously damaged by flood control efforts, both the marsh and the waterworks are important. Both are awesome in extent and complexity. Because of their monumental scale and the subtlety of their ways, however, that they exist, what they do and the nature of their conflict is difficult to perceive.The more general issue may be understood as a problem of getting the scale of the Everglades -- and the scale of 2,000 miles of canals -- to make sense at the scale of a person. The book is organized in three parts. The first describes these issues of scale and perception, and presents the idea at the landscape-size gesture to mark a small piece at it as place, site. This section describes the ways in which water behaves in the marsh and · in the man-made system, introducing the notion that a construct -- a third way of ordering the water -- could make the water's behavior in both systems explicit. The second part of the book presents the proposed design by describing how one would experience such forms in a journey through the sitE!. Here, human movement and the movement of water are described in parallel. The journey is made partly by boat, partly on foot. It is a "tour" of the waterworks, leading one through canals and levees that converge at a pumping station on the site, and of the marsh that survives this extensive intervention. The third part is a recapitulation of the journey, linking it with the more general issues of scale and perception.