The Public Sediment team (which includes Variable Projects director Adam Marcus and his colleagues from the Architectural Ecologies Lab) has won a 2018 AIA California Merit Award in the Urban Design category, for the Unlock Alameda Creek proposal. The project was developed within the framework of the Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge, a year-long research and design initiative exploring new design approaches to sea level rise and climate change.

The team’s proposal is based on the premise that sea level rise adaptation must happen upstream. Low sediment supply and bayland drowning represents a slow but devastating scale of loss that threatens ecosystems, recreational landscapes, and places hundreds of thousands of residents and the region’s critical drinking water, energy, and transportation systems at risk. To creatively adapt to this challenge, the team has focused on bringing back sediment to the Bay. Marcus and the team at the Architectural Ecologies Lab led the development of a central component of the proposal, the Living Levee. The Living Levee is a multibenefit strategy for revetment design that integrates ecological principles within an interlocking concrete module that helps limit erosion and support the surrounding ecosystem.

The jury for this year's Urban Design awards included Duane Border, ASLA; Frank Fuller, FAIA of Urban Field; and Gwynne Pugh, FAIA. The jury remarked that the winning projects represent “a great example of green infrastructure” and are “ingenious solutions to unique and complex conditions.”

The Public Sediment team is led by SCAPE Landscape Architecture and includes Arcadis, The Dredge Research Collaborative, TS Studio, UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Design, Cy Keener, and Architectural Ecologies Lab. See this link for more info on the project.