E mbr a c i ng t he Ame r i c an At l ant is : Designing for a Post-Disaster New Orleans Mikayla Beckwith and Katherine Truluck
Core 023: Photo Collage
For decades, society has had an obsession with flooding and disasters relating to water. However, unlike in the dystopian representations of our imagination portrayed in film, television, and literature, there is no romanticism or spectacle behind the narrative of cities that experience these disasters for real. New Orleans has dealt with the repercussions of disaster for centuries and unlike in media, the city does not get a fantastical resolution. Instead, New Orleans will flood and become a ruin of itself
unless it is designed to function as an adaptive water city. In the year 2100, New Orleans is flooded and reduced to a fraction of its previous grandeur. The rising sea level has reduced the city to an archipelago settled between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. This is Embracing the American Atlantis: Designing for a Post-Disaster New Orleans. Our proposal will implement a transportation and program
core system that will reconnect the archipelago of territories and redistribute the programmatic organization of the land. Our design combines architectural, infrastructural, and utopian case studies to move beyond the mitigation of water and instead create a new condition that adapts to the water in a more symbiotic fashion. Through our intervention, New Orleans is able to survive future flooding and provide a new aquatic living condition for the residents of the archipelago.