XL

above: Linen "bleachgreens", circa 1870

The twin gantry cranes Sampson and Goliath are functional icons of Belfast’s once-dominant shipbuilding industry. They stand over thirty stories tall, looming over the Harland and Wolff shipyard and one of the world’s largest dry-docks. They are taller and broader than any building in Belfast. The cranes are symbols of Belfast’s urban identity. Although they are an official landmark, their continued existence beyond their current use is not certain.

The gantry cranes are rarely commissioned to work on a large vessel, rather they can spend months, sometimes years, sitting unused. The dormant cranes frame a unique, massive void.

“Loom” reworks that void with a hanging lattice, descending to the surface below in a half-catenary curve that is moored to the earth by a living garden. The lattice is designed to be easily removed and reinstalled in the event of a commission, and the garden below is positioned at the far end of the Harland and Wolff shipyards, an area little used and closest to the new residential and commercial development known as the Titanic Quarter.

The lattice is composed of strips of woven, jute, erosion-control fabric. These are anchored by mounds of earth seeded in alternating rows with yellow-flowering rape-seed and blue-flowering flax, two crops that evoke Northern Ireland’s transformation from a rural to industrial economy through linen and seed oils. Over the course of the installation these colorful crops will blend into an undulating field. The colors of this field are distinctly non-sectarian, in a city where specific colors - green, red, blue and orange - can evoke anxiety and emotion, the blue and yellow of Loom embrace Belfast’s new civic identity.

Belfast is a city in rebirth after decades of sectarian strife. In recent years, the city has worked to reconstitute urban spaces, soften barriers that once separated antagonists, and create a new civic iconography. Some of these efforts have been effective, others have been viewed with skepticism. The gantry cranes Sampson and Goliath are universally considered symbols of the city. This is a post-conflict development. The collective understanding of what these cranes represent was not driven by a developer’s initiative or publicity campaign. The cranes are neutral territory, they are accidental icons that speak to the strength of Belfast without sectarian divides. Numbers: Aggregate and Soil: 110m x 50m x 3m = 16,500m3 (360ft x 165ft x 9.8ft = 582,000ft3) 486ft3 per truckload= 1197 truckloads Woven jute erosion control fiber 2.45m (8ft) wide: (23) x130m lengths = 2,990m (3 kilometers, 1.4 miles) Open spiral strand stainless steel cable = 150m 77kilograms of seed

The Gowanus Canal is a sewer. It has always been and will always be a sewer, by the simple fact of its geography. The Gowanus lies at the bottom of a bowl. The sides of this bowl are referred to by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection as the Gowanus “sewershed”. As a pre-industrial swamp the Gowanus was a sewer and as an industrial canal it is a sewer.

The sewer system as it was laid out over the years uses the Gowanus Canal as a receiver of last resort. When surrounding sewers are overloaded they flow into the Gowanus. This happens on average 30-50 times a year. No amount of Super Fund remediation will alter this.

Variations on a “soft” remediation strategy have been proposed, whereby the Gowanus is returned to some degree of its pre-industrial state as a swamp. I would argue that, in fact, the Gowanus Canal is a case for a “hard” strategy of total remediation, based on the intractabe nature of its geographic position.

This hard strategy takes advantage of the immanent post-Superfund moment -when the canal is drained and dredged to place a canal beneath the canal, a sub-infrastructure. The surface level canal would, in essence, be “double –bagged”, contained in an impermeable lining, while the sub canal would receive the Combined Sewer Outflow (CSO) and surface runoff through an enveloping filtration substrate that culminates at outlets that flow into the subsurface-canal. The canal, as it exists, is the sum of low intensity moments. Apart from the waterway itself, there is no outstanding objector location that defines the experience of the canal and its surrounds. It is a series of repeated underwhelming moments that collectively produce a sublime effect that is very much dependent on the weather and the viewer’s state of mind.

In this proposed infrastructure there are opportunities for architectural insertions that can serve as higher intensity, experiential, and incidentally pedagogic moments. By creating pathways and occupiable spaces that dramatically reveal and merge the doubling infrastructure, creating places of heightened awareness and communication with the canal itself. The toxic past, and consumptive present are revealed in the catch-basins and leaching zones along the sub-canal route; and chambers at the bottom of aeration voids offer a unique simultaneously subterranean and sub-aquatic experience

Occupying these spaces is subject to the natural ebb and flow of the canal, which overflows into the subcanal at high tide. On the surface the project is revealed in voids; underground by a designed spelunking. The Gowanus Canal becomes occupiable in a new way, its water is again the water of New York Bay, not tainted by the toxic runoff of the industrial past; yet its essence, and its primary role as infrastructure is unaltered.