Emergant Urbanism – The Miami Lakes Studio 2004

As brought up here, there are several parallels between Owens Lake and the Florida Everglades as site where human intervention into water flows has created unintended ecological impacts. It happens that in Fall 2004, my studio selection gave me a chance to explore the area of the Everglades directly east of Miami. An area known as the ‘Miami Lakes’ after the flooded quarries that chewed up dozens of square miles of everglade limestone and turned it into aggregate for freeways and buildings around South Florida.

The studio instructor was Chris Reed of Stoss. That semester wasn’t my best design effort as my thesis research into Owens Lake was my primary preoccupation. I still learned a lot about landscape urbanism and large scale design. Here is final presentation brief: EMERGENT URBANISM.

We started the semester with a site visit and mapping exercise where I created some infographics about the solid waste network.

Infrascaping on an airboat tour

Here are my final project boards – note that there is a level of snark with the ‘environment & economy’ tagline. I’ll skip the process as that was where I fell down – I’m not a fan of 3d digital manipulation as a means to an ends

(note the 12′ long sections drawn at 1″=200′ the site was that big!)

And the coolest part of the project was this site model that I cast out of plaster, then filled with glycerin.

Plaster, glycerin, and basswood

by Barry Lehrman