Areas
River’s Edge Fulcrum:
A parallel model of river edge restoration and bioproducts distribution
Located at the last lock and dam along the Mississippi River and surrounded by dense rail network, Granite City has been famous as a transport hub for raw and processed agriculture products. This industrial city has spent much investment to reconstruct the Mississippi River and to resist flooding. As a pivot point, the levee is the key to balance the city and the river – rather than seeing it as a dividing line between water and land, we consider it as a media of river edge restoration as well as bioproducts exchange. This project visions that a berm not only serves as a defense against flooding, but also should serve as a distributor of bioproducts and an activator for human production. At the back of the berm, we propose a massive man-made system against the environment malfunction including flooding, energy shortage and transportation inefficiency. The previous levee prevents any use of river and human access. Yet, with the potential of water edge malleability, the visitors now have a chance to approach the natural-like berm park along the Mississippi River.
The distribution center inside the levee hybridizes the existing bioproduct processors with a futuristic logistic system. Currently the transport of agricultural products and by-products is heavily relying on highway and barges, which are energy-demanding and unreliable. This proposal challenges the traditional transportation of bioproducts by introducing autonomous transport via non-human agency. With its collection of drone hive, pod dock, and freight station, the distribution center collects crops from farmland along the river, delivers them to the bioproduct processors and redistributes the processed products to afar. Its symbolic gesture of two-way exchange shows how agriculture commodity exchange can be expedited with technology and architecture.