This was an undergraduate student project by Mark Oswanski for Stephen Turk's ARCH 341 course, Autumn 2005. Asked to provide a new look at how the city of New Orleans might be able to exist in a naturally flood-prone environment, this project needed a naturally flood-adaptive response. The first intuition was to look at the defense mechanisms employed by organisms as a means of adapting to changing conditions in their surroundings or to otherwise escape predation. After exploring and defining each of these systems, there was a need to make a translation to a feasible building material. Some of these translations made stronger correlations between visual characteristics and phenomena (translucency, etc.) while others were based more firmly in the physical performance exhibited in the defense mechanism (absorption, flotation, dissolution, etc.). The material elections were then catalogued, as 1 foot wide panels made to interlock with each other as exterior sheathing, alongside a matrix of prefabricated, programmatic slices which can be augmented to or subtracted from a framing of four I-beams at the will of each individual client. With the transformability to live above, on, or beneath the existing structural framework of the devastated city, the growth of the new system could proceed unchecked. The hope then is that the system could grow large enough, being unlimited by any particular factor and being encouraged by the connectivity of the pieces, to genesis a pair of flood-adaptive networks to cater to the greater community. - Mark Oswanski This work is a part of the online collections of the Knowlton School of Architecture Student Archives, The Ohio State University. It is part of an effort to make accessible student work ranging from the first student that graduated from the program in 1903 to the present. The effort to preserve and digitize drawings in the Student Archives was sponsored in part by the Graham Foundation. Keywords: student work, KSA, drawings.
