The call for “Resilient Edges - Investigations, Strategies and Designs for the Ecological Resilience of Coastal and Delta Areas Around the World” presented a unique opportunity for those interested in the design and theory of the built environment to explore problems and solutions relative to the pressing problems of global environmental damage, climate change, materiality, along with a parallel potential for an architectural language of which permanence may not be the singular performative element. The subsequent content is situated at the intersection of water and land whereby the evidence of ecology, both manifest and specular, are at a point of considerable vulnerability. In this site, the variables of life are at once extremely noticeable and at times absent. This zone of “wrack and drift” is one where the physical artifact of architecture presents a need for a flexible, hybrid character, reflecting the needs of both the natural and the manmade, along with their respective infrastructure.

In the essay “Non-Anthropocentric Architectures,” Michael Hensel responds to the issues of altered environmental conditions, “For several decades numerous politicians, biologists and architects have stated the need for a biological approach to some of the most pressing problems arising from the extensive impact of humankind on the natural environment.” ¹ The 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, entitled Our Common Future and commonly known as the Brundtland Report, explored a broad range of sustainability concerns, including the fundamental necessity or preserving the abiotic (non-living) and biotic (living) environment and its associated processes:

Important are the vital life processes carried out by nature, including stabilization of climate, protection of watersheds and soil, preservation of nurseries and breeding grounds, and so on. Conserving these processes cannot be divorced from conserving the individual species within natural ecosystems. Managing the species and ecosystems together is clearly the most rational way to approach the problem. ²

The “Non-Anthropocentric” essay continues with the question, “how are natural processes and ecosystems to be maintained? And what kind of disciplinary affiliation between architecture and biology is needed in order to tackle the complexity of the problems arising from the interaction between the human-made and the natural environment? To confront these issues it is necessary to focus all efforts on the question as to how the built environment can be ‘in the service of’ the natural environment.” ³

As rising sea levels are projected to continue one meter before 2100,⁴ there is cause for a specific dimensional area of speculation to be fertile ground for architecture, landscape architecture, ecological urbanism. At this point, it seems fitting that words such as barricade, barrier, block, dam, wall, facade, fence, screen, side, be replaced or reconsidered along side such words as accessible, susceptible, expanded, exposed, revealed, rolling, dehiscent, expansive, navigable, whereby the aesthetic of future intuitive programs can be embraced by fluctuating needs of both man and nature, and the performance of the drift zone be up-cycled to one of elevated performance. This need is made more important considering that many of the fastest growing cities in the world are along a coastline, and population is at a level higher than previously seen in our history. Even at the current state of global population, it is clear that our relationship to manmade and natural ecology is in need of radical cultivation and refinement on a multitude of scales. 

Beaches have always been an ongoing setting for erosion and the effects of natural processes relative to materials and landscapes. In this setting natural selection can take its toll and ecologies are shaped because of what they are, where they are, and what they are made of, literally. In the twentieth century, this setting also, unfortunately, became prime territory for pollution, waste, and erosion due to manufacturing, lack of regulation and expanse of globalization whereby coastal shipping practices privilege transient international growth at the expense of local sustainability. In the special issue of Architectural Design titled “Cities of Dispersal,” the essay “Our Beautiful Future,” Martha Rosler describes “collaborative projects which were manifested at the 2003 Venice Biennale that joined together students and artists in imagining alternative publics to rescue the utopian hopes” ⁵ of society. In these projects there is discussion of imaginary “post-places” whereby mankind perhaps would not recognize itself in the promised land of change and remediation. For the project MaterialNature, the imagined role of the “post-place” is a tidal zone where architecture is centered around a material agenda that gives way to landscape and a reconceptualization of the bionomic circuits of waste, erosion, ecology and opportunity.

In this space, influences of small-scale coastal erosion, and natural growth become the vehicle for project based architectural speculation that leverages localized material logics and creates a new architectural trajectory based upon the need and the aesthetic of ecology. In this state, MaterialNature is a series of architectural entities that become landscapes over time, made from a mixture of residual materials designed specifically to be weatherized. Its design is intended to provide a potential architectural amenity in areas of recreational activity as well as areas devoid of human contact, while simultaneously realizing a potential for architecture to be born from waste, and to return to nature without providing further waste. As such, this architecture moves from one of formal composition to one where the formal characteristics of local ecology and landscape become more apparent than the form itself.

Moving to a practical reading of the beach as a site, although non-scholarly, the manual How to Read a North Carolina Beach published (2004), discusses years of scientific observations taken by walking beaches and observing the materiality and found condition of the daily wrack zones caused by the ebb and flow of the tide. In this, the author states: 

Much of the extraneous material on beaches is found in drift lines (wrack lines) which are the linear piles of natural and man-made objects that are left behind at the uppermost limit of the wave swash. The positions of the drift lines are a good indicator of the high tide or storm wave limit. On some beaches, especially the undisturbed ones, as many as three separate wrack lines can sometimes be seen. The lowest line of debris marks the normal high-tide line. The next line, a foot or two higher, is from the full-moon tide, and the highest wrack line is from the last big storm. A walk into the dunes, into the center of the island, far from the shoreline, may reveal old lines left from significant flooding as long ago as ten of twenty years.⁶

The author’s description of the found condition is one that illustrates a change in the material status of the site and indicates the natural history of day to day activity along this versatile but dimensionally thin landscape ecology. It tells of an ephemeral reading of the site based upon time, material, water, wind, gravity.

This reading is not always apparent. A variety of practices designed to supplement our day to day existence in modern society act to erase these natural readings. Actions such as beach grooming, sand modification, seaweed and shell harvest, erosion, illegal sand collection, coast-line fracking, urban runoff, sewage lines, improper drainage all act to modify or in some cases erase the natural state of being along the drift. Unfortunate in that the natural retention of this material, along with the ecology that accompanies it, can naturally work to maintain the delicate performative balance between landscape and ecology. 

According to the 2017 scientific interview “Beach Ecology,” ⁷ researchers view the high tide line as “an ecologically vibrant zone on the beach […] grasses wash up to this zone, forming what is called the wrack line. As the wrack breaks down, it provides nutrients that form the base of the food chain on the beach, supporting everything from tiny invertebrates to shorebirds. Many nutrients from the wrack also filter through the sand and make their way back out to the water, supporting the near-shore marine ecosystem.⁸ Both wrack at the high tide line and plants growing on the upper beach help to reduce the impact of the wind, protecting the sand from erosion. These processes are essential to maintaining a healthy beach ecosystem.” ⁹

This material is printed from a modified Potter-bot printer that normally prints large-scale pottery elements, but is in this case used to print with mud and clay via wet medium as a slurry that begins to dry within thirty minutes. Once printed and deployed to site, the timeline of each individual module is solely contingent upon the natural processes that take place over the course of the first three years, after which, the individual parts and pieces of the project become a landscape artifact made expressly to be weathered and decayed on site. 

As a process, MaterialNature employs a strategy of “opportunistic materiality,” building on an attitude of creative problem solving that embodies a forward thinking agenda respondent to the overlooked forces of neglect and waste.

The resultant artifacts of this process theoretically can be any form of material or spatial situation created by discarded materials left behind by humans, but to be more specific for the context of this project, it can build upon the ingredients of the local ecology as building blocks for architectural forms. This agenda positions the future of architecture as a scenario with three possible motives:

1. Potential for relationship with ecology.

2. Potential for relationship with local culture.

3. Potential for relationship with material.

To further contextualize the methodology, this agenda is prescribed to coastal communities. Within this context, 3D printing has been used to replicate the found geologic conditions that assist in erosion control before manmade activities began interfering with the natural processes of beach control. We began taking note of soft rock formations along the shore which are transformed by wind, water, and subsequently taken over by plants. The rock here is a porous mixture made of shells and sand which are accepting of spontaneous, opportunistic landscapes. Plants themselves are able to germinate in the rock surfaces and grow year round, creating a surface of landscape on the outlining layer. This is a mutual relationship fostered between the landscape and the local stone which is a concept leveraged by MaterialNature to create a localized architectural surface prototype. In the Architectural Design journal “Experimental Green Strategies, Nature as Measure,” the author Terri Peters writes, “nature always doubles up on functions, think of a feather - waterproof, airfoil, self-cleaning, insulating, beauty for sexual reproduction. What can we expect from our buildings.” ¹¹
The spirit of programmatic multiplicity and performance is found in MaterialNature as we begin to create surface prototypes that are meant to ride the line between nature as the diviner of form, surface and aesthetic.

Though the continued research of geology gave specific shape to the prototypes of MaterialNature, the life span of this architecture is multi-variate, and ultimately fleeting. Its form is meant to change and ultimately become one with its location, perhaps disappearing from its original state. It is quite possible that the self-organizing peripheries will become contaminated once again. However, the project seeks to give credence to nature, allowing it to play a heightened role because of the infrastructure put into place. It is not designed to remain in one state, and is destined to be ephemeral, lasting for only a short, transitory time. It begins as a series of man-made natures and as time progresses, the natural process of beach ecology takes its course; the project develops into a reef like protective landscape, completely natural to the environment. The architecture is a singular transgression between the meta-morphosizing effects of wind currents, geography, landscape germination, pollination, growth and site. Its mission is to embrace integrated site problems in a natural way, with the following problems as being most relevant:

1. Coastal erosion due to man-made activities such as beach grooming, sand removal, drainage and fracking undermine  the natural history of place and dilute the natural act of self-maintenance and performative landscape along the beach. 

2. 60% of U.S. landfills are filled with waste from construction sites or an architecture related industry. The physical act of making and designing with traditional materials which are used inefficiently and then thrown out needs to be re-considered due to ecological destruction, new ideas need to be explored, new architectures need to be brought to life that can include ecology and a higher variance of performance.

In many ways, the performance of MaterialNature is contingent upon the placement of the structures. Ideally, they are placed in the wrack zones and drift lines on areas of coastal erosion along shorelines like a land reef. In this situation, the project is introduced as a civic amenity, but also presented as an opportunity for public knowledge and enlightenment by utilizing architecture as a vehicle for issues surrounding local erosion based on recreation, poor land management practices, waste from the ocean going shipping industry, lack of civic design, and the importation of mass produced, seasonal pavilion structures that are non-local and out of touch with a true sense of place. The project leverages large scale 3D printing with sand and clay, and offers an alternative material trajectory paired with the aesthetic of localized ecology. The exterior and structure are all made from the same multi-layered material paste mixture of sand, clay, landscape seeds which are local to the area and responsive to germination but finite enough to pass through our modified printer nozzles. Over time, the architecture becomes garden. The garden becomes landscape. The landscape becomes beach.