nARCHITECTS install an inflatable storm barrier along the shoreline of southwest Brooklyn and build mega-piers there with long, low apartment blocks. LTL Architects fill the waters between Liberty State Park in New Jersey and Manhattan with an archipelago of manmade micro-islands, tied together by a network of bridges and ferries. While these plans are highly refined pictorially and technically, they continue to develop the city as it has already been developed. They extend its footprint, and its real estate, with new thoroughfares and plots of usable land.
     Two more provocative proposals build in ways that are more deeply embedded in the landscape. A scheme from Matthew Baird Architect allows parts of a waterfront shipping and dumping site in Bayonne, New Jersey to be drowned out, while preserving its existing piers and bolstering the shoreline with berms. Just a handful of new structures are built, each one highly responsive to the site’s post-industrial geology and economy. Among these are a processing plant for local waste, a “subquarium” to collect water floral and fauna, and a protective manmade reef formed from discarded glass scraps. This proposal develops the city in a way that’s finely attuned to its history.
     In a dreamy, nostalgic gesture, a scheme from Scape Studio repopulates the Gowanus Canal, a highly polluted inlet in Brooklyn, with reefs of native oysters. The animals, incubated in nets underwater, will form large, living reefs that can buffer the shore, detoxify the water, support new ecosystems, and strengthen local industry, so that one day local residents might stroll the Red Hook promenade and dine on locally-grown oysters. While simple in conception, the project embraces the complexity and uncertainty of a natural system.