This winter, we wrote about the inaugural outing of the North Coast Design Competition (NCDC), Designing Dredge: Re-Envisioning the Toledo Waterfront, and now the winners have been announced. The entrants were asked to envision a useful waterfront space that combined existing and future outdoor developments with dredged materials, and also to provide the placement and design of a research site for the testing and experimentation of dredge material among other possible uses. Garrett Rock’s winning proposal, Re-Frame Toledo, would use Toledo’s dredge material to create sites for the public while also suggesting a phytoremediation step in the dredging cycle to process the sediment for future land use and better water quality. Sean Burkholder, an assistant professor of landscape and urban design at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the founder of NCDC, said that each of the 21 entries showed a thorough understanding of the subject. Some dealt with the excess sediment associated with dredging by creating riverside parks and recreation; others sought to create new ways of dealing with this material.
The two runners-up, Metabolizing Dredge by RDA Office (Nicholas Bonard + Christina Milos) and Claire Eddleman, and Catching-Scape by Hansol Kang, Taekyung Kim, and Sungjin Na, also suggested innovative dredging approaches. Metabolizing Dredge envisioned nine types of cells that would use dredge sediment for different purposes throughout the riverfront and bay area, while Catching-Scape proposed changing underwater and riverfront topography so as to redirect sediment to the shoreline, minimizing the need for dredging altogether. Burkholder hopes to have these projects, along with the other submissions, on display next fall in Toledo.
The federal shipping channel into Toledo supports 7,000 jobs and is said to generate $500 million in economic activity, according to the NCDC website. Dredging is a necessity in order to maintain the minimum depth necessary for the passage of ships. One current practice in dealing with the nearly one million cubic yards of material dredged per year from the channel is to pile the sediment in confined disposal facilities; another is to redistribute the material in open water. Yet these options have limits. “The remediation of dredging material is relatively new,” Burkholder says. “Few are researching this. Instead they’re just placing it and leaving it alone.” The Designing Dredge competition was envisioned as a way of inviting new ideas about the material’s use and remediation as well as to help garnish public knowledge on the subject. For a full list of winners and their proposals, see the North Coast Design Competition website.
Images courtesy of the North Coast Design Competition.
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