The Muddy Mississippi’s Élan Vital: Post-Flood Machinic Assemblages

This project makes use of the natural resources that the disaster brings: mud from the Mississippi river. The changes in the topography as well as the 100 year floodplain establish working and living areas. The working areas are where the mud is extracted to create mud bricks and the buildable areas are the dogtrot houses above the 100 year floodplain. Whenever the river floods the city, it brings mud to create buildable materials, and the organisms work together to make a more efficient use of it. The earth plus earth organism is transformed into steps of different heights. The ones that belong to buildable areas are low enough  for people to walk through while the ones  in non-buildable areas create taller walls that prevent circulation and are more suitable to accumulate mud. Air plus air make The dogtrot extend their porches to connect to each other in sort of bridges. The air earth organism relation variates the height of the dogtrot houses, making the ones in non-buildable areas higher by triplicating  the amount of meters needed to reach the ground. The breeze ways change angles as they go higher following the wind direction and depending on the intensity of the north south wind in greenville, they are splitted in perpendicular direction of the wind. The smaller fire organisms that overlap in plan with porches, are made taller into structure until they reach them. When a bigger fire organism intersects a porch, they are moved  to the midpoint between that porch and the closest fire organism. The fire organisms that are within 10m of distance merge into one. Joined with closer ones, they are scaled as downwards as the steps of the topography allow, and adapted to it afterward. All the trees planted in the non-buildable area are scaled to reach 12 meters above the 100 year floodplain and pierce the porches in their way in form of structure piles. The fire organisms that overlap with the bald cypress trees morph their structure to create peaks where the trees pass through.

In Greenville, the earth strata is one continuous organism that covers the whole site, with variations that are informed by the concavity of the topography, and the 100 year flood level. The areas below the floodplain will collect the mud from the flood, which will be used to build up the areas above in order to protect them from flooding in the present and in the long term future. The dogtrot houses are organized on a wind grid oriented North to South as these are the predominant wind directions. This grid is then bent to create wind tunnels between the dogtrots, and then the dogtrot distribution pattern is checkered to generate interstitial public spaces. Finally, the organisms are scaled according to wind intensity. The fire organisms are territorialized using the radiation mapping and a square grid in the north south direction. The fire organisms will have the bent side facing south, where the bricks will be placed in the racks to dry. The size of the organisms is inversely proportional to the radiation intensity, to minimize exposure when they become transitional shelter in the post disaster order. Then, to maximize the use of intense radiation areas as mud ovens, the smaller organisms are densified. Finally, the water organisms are distributed using the water flow mapping, which will generate higher densities where water accumulates, and lower densities in drier areas.