Architecture Now / News / Irish Landscape Architects Finalist in Boston Competition

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Dublin-based Dermot Foley Landscape Architects emerged as a finalist in a significant international competition for South Boston. The Irish competition entry explored the changing character of the interface between land and sea and asked “what now, for Boston’s coastal fabric, with port activity changing and sea conditions threatening?”

According to Dermot Foley, their project “finds a middle ground; rejects the concept of ‘nature’ simply re-asserting itself, but equally rejects the notion of ‘protection’ against nature. If there is a future for Boston it lies in the re-imagination of the coastal interface. What if the interface is exploded? No longer linear, its dimension becomes infinite. The Dorchester Flats, and many other Boston districts, offer the opportunity for a new landscape of living: a complex, multi-dimensional interaction with the sea.

The spatial complexity of the new interface gives rise to infinite combinations of land and sea, with new, hybrid, land-sea scenarios. Art galleries flood, elevated canals hold water back after the flood, flood water is slowly released, drip-feeding, reminding us and protracting the process of rise and fall. Functions float and move, appear and reappear. Ecosystems emerge in unlikely places. Inter-tidal zones renew and tidal change is re-emphasised. The ephemeral of this new district brings the solid of the city into sharp focus, and returns the deep contrast crucial to city living.”

www.dermotfoley.com

The competition entries can be seen at: http://www.shiftboston.org/outcome2.php

Posted: 26/01/2010 14:22:29

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