The Bay Marsh Boardwalk

For the first studio project, I teamed up with Sarah Abroff. We were tasked with defining a transect in the Bay Area, with the only restriction being that we include water. We chose a line that does not exist visibly at the surface with an edge that is not perfectly defined, by geologists: a line of liquefaction. We looked specifically at West Oakland, California.

The study looked at conditions above, and compared them to below conditions. While the line is much easier to see underground, it is nearly impossible to define above ground. Or at least, the line is softer: industry and low income communities (above liquefaction areas) transition into higher income communities (outside of liquefaction areas). However, these conditions do not line up perfectly.

Our concept looked decades into the future and imagined a scenario when the next big earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area. With the extensive damage in liquefied areas, and the threat of sea level rise, recovery and development was halted in the West Oakland community. The result was a boardwalk acting as a landscape intervention where people could see the ruins of West Oakland, and the rise of the marsh and sea.

This concept intended to highlight the inequities of risk the black and other marginalized communities face as time moves forward.

The studio was taught by Richard Hindle, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, and Roderick Wyllie, Partner at Surfacedesign, Inc. in San Francisco.