INTERVALS

2013
w/ Jason Butz
Project location: Nashville, TN

A new active neighborhood on the Cumberland river.
Brief:
Nashville is no stranger to performance. Through its pervasive music industry and culture, it brings communities together. Intervals expands on the city’s commitment to integration, and provides a field of action as a communal neighborhood that promotes vitality. Already a regional center for many industries, Nashville now has the opportunity to be the capital of active and healthy living in the region.

Intervals is a landscape urbanism proposal that is simultaneously interested in the equilibrium and disequilibrium of the relationship between water, land, and the built-environment in floodplains. It challenges the common perception that land is a victim of water in the case of floods, and its accompanying rigid flood-wall boundaries, to propose a negotiated interface where the river, the land, and the built environment can co-exist actively.

     
Working model
 

Site Plan

NATURAL SYSTEM PRECEDENT: The proposal looks to sedimentary structures and fluvial geomorphology in the form of Avulsion as a natural precedent. Both reveal various organizations and behaviors that are critical systemic and formal precedents; particularly in regions that are prone to flooding. Just as Avulsion occurs when a river abandons a river channel and forms a more favorable one, so does the proposal provide options for new courses of the river, in case it were to flood. It avoids damage to the built-up landscape, and allows for continued usage while flooded. This way, the proposal diffuses the precedence that land takes over water in cases of floods.