Coastal Research Laboratories

Cocodrie, LA

Adaptive reuse of Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium

The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) exists in the marsh autonomously. As a result, few truly understand what it does as it sits in the landscape for decades. The building must begin to act tellingly of its purpose. The building must begin to act.
Mostly it should express its permanence and ability to adapt to changing climate. Its windows should not only open but see. Its walls should not only keep out the elements, but hold and protect the sacred information inside. The building should respond actively and consciously of the impending decision it must make to fight or flee as it experiences the place around it changing entirely due to sea level rise.
This experience can be referred to as solatalgia. Solastalgia is a new concept “created to more adequately describe the particular form of existential and psychological distress connected to negatively perceived changes to the ‘home’ environment.” As opposed to nostalgia--the homesickness experienced when separated from one’s home--solastalgia is the distress produced by environmental changes to one’s geographical home as one remains there. It was first used by rural farmers as they experienced drought, but it will be used now in reference to this building as it experiences salt water invasion and land loss.

LUMCON is both connected and confined to Cocodrie, Louisiana. By deciding to embed within its current landscape, LUMCON becomes defined by its resources and its isolation. Without it, not only are the potential findings of its researchers lost--the most tragic loss is its ability to question the surrounding area. In its distress and acknowledgment of a home that is leaving, the building serves to protect the research it contains at all costs.

Floating Residences

As this building embeds itself further into the land and braces itself for environmental change, all inhabitants need to be housed safely in the building. This safety, however, is not one of complete comfort or lack of tension. Both staff and researchers should be constantly aware of (and have immediate access to) changing building and landscape conditions. Instead of blocking the climate out, the space should be selectively permeable and, like the laboratories, still steadily informing inhabitants. As a result, the structure was designed with slits in the massive concrete wall in order to accommodate movement of cables and doors as the apartment units rise with the sea. These slits also work to allow light and air into the building. Below the apartment units, water lines and natural aging will scar the concrete. Marks on the building and freshly exposed clean concrete will tell the story of sea level rise as the building shifts upward over time.

Laboratories

Because the walls of the dry wing (as opposed to the wet wing) are not embedded with pipes for salt water hookups, they can be more
easily shifted around. This inspired the notion to replace the walls currently diving the laboratories with walls containing hoods and other lab equipment, hung from an overhead track. In times of crisis, the walls move in towards the core of the building for protection. The walls also contain data recorders similar to airplane black boxes which can ensure the safety of facility's data even as the salt water invades and sea level rises.

Interior Courtyard

LUMCON currently has a small courtyard beneath a breezeway of apartments. The courtyard below floods mildly but often and will soon be completely immersed as sea level rises. The resulting design is an enclosed interior courtyard which will, as the water comes, provide one of the only outdoor spaces for residents to step outside onto dry ground. This will accommodate activities the courtyard currently serves with a door that opens to outside. The door will eventually be sealed as water rises around it.

Part of the building's design was calculating and designing a way for the facility to function "off the grid." The diagrams above look specifically at how LUMCON’s existing building and renovations deal with water, power, and waste self sufficiently in order for the building to function autonomously as environmental conditions intensify and the buildings around it and their systems succomb to the elements. The aforementioned systems must be rewoven into the architecture as the systems are rethought in a way that makes the building more sustainable and resilient. The building will collect rainwater and harvest energy through its roofing system, which will serve to collect water in a series of cisterns and collect sunlight in a network of solar panels. The building will also have the lower part of its cast-in-place concrete structure of the residential wings carved out as septic tanks and potable water storage which serve the greater building to which it attaches.

Construction Documents

As the entire semester was an effort to design both technically and fantastically, the following construction documents are an attempt to
give validity to the fictional world in which the design was conceived. As a result, the following documents grapple with the conceptual and logistical worlds that architecture must exist in simultaneously, meanwhile attempting to channel amphibious existence into tectonic
coastal architecture. The following set of construction documents was made for renovations to LUMCON with specific attention given to the floating residents, as this would be the only part of the building with entirely new construction as opposed to adaptive reuse.