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Abstract
The erosion and protection of sandy coastal landscapes is happening across the globe and is prominent in the engineering, planning, conservation and design fields. Researchers and practitioners have identified a need for new approaches and forms that work with erosion instead of defending against it, and this paper is part of that effort. Situated on the western coast of Lake Michigan, our work offers insights into Great Lakes coastlands and sandy landscapes more broadly. Because the Great Lakes have widely varying water levels and are generally erosive over the course of decades, this region may also provide lessons for our marine coastlines. We combine physical and computational wave modelling with conventional means of landscape architectural work to develop a new form of coastal design and theorize that a landscape approach to the problem of erosion promises a reduction in control and better ecological, aesthetic and coastal protection outcomes over time.
Acknowledgments
This research was part of the Healthy Port Futures research project, with funding from the Great Lakes Protection Fund. Project collaborators included coastal geologist Ethan Theurkauf and Ania Bayers, Cody Eskew and Diane Tecic of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Coastal Management Program. The pilot project was constructed by the USACE, Chicago District, and with support from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, through the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Notes
1 Michael Chrzastowski and Wayne Frankie, Guide to the Geology of Illinois Beach State Park and the Zion Beach-Ridge Plain, Lake County, Illinois (Champaign, IL : Illinois Dept. of Natural Resources, Illinois State Geological Survey, 2000), archive.org/ details/guidetogeologyof2000chrz.
2 Ethan Theuerkauf and Katherine Braun, ‘Rapid Water Level Rise Drives Unprecedented Coastal Habitat Loss along the Great Lakes of North America’, Journal of Great Lakes Research 47/4 (2021), 945–954.
3 See: Boris Jardine, ‘Made Real: Artifice and Accuracy in Nineteenth Century Scientific Illustration’, Science Museum Group Journal (2014), journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/madereal/#abstract (accessed 22 May 2023). Some influential artists who have demonstrated the aesthetic value and quality of these landscapes include Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes series, Vija Celmins’s Ocean drawings, Joseph Turner’s cloud studies, and Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of water movement.
4 Frederick Law Olmsted, ‘Report Accompanying Plan for Laying out the South Park’, by Olmsted, Vaux and Co. Landscape Architects, for the Chicago South Park Commission, (1871), 10.
5 Michael Chrzastowski, Anthony Foyle and Brian Trask, ‘Erosion and Accretion Trends along the Lake Michigan Shore at North Point Marina and Illinois Beach State Park’, Open File Series 1996/1 (1996).
6 See: Julian Raxworthy, Overgrown: Practices Between Landscape Architecture & Gardening (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).
7 See: Junaid As-Salek and David Schwab, ‘High-Frequency Water Level Fluctuations in Lake Michigan’, Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering 130/1 (2004), 45–53; Andrew Gronewold and Richard Rood, ‘Recent Water Level Changes across Earth’s Largest Lake System and Implications for Future Variability’, Journal of Great Lakes Research 45/1 (2019), 1–3; Todd Thompson and Stephen Baedke, ‘Strand-Plain Evidence for Late Holocene Lake-Level Variations in Lake Michigan’, U.S. Geological Survey 109/6 (1997), 666–682.
8 Gordon Fraser, Curtis Larsen and Norman Hester, ‘Climatic Control of Lake Levels in the Lake Michigan and Lake Huron Basins’, in: Allan Schneider and Gordon Fraser (eds.), Late Quaternary History of the Lake Michigan Basin (Boulder: Geological Society of America, 1990), 75; see also: Todd Thompson and Stephen Baedke, ‘Beach-Ridge Development in Lake Michigan: Shoreline Behavior in Response to Quasi-Periodic Lake-Level Events,’ Marine Geology 129/1 (1995), 163–174.
9 Lori Thompson, ‘New Lakes Study Predicts Lakes Huron/ Michigan Will Fall by 3.5 Feet over Record by 2030, then Rise 1 Foot over Record by ’40’, The Manitoulin Expositor, 25 May 2022, manitoulin.com/new-lakes-study-predicts-lakes-huronmichigan-will-fall-by-3-5-feet-over-record-by-2030-then-rise-1-foot-over-record-by-40/.
10 Guy Meadows et al., ‘The Relationship between Great Lakes Water Levels, Wave Energies, and Shoreline Damage’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78/4, (1997), 675–683; see also: Todd Thompson, ‘Beach-Ridge Development and Lake-Level Variation in Southern Lake Michigan’, Sedimentary Geology 80/3 (1992), 305–318; Curtis Larsen, ‘Beach Ridges as Monitors of Isostatic Uplift in the Upper Great Lakes’, Journal of Great Lakes Research 20/1, (1994), 108–134; Todd Thompson et al., ‘Mid Holocene Lake Level and Shoreline Behavior during the Nipissing Phase of the Upper Great Lakes at Alpena, Michigan, USA’, Journal of Great Lakes Research 37/3 (2011), 567–576; John Johnston, Todd Thompson and Douglas Wilcox, ‘Paleohydrographic Reconstructions from Strandplains of Beach Ridges in the Laurentian Great Lakes’, Geological Society, London, Special Publications 388 (2014).
11 Theurkauf, ‘Rapid Water Level Rise’, op. cit (note 2).
12 Katherine Braun et al., ‘Modeling Organic Carbon Loss from a Rapidly Eroding Freshwater Coastal Wetland’, Scientific Reports 9/1 (2019), 1–10.
13 Vitruvius Pollio and Giovanni Battista da Sangallo, edited with introductory essay by Ingrid Rowland, Ten Books on Architecture: The Corsini Incunabulum (Rome: Edizione dell’Elefante, 2003); see also: Leslie Geddes. Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Mastery of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2020); W.A. Price, ‘Models, Can We Learn from the Past and Some Thoughts on the Design of Breakwaters’, 16th International Conference on Coastal Engineering (1978), 25–48.
14 One of the USACE procedures that enabled our research was their practice of issuing ‘technical notes’ (CHETN) when they try an innovative or untested idea. While the USACE rarely aims at innovation as a goal, because of the wide range of environments and complex problems within statutory, budgetary and regulatory constraints they inevitably end up producing innovations. Two of these that were important for our work were Cheryl Burke, Neil McLellan and James Clausner, ‘Nearshore BermsUpdate of the United States Experience’, Proceedings of the CEDA-PIANC Conference (1991), and Mohammad Dibajnia, James Selegean and Andrew Morang, ‘Effect of Armoring a Cohesive Nearshore with a Thin Cobble Lag, Shoreham, Michigan’, ERDC/CHL CHETN-III-74 (2006). The first explored the stability and wave attenuation as well as habitat potential of constructed nearshore berms, and the second noted that a rough field condition in the nearshore might produce wave attenuation effects.
15 Arthur De Graauw, ‘The Long-Term Failure of Rubble Mound Breakwaters’, Méditerranée. Revue Géographique Des Pays Méditerranéens / Journal of Mediterranean Geography (2014), journals.openedition.org/mediterranee/7078.
16 Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Julia Chapman and Guy Nordenson, Structures of Coastal Resilience (Washington: Island Press, 2018).
17 Barry Bergdoll, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011).
18 Guillermo Tella, ‘Benito Carrasco en el camino de la costa,’ Revista Summa+ 20 (1996), 56–61.
19 For a great example, see: ‘Dredge City: Sediment Catalysis’ by Matthew Moffitt, 2013 ASLA Honor Award.
20 This year-long collaborative competition brought together design consultants in engineering, architecture and landscape architecture to imagine future shoreline scenarios for the San Francisco Bay Region. The programme was modeled on the Rebuild by Design: New York programme and supported by the Bay Area Regional Collaborative and the Rockefeller Foundation, barc.ca.gov/our-work/past-projects/ progress-resilient-design-challenge (accessed 19 May 2023).
21 Joanna Burger et al., ‘The Shore Is Wider than the Beach: Ecological Planning Solutions to Sea Level Rise for the Jersey Shore, USA’, Landscape and Urban Planning 157 (2017), 512–522.
22 Defining the coastal zone as an area spanning land and water affected in similar ways by coastal processes of wind-waves, water currents and aeolian transport of sediment is not original to our work—it is common in coastal engineering and coastal geomorphology, although many of the specific coastal sciences do often have a break based on vegetation, fish or other things they treat as subjects. The depths we propose here do not correspond to the concept of depth of closure, which is an engineering term that is often used as the lower boundary of coastal landscapes (defined by the limit where the bottom of the water body begins to be affected by the orbital velocities of the largest waves, which is about one-half the wavelength). Our boundary is set closer to the limit of the surf zone (where big waves begin to break in a given coastal area); here in this part of Lake Michigan that boundary of 3 m of depth (during mean water levels) is about the deepest that swimmers would go, the shallowest that boaters tend to go, where the waves break, and where the predator fish hunt. It’s not a decisive boundary, but a fuzzy one, an approximation.
23 West 8 Landscape Architects, Fanny Smelik and Hilde Pauwels, Mosaics (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007).
24 USACE, ‘2012 USACE NCMP Topobathy Lidar DEM: Lake Michigan (IL, IN, MI, WI)’, NOAA Office for Coastal Management, Digital Coast Data Access Viewer (2012), coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/#/lidar/search.
25 USACE, ‘2018 USACE NCMP Digital Terrain Model for Bathymetry’, JALBTCX Image Service: 1-Meter Topographic/Bathymetric Lidar Elevation Models (not yet published; provided by USACE for research purposes).
26 Orrin Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
27 Alex Robinson and Brian Davis, ‘From Solution Space to Interface: Six Actions for Landscape Infrastructure Design’, in: Bradly Cantrell and Adam Mekies (eds.), Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2018), 155–168.
28 Most often understood using concepts such as viscosity, shear stress, and orbital velocity, just to name a few.
29 Catherin Dee, ‘To Draw’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 11/2 (2016), 42–53.
30 Catherine Seavitt Nordenson and Guy Nordenson’s discussion of Georges Bataille’s informe (formless) is a rich vein influencing our methodology and understanding of this landscape, with the key exception we note in the body text—these landscapes are being fundamentally misunderstood. What they lack is not form, but a figure. The conflation of the two seems to have a long history in the art-historical tradition of Europe, perhaps dating back to Plato. That is more than we can attempt to argue here. However, we are confident that these landscapes do not lack form, but are full of it. See: Nordenson, Structures of Coastal Resilience, op. cit. (note 16), 14–18.
31 USACE 2012, op. cit. (note 24).
32 USACE 2018, op. cit. (note 25).
33 USACE, ‘Wave Information Studies, WIS Station 94033’, Coastal Ocean Data System: Wave Information Study Work Unit (2020), wis.erdc.dren.mil/index.html (accessed 19 May 2023).
34 USACE, Revised Report on Great Lakes Open-Coast Flood Levels (Detroit, Michigan : US Army Corps of Engineers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 1988), Michigan. gov/documents/deq/wrd-nfip-great-lakes-flood-levelspart1_564793_7.pdf.
35 Seagrams Plaza in New York, NY, or the Piazza del Campo in Siena, for example.
36 Consider the Mall and Literary Walk in Central Park for a well-known version of this move.
37 The Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana by Dan Kiley, famously exerts a tremendous degree of control over its locust allee, but even Kiley’s vision didn’t attempt to shape and control the specific form and lighting effects of the branches and foliage.
38 The Alhambra in Granada and the Keller Fountain in Portland use the aural effects of running water to create environments by turns spiritual and cathartic, in deeply religious and urban contexts, respectively. While the sound effects can be controlled to a large degree in these settings, or figured, their effect on the human state of mind is not controlled, and yet is very explicitly the object.
39 This conclusion is based on a comparison of the costs of the pilot project, analysed per linear foot, with the estimated costs of a nearshore breakwater proposed in a similar location, closer to the shoreline, during the same period as part of a large capital project funded by the State of Illinois. Those estimated costs were provided to the research team by SmithGroup.
40 De Graauw, ‘The Long Term Failure’, op. cit. (note 15).
41 RR-7 riprap; see: Illinois Department of Transportation, Standards of Specification for Road and Bridge Construction, Illinois Department of Transportation (2016), 133, idot.illinois.gov/ content/dam/soi/en/web/idot/documents/doing-business/ manuals-guides-and-handbooks/highways/construction/ standard-specifications/standard-specifications-for-road-and-bridge-construction-2016.pdf (accessed 3 October 2023).
42 Burke, ‘Nearshore Berms’, and Dibajnia, ‘Effect of Armoring’, op. cit. (note 14).
43 Martin Prominski, ‘Research and Design in JoLA’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 11/2 (2016), 26–29; see also: Sanda Lenzholzer, Ingrid Duchhart and Jusuck Koh, ‘“Research through Designing” in Landscape Architecture’, Landscape and Urban Planning 113 (2013).
44 Theresa Ruswick, Sean Burkholder and Brian Davis, ‘Developing and Monitoring an Innovative NNBF to Nourish a Bay Bar: An Example from the Southeast Shore of Lake Ontario’, Journal of Great Lakes Research 48/5 (2022), 1159–1170.
45 Elizabeth Meyer, ‘The Formation of a Mississippi River Urban Landscape Morphology: Louisiana, MO; Quincy, IL; Burlington, IA; Dubuque, IA’, Places Journal 10/3 (1996), 38–51; see also: Katherine John-Alder, ‘A Field Guide to Form: Lawrence Halprin’s Ecological Engagement with The Sea Ranch’, Landscape Journal 31/1-2 (2012), 53–75.
46 This formulation of the quantitative and qualitative being co-constitutive we first heard presented by Maria HellstromReimer in a lecture at Cornell University in 2017. Related to that insight, she discussed drawing as a boundary practice that moved between the qualitative and quantitative modes of work. This pair of insights was like a bolt of lightning for our own then-nascent efforts on this project.
47 Elizabeth Meyer, ‘Situating Modern Landscape Architecture: Theory as a Bridging, Mediating, and Reconciling Practice’, in: Proceedings from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture: Design and Values (1993), 167–178.
48 Ann Spirn, ‘Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted’, in: William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (Norton and Company: New York, 1996), 111–112.
49 James Corner, ‘A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics’, Landscape Journal 10/2 (1991), 115–133.
50 Elizabeth Meyer, ‘Landscape Architecture as Modern Other and Postmodern Ground’, in: Vanessa Bird and Harriet Edquist (eds.), The Culture of Landscape Architecture (Melbourne: Edge, 1994), 21.
51 Seavitt, Structures of Coastal Resilience, op cit. (note 16).
52 Rob Holmes, ‘The Problem with Solutions’, Places Journal (July 2020).
53 Brian Davis, ‘Public Sediment’, in: Kate Orff (ed.), Toward and Urban Ecology (New York: Monacelli Press, 2016), 233.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Brian Davis
Brian Davis is an associate professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia where he co-directs the Natural Infrastructure Lab and teaches courses on coastal design and landscape theory. He is a landscape architect licensed in the State of New York, a member of the non-profit Dredge Research Collaborative, and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is a founding principal of Proof Projects, and together with Sean Burkholder was a primary investigator for the Healthy Port Futures project.
Theresa Ruswick
Tess Ruswick is a fellow of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the Engineering with Nature Program at the US Army Corps of Engineers. She is managing principal of Proof Projects and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Landscape Architecture.
Sean Burkholder
Sean Burkholder is the assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Environmental Modeling Lab and teaches courses on design, environmental modelling and monitoring and coastal infrastructure. He is a founding principal of Proof Projects and a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative, and together with Brian Davis he was primary investigator for the Healthy Port Futures project. His work focuses on environmental epistemology through temporal, curious and experimental practices.