artifacts of entropy
daniela moro \\ gabriel tomich
2nd prize - INNATUR 9 Competition - 2020
River floodplains are naturally changing landscapes. A meandering riverbed is constantly accommodating to its surroundings, often creating new water bodies and influencing a territory much larger than its mere course.
The upstream portion of the Iguaçu River in southern Brazil, one of its most important rivers, stretches its floodplains across a large metropolitan region. Contrary to its potential for preservation and use, this territory has become the site for major infrastructure and resource extraction. Half a century of sand mining and other interventions has devastated the substrate of the floodplains and extinguished its meanders, leaving behind the footprint of a singularly hybrid landscape, consisting of exposed groundwater in the form of wetlands and small lakes confined by now straight-flowing river.
The fast pace of devastation exposes the entropic character of this type of extraction. By removing earth at a rate of roughly 90.000m³ a year, this landscape was quickly turned into an irreversible terrain vague by the end of the century.
Its current condition is of a static landscape - a mile-wide strip of land, spared from metropolitan expansion - an oasis amid the metropolis, dominated by a combination of artificial and natural features.
Unable to restore this territory to its original conditions, we can only accept those hybrid features as preexistence. However, a contemporary response to this territorial condition requires understanding it as a changing landscape, as an alternative to both its static character and its entropic decay.
We propose a strategy that addresses two goals:
1 - The minimal necessary built structure to enable a distant sight of the surrounding territory - which in the context of a horizontal wetland landscape, can be achieved by elevating a viewpoint by just a few meters.
2 - An intervention that - such as the meandering original landscape - incorporates change, but - unlike its mid-century exploitation - does not consume its resources.
The proposal consists of horizontal embankments to be built slowly over time from earth available on the site. In a ritualistic manner, every year, small chunks of earth that are now partitions between small lakes would be removed and piled in the form of long, sloping surfaces distributed along the landscape. At the end of each cycle, that changes the landscape at a rate of merely 9.000m³ a year, the strips would become 100m longer and 1m taller, venturing further into the landscape.
As a result of this process, the hydric system would also change in a slow form, following the meandering logic of the landscape. As the earth is removed, smaller lakes would merge into larger bodies of water, and other connections might cease to exist as the earth banks stretch into the water.
Accommodation and cultural programs use the resulting structure as a support, either in the form of annexes to the structure or embedded in its form.
The proposal transforms a neglected territory once sentenced to entropic decay, by generating a new ecology that confronts visitors with their surroundings in a new way.
