Waterfront Architecture That Braces for Natural Disaster

There’s a popular fixation on waterfront architecture lately. A plus-shaped pool installed in the midst of New York’s East River, along with an artificial wave pool in Melbourne’s Victoria Harbour, and other amusement park projects like it have city-dwellers raving about the wonders of civic architecture like never before.

Seaside construction, sadly, isn’t all about fun and games. “Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change,” an exhibition on view at L.A.’s Annenberg Space for Photography through May 3, focuses on waterfront architecture as a tool for survival, chronicling the methods that various cultures have developed in response to natural disasters. The archival and commissioned photographs, taken by Jonas Bediksen, Monica Nouwens, Paula Bronstein, Stephen Wilkes, and of course, architecture’s favorite photographer, Iwan Baan, depict scenes from post-Katrina New Orleans, post-Sandy New York, post-tsunami Japan, post-typhoon Philippines, and more.

A woman makes her way down the seawall along the Kitakama and Ainokama coastline in Sendai, Japan. After the tsunami in 2011, the Japanese government has spent billions of yen on the reconstruction of a 31.8 km seawall along the Sendai coastline. Commissioned photograph for the exhibition. ©Paula Bronstein.

“From adaptation for survival to ambitious infrastructure planning, in some of the richest and poorest of the world’s coastal communities,” as the press release goes, the exhibition adopts the word “resilience” as a blanket theme to tie these diverse set of photographs together. The variation in response from place to place is astonishing, informed by differences in culture and economic means. The dispatch from Bangladesh by Norwegian photographer Jonas Bediksen, for example, on the flash floods that frequently and unexpectedly strike the coastal and delta regions, demonstrate that in a nation where a quarter of the population lives below the national poverty line, the best response is to go with the flow. There’s an image of a man sitting atop a vehicle, holding his cell phone against his ear, as a young boy pushes it through knee-deep brown water, continuing with life as usual. In a more rural community, we see children embarking on a boat that’s actually a floating school, created by non-profit Shidulai Swanirvar Sangstha to work with the water, rather than against it.

Pabna, Bangladesh, 2010. The nongovernmental organization Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha runs a fleet of more than 50 floating schools and libraries in an effort to provide basic education in a severely flood-prone area. © Jonas Bendiksen

In contrast, the Dutch take a more defiant approach to their surroundings. For hundreds of years, the residents of the Low Countries have asserted their power over the sea, building dikes to keep the ocean at bay. Baan presents projects in his native Netherlands: the massive Delta Works network of defenses from the North Sea; the Scheveningen promenade, Spanish architect Manuel De Solà-Morales’s seaside coastal reinforcement-cum-resort in the Hague; and Watervilla de Omval, +31 Architects’ slick, modern reincarnation of the houseboat.

Watervilla de Omval, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Photo: Iwan Baan

Although the curatorial narrative of “Sink or Swim” promises to “present viewers with various human responses to changes in their landscapes” and forego the tidiness of “pristine architectural photography,” this section devoted the Dutch, in addition others on the disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina and the Japanese tsunami, focus on just that, offering loads of pristine architectural photography, plus shots of new infrastructure, and stories about the myriad celebrities who swooped in to save the day. We get Stephen Wilkes’s very controlled portraits of New Orleans residents in front of their garish new Frank Gehry or Thom Mayne-designed homes, courtesy of Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation; interior shots of Shigeru Ban’s shipping-container relief shelters in Japan and aerial views of Arata Isozaki and Anish Kapoor’s collaborative inflatable concert hall. Images of a post-Hurricane-Sandy New York are entirely bereft of any people; instead, we get far-off, fine-art aerial photographs, including Baan’s iconic Lower Manhattan helicopter ride, and a rollercoaster that Wilkes captured semi-submerged by the sea.

The roller coaster from the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey partially submerged in the ocean after Hurricane Sandy. © Stephen Wilkes courtesy of Peter Fetterman Gallery

TV in the sand post Hurricane Katrina, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. © Stephen Wilkes courtesy of Peter Fetterman Gallery

It’s worth noting the difference between a well-meaning exhibition’s approach to portraying the first world in contrast to the developing one. In Bediksen’s documentary-style photos of Bangladesh, in addition to Baan’s series on a lakeside community in Benin, we see people living their day-to-day lives, following along with their commute across the water. An especially poignant series by photojournalist Paula Bronstein shows the devastation of a typhoon-torn Filipino community — barefoot children, tear-stained faces, a man taking a hammer to a corrugated tin roof as he attempts to rebuild his home using scraps of the surrounding detritus.

The same heart-wrenching scenes occurred in New Orleans and Japan, but any documentation of the Superdome has been scrubbed clean from the exhibition in favor of high-gloss, fine-art photography. (Shigeru Ban also designed pop-up refuges for the Philippines, but they never made it into the show’s storyline.) Why such a dichotomy? Adaptive architecture is a means of survival around the world, but the striking disparities between these photos show that, depending on where you live, it’s not just that not all relief efforts are created equal — nor are the ways your community might be portrayed. In the places where architects, artists, and movie stars fear to tread, resilience alone is what keeps a community afloat.

“Sink or Swim” is on view at the Annenberg Center for Photography through May 3.