WAY BEYOND BIGNESS

AUTHOR: DEREK HOEFERLIN

Provides a uniquely contemporary design-research framework for multi-disciplinary strategies across multiple scales of river basins.

This necessary realignment is what I define as “Watershed Architecture [WA].” Given our complex contemporary challenges—specifically in relation to water—current design-research cannot be accomplished by one author, or for that matter, by one architect, landscape architect, or urban designer. Rather, it requires collaborations that oscillate inside and outside typical design disciplines’ definitions, breaking down typical professional and academic dichotomies.

Further, “Watershed Architecture” recasts Oxford Dictionary’s two very different definitions for a “watershed”: 1) “An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas” and 2) “An event or period marking a turning point in a situation in a course of action or state of affairs” and its two very different definitions for “architecture”: 1) “The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings” and 2) “the complex or carefully designed structure of something.”

Specific to the themes presented in this book, the contemporary question to ask is: Why should the term architecture, or any design discipline for that matter, be part of river basin–scale decision-making? And ones, particularly in the United States, that are designed both in policy and physicality through engineered forms?

The intended goal of book advocates for design disciplines to possess new tools to engage a wider audience of river basin management projects, by gaining an objective and more technical 

perspective on issues with which they may not be familiar. Architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and practitioners of other design disciplines can contribute important ideas, both in terms of graphic legibility, as well as important ideas that directly impact the built environment at territorial scales beyond their typical disciplinary definitions and scales. But to do so, designers need to embrace a more technical grounding from other fields working in river basin management. And conversely, these other fields have much to gain from various, more generalist-oriented skill sets that design disciplines bring to promoting a healthier and more adaptive built environment.

In order to address the complex challenges impacting multiple scales set within river basin contexts, I believe a new synthetic notion of architecture, as well as landscape architecture, urban design, and other design disciplines needs to emerge and work far beyond an envelope of a building, or a definition of a landscape, or a boundary of a city, or a predominantly engineered system. Architects need to be part of a new type of interdisciplinary, trans-boundary, decision-making design table. This table is a messy one for sure, and one rife with conflict. But architects and allied design disciplines posses a particularly unique toolset to negotiate possibilities within such a milieu.

Since the author’s primary home and workplace is in St. Louis, Missouri, along with prior and continuing work in New Orleans, Louisiana, the bulk of the design-research begins, prioritizes, and ends, in the Mississippi River Basin. But this work is critically understood comparatively with two other major river basins: the Mekong and the Rhine.

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