Take Back The Edge
A Joint Submission Of JONATHAN CECI LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT And JAMIE BARNETT DESIGN
The following materials were developed as a design entry for Baltimore-AIA’s 2019 design competition Edge, Harbor + City. Jonathan Ceci Landscape Architect teamed with graphic designer Jamie Barnett Design in order to explore ways of revealing the latent ecology in much-altered landscapes around the margins of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
As an artifact, the built environment reflects our culture’s practice of delineating edges. Walls, fences and bulkheads compartmentalize the physical world. They draw distinctions of ownership and use and delineate political boundaries. When imposed on the natural environment, these edges obliterate ecological thresholds as determined by hydrology, soil and microclimate.
Nowhere does this phenomenon find fuller expression than in the hardened edges of Baltimore’s waterfront, where seawalls draw a blunt distinction between aquatic and terrestrial. In early colonial times, the harbor was broader, and the threshold between land and sea was a gradient--from deep water to shallow to marshy wetland to flood plain, etc. to dry upland.
Our design reasserts the Edge-as-gradient—a wide swath of ground that wraps around the harbor from Riverside to Downtown and up the Jones Falls. Though now absent, the ecological diversity and sensuous richness that once marked this zone may yet be recaptured through the cultivation of synthetic ecologies. In order to make visible and inspire renewal of a widened natural edge, we propose a series of discrete interventions around the harbor on land and in water. Combining environmental graphics and living systems, these pop-up parks combine everyday materials in unexpected ways: dumpsters, chain link, plastic bottles, rusting posts and patched asphalt. These materials, so ubiquitous along the water’s edge, will be reassembled to represent abstractly the ecologies and experiences that have been lost and which might yet be reclaimed as the natural heritage of every Baltimorean.
We propose three installations around the harbor. Each evokes a distinct memory of lost ecosystems and dreams about new experiences that can be realized in the future. Our plan shows how the three installations are situated relative to today’s urban fabric. It also situates them relative to the historic extent of the harbor and its modulated ecologies. Prior to the late 1700s, when dredging and earthwork reshaped the harbor into a deep water port for the industrial age, Baltimore’s harbor was a thriving tidal cove with abundant shallow-water habitats like the rest of the bay, and an undulating skirt of tidal salt marsh.