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metropolis
This page and opposite: courtesy water pore partnership
Poreform acts like
an “urban skin” punctuated by apertures (or
“pores”) to absorb, capture, and slowly release
water in arid climates
like the Mojave Desert.
The recipient of this
year’s North American
Holcim Gold Award,
the project aims to
reframe water as a valuable resource and
urban amenity.
Game Changers 2015
Landscape, Urban Planning
Water Pore
Partnership
By Samuel Medina
Architects and planners
are often eager to
shepherd infrastructure
into the shadows of a
city. Amy Mielke and
Caitlin Gucker-Kanter
Taylor advocate for the
opposite—revitalizing
Las Vegas’s stressed
water supply and putting it in plain sight
for all to experience.
For architects, particularly American architects,
Las Vegas is something of an enduring enigma,
an absurdity that has to be confronted at some
point or another. It looms there in the back of
many a practitioner’s mind, or at least it does
for those given over to self-aggrandizement or
historical role-playing. The inflicted can blame
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who
polemicized the Strip’s cavalcade of infantile
trappings and fuddy T-bone gigantism. But as
four decades separate us from the quaint world
of Learning from Las Vegas, what is there left
to glean from this incorrigible place?
Designers Amy Mielke and Caitlin GuckerKanter Taylor—far from self-promoters—think
there remain lessons to be learned. Like those
erstwhile pioneers Bob and Denise, Mielke and
Taylor first encountered Las Vegas as part of a
graduate-school studio, their last at the Yale School
of Architecture. The thesis project they developed there formed the basis of their professional
collaboration, Water Pore Partnership (WPP).
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71
“Instead of sending
water down a pipe
or staying away
from urban waters,
the projects try
to reimagine ways
to interact with,
acknowledge, and
accept water in the
urban environment.”
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metropolis
The textured surface
swells from a semiflat perimeter to
deep pools that
quickly capture large
volumes of water.
courtesy water pore partnership
The pairing was fortuitous—Mielke
studied architecture at Oklahoma State
University before moving to New York City
to practice, eventually making her way
to Yale, while Taylor had a background in
biochemistry. “She said she was interested in infections, and I said I liked temporary architecture, so we thought, ‘Let’s
see where this goes,’” Mielke remembers.
For the duration of the youthful
partnership, the object of study has been
water (it’s right there in the name, after
all). And while their aim seems almost
single-minded, it’s impressively multifaceted, if admittedly unglamorous: How to
sensationalize the mundane mechanisms of water storage, rain collection, and
flood controls?
Poreform, the modular system of water
capture that Mielke and Taylor designed
for Las Vegas, injects these infrastructures
with verve and drapes them in spectacle.
It layers a seductive concrete skin on otherwise typical storage tanks that can be
plugged into the city’s existing pipelines.
These tanks would be integrated at crucial junctions between downtown and
surrounding suburban enclaves, acting as
sponges to absorb some of the tens of
billions of gallons of water that fall on
Las Vegas each rainfall.
Beyond its functional (read: absorptive)
capacity, Poreform also carries political
The pools are punctured with open pores
to release the captured water to the
subterranean basin.
The primary capture
basin holds up to
3.6 million cubic
feet of water. The
largest tank will
contain spaces for
performance and
cultural programs.
Las Vegas is plagued
by drought and flash
floods that unleash
billions of gallons
of water onto the
city— most of which
is lost to runoff.
“The overall contrast between extreme
scarcity and flooding became a really
productive thing for
our project,” says
Taylor. The solution, she adds, was
to balance an imbalanced system by
“capturing as much
floodwater as quickly
as possible, and
then hold it.”
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73
a lot of precious energy
pumping water uphill
to the suburbs,” says
Taylor. “The further uphill
the suburbs sprawl,
the harder it is to get
water up there.”
resonance, encouraged by Mielke and
Taylor’s then-professor Keller Easterling.
“The studio was laughingly interested in
Tony Hsieh’s urbanism-as-start-up proposal
for downtown,” Easterling says of her time
with the twosome. Since defunct, Hsieh’s
urban aspirations amounted to the stuff of
“naturally occurring fiction” and scenerychewing chutzpah—not to mention hype—
that Easterling suggests Las Vegas is prone
to. Irrationality easily takes hold here, she
says, and the city’s “risky relationship with
water use similarly defies all reason.”
Despite their centrality to the concept,
Mielke and Taylor surprisingly knew little
about the politics and economy of water
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metropolis
“The primary issue is
not hiding shared
infrastructure from the
public it belongs to.”
management before embarking on their
shared project. Las Vegas’s improbable
formation and its artificial cityscape—
the modish architectural historian Reyner
Banham, sunburnt and channeling his
best desert hippie, abstracted it as “pure environmental power”—offered many rabbit
holes to burrow into and take creative refuge.
“Las Vegas came before water for us. I didn’t
know the first thing about it—I’m pretty
sure I Googled ‘water issues Las Vegas,’”
says Mielke. Taylor explains how cursory
research gave way to entrenched engagement with two key problems that have
plagued the city since its founding: drought
and flash floods. As she recalls, “We got
deep into the municipal records, flooding
records, and flood maps, and tried to understand how Las Vegas maintained and valued
its water resources.”
The diligence paid off. In September,
just over a year since graduating, Mielke and
Taylor received the North American Holcim
Gold Award and $100,000 (the same bounty
awarded to Shigeru Ban, last year’s Pritzker
Prize winner) to develop their project from
architectural schematic to proof of concept,
and, if they’re lucky, physical implementation. Currently, WPP is in the first phases
of prototyping, having enlisted aid from
Holcim and its concrete technology experts,
and engineers from Arup.
this page and opposite: courtesy water Pore partnership
The Vegas Strip and
downtown are situated
at the center of a bowl,
surrounded by suburban
developments that
move uphill around it.
“The city has to spend
“We got deep into the
municipal records,
flooding records, and
flood maps.”
Module System
The plug-ins range in size and
absorptive and volumetric capacity
to fit in numerous configurations.
AStreet and Sidewalk Surface
Absorption 0.8
B Curb and System Drain
Absorption 2.0
CSponge
Absorption 3.8–10.8
DFoundation
Absorption 5.0
EAuxiliary Basin
Absorption 5.5
FPrimary Collection Tank
Absorption 10.8
F
C
A
B
E
D
The designers are
beginning to prototype
the system, and are
working with Arup and
Holcim. “If we can figure
out a way so that it’s
reproducible, who knows
what the applications
could be,” says Paul
O’Connor of Holcim US.
“We are helping them
to promote and develop
their idea, to get them
from a Ford Model T
to a Tesla.”
“What initially drew me to Water Pore
was the idea of bringing attention to and
creating a place for stormwater that doesn’t
just hide away under the street like traditional infrastructure,” says Arup engineer
Nancy Choi. For Choi, a specialist in storm
and wastewater management, Poreform is
in some ways akin to +POOL, whose architects she has consulted with. That project,
envisioning a cruciform-shaped natatorium
in the East River, was a crowdsourcing hit
that made public amenities sexy (or dumb)
enough for Internet consumption. “Instead
of sending water down a pipe or staying
away from urban waters,” Choi adds, “the
projects try to reimagine ways to interact
with, acknowledge, and accept water in the
urban environment.”
This is at the core of the project and
the partnership in general. As the Holcim
jury commendation reads, Poreform
articulates a desire to recover the heroic
role of infrastructure, in the process reconceiving it as an architectural undertaking. “As architects, we typically think
of infrastructure as being in service to
us,” says Mielke. “Instead, we’re trying to
explore how these types of systems can
benefit from an architectural way of
thinking.” Taylor agrees: “The primary
issue is not hiding shared infrastructure
from the public it belongs to.” M
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