Carbon T.A.P. / Tunnel Algae Project: Port

New York, 2009

Christopher Marcinkoski and Andrew Moddrell’s design practice, Port, addresses issues of environmental performance. Its conception of architecture and public space is conceived as inherently flexible and responsive not only to the vicissitudes of human inhabitation but to the complex, unpredictable, and contingent pressures of the environment as well. Port participates in the tradition of turning urban crisis into opportunity by harnessing the forces of a polluted planet in the development of new directions for landscape and urban design. Thus, it seeks to ask new questions and reveal new potentials about the state of the climate and the twenty-first century city, deploying some of its most deleterious effects, such as carbon off-gassing from New York City traffic, into productive material for energy generation and public space. In an age when the built and natural environments are increasingly intertwined, rendering their conventional distinctions more and more ambiguous, Port operates at the intersection of multiple disciplines, including architecture, landscape, urban design, infrastructure, and ecology.

Port’s Carbon T.A.P. / Tunnel Algae Project, a speculative unbuilt project that won the WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture ideas competition in 2009, is one such example. Carbon T.A.P. is a highly variegated landscape/infrastructure proposal that utilizes industrial-scale algaculture to sequester, consume, and convert greenhouse gas emissions into biofuels, bioplastics, and agricultural feeds, while simultaneously providing new forms of public space for social and cultural activity. The project could be described as operating at infrastructural, environmental, economic, social, and cultural scales. A series of floating pier-like armatures connect to the ventilation system of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in New York City, effectively “tapping” the constant and previously unharnessed emission of CO₂ by cars traveling between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Additionally, these “piers” are flexible and thus able to rotate in plan, allowing Carbon T.A.P. to function as a pedestrian bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn while also permitting the passage of boat traffic between the East River and the Hudson Bay. The piers themselves form a hybrid landscape of algaculture harvesting systems, service and production facilities related to the generation of new biomaterial products, and a variety of social and cultural amenities characteristic of public space. As such, the project might be described as a dynamic landscape infrastructure machine that performs environmentally, economically, socially, and culturally. As Port describes its project, Carbon T.A.P. is “one part climate action, one part agricultural production, one part ecological preserve, one part public realm, and one part economic catalyst.”

Rendering of Carbon T.A.P. / Tunnel Algae Project proposal, New York City.

Plan of proposal. Courtesy Port Architecture + Urbanism, LLC.