This project proposes a series of counterbalances to water fluctuation extremes, set along the Lower Esopus Creek of the Catskill Mountains in Ulster County, New York. Three architectures extend the existing Ashokan Community Center for the creation of a water-centric commons: a deployable dam, allowing for the flooding of the local area; a gabion, which constructs three interdependent ecologies in support of different types of life (trout, wetland grasses, and human); and a split house, used for the storage of human-focused equipment for the full use of such a water-terrain. To challenge the existing paradigm of political entities using landscape as a means for extraction, an inversion of land and water is employed, turning the waterscape into habitable spaces. Each reacts in their own ways to man-induced climatic events and landscape alterations offering operations at an infrastructural scale but disappear on the surface into a newly crafted landscape.
