Understanding that uncertainty plays an inevitable role in the relationship between humans and non-humans, “Living Infrastructures” experiments with how uncertainties can cultivate new growth between Pleasure Beach and Bridgeport’s East End. Focusing on the first point of contact, the dock, immediately stimulates awareness of human and non-human relationships, offering a journey of education for visitors before they step foot on the beach. Intertwining hydroponic gardens and education spaces mediates three user groups – birds, people, and fish – within a “vertical forest,” stimulating interaction among three clustered structures. By extending the existing infrastructural grid of pilings, our design utilizes two systems of lines and dots to foster vertical density. Platforms are dispersed among the pilings, echoing the urban scale of Brideport’s pollutive industrial past while diffusing porosity between interior and exterior spaces. Hydroponic gardens woven throughout the clusters tie species into a vertical ecosystem that supplements East End’s food desert and pushes the hydroponic systems to become the infrastructure. Extending beyond the dock, the grid of dots and lines fluctuates into clouds of randomness, allowing future uncertain use and structural growth to flourish. A seemingly static idea of “infrastructure” is challenged as this new ecology of growth breathes life into the non-breathing, creating coexistence in the vertical that regenerates a living connection between East End and Pleasure Beach.
