Hurricane Maria Memorial Competition
Location: Battery Park, New York, NY
Year: 2019
Status: Competition Design
Construction Cost: $750,000
The HMMC proposal seeks to capture many challenges relevant to those who experienced Hurricane Maria’s strike in Puerto Rico including its vulnerability and local unpreparedness. Also, we wanted to portrait our infrastructure's fragile condition to counter such an atmospheric event. We wanted to emphasize the resilience character that the people living in Puerto Rico demonstrated afterward. To better demonstrate the impact of the atmospheric event we chose to refurbish significant parts of the Chamber Street Overlook to provoke an interruption in the visual reading of the Battery Park landscape, as a metaphor of the interruption caused by Hurricane Maria to our lives, the collapse of our communication infrastructure and the food supply shortage. A series of slanted curved walls made from poured concrete are arranged in a pinwheel scheme as a formal metaphor of a cyclone crashing onto the ground. The wall’s texture reminds us of how portions of this disaster are man-made, and their slant speaks of the literal collapse of structures, as a reminder of the result of uncontrolled development in coastal areas. The arrangement of these walls creates a dynamic and yet intimate space for contemplation.
At the Chambers Street Overlook level, only the footprint of the original ramp is kept in place. The two original stairs are grouped into one to properly convey the generating ideas behind the proposal without compromising or disrupting the pedestrian circulation in and out of the park. A sculpture made of a series of arching steel pipes sits at the epicenter of the refurbished overlook. Its shape is inspired by the iconic features of a tree native to Puerto Rico: the roots of red mangroves. Red mangroves are native to the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico and South Florida, and are one of the agents responsible for resilience against coastal erosion and provide natural protection from hurricanes and tidal waves. Moreover, it is an appropriate symbol to characterize the fragility of our ecosystems and suggest an imperative need to strengthen our waterfronts and coastlines. In an era where sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and global warming are imminent threats, the design aims not only to pay tribute to the lost lives but to raise awareness of the need to decelerate Climate Change’s effects and a call to use nature itself to shield from increasingly devastating natural disasters.