Tesselate creates a water filtration and resiliency infrastructure that changes over time- transforming in program and increasing in scope as water quality improves. The East river park currently presents a site that doesn’t encourage engagement with the river, aside from a timid visual connection. The project creates a direct engagement with the river environment extending out from the land to incorporate aquaculture, and oysters to filter the river and water sports among floating platforms. The aggregation of triangulated modules creates a geometry of ramps and paths under which and upon various program is nested.

On land bioswales and promenades wrap around a welcome center, education center, and café. The geometry meets the water with an exhibition space as the modules branch out into a field condition, containing floating platforms and structure for oyster propagation, a boathouse for kayaking, and fishing docks. As Manhattan faces severe storms and sea level rise in the future, the form projects into the future as a landscape in transition, presenting opportunities not only to protect the coast but to increase engagement with the water. The tessellated underwater structure for the platforms creates a substrate for oyster propagation and in certain modules is designed to fail, changing the underwater environment. As oyster populations grow the underwater structures morph from tessellated geometry into a resilient oyster bed and reef encouraging further introduction of species into the ecosystem.