This design intervention reimagines University of Virginia’s Lambeth Field dormitory complex by emphasizing its location at a key point in the city’s Meadow Creek watershed. Meadow Creek is categorized as an “impaired waterway”, with 72% of the watershed existing in pipes underground. Rather than simply daylighting the creek, I chose to highlight the dark-and-buried to daylit fluctuations of Meadow Creek’s existing water infrastructure, using it as a basis for the creation of experimental social spaces for humans and nonhumans alike. Patterns in both passive and artificial lighting allow the spaces to evolve throughout the day and into the night.
Currently, access to the site is heavily impaired by a railroad berm, whose only puncture is a small tunnel which allows Meadow Creek to flow in. My design works to dramatize and inflate this tunnel, exaggerating water infrastructure's spatial forms across the site to provide passage for water and humans alike. Upon exiting the tunnel, the creek continues out below a raised circular plaza before spilling out into a 5 acre wetland at the site’s northeast corner.
