*BLUE DUNES - POST-SANDY NY | Primary Case

As part of the Rebuild by Design competition, Blue Dunes was proposed as an offshore New York and New Jersey development to address increasingly frequent and intense storms in the Atlantic Ocean. The proposal is unbuilt. The project was a finalist in the competition, and received input from scientists, engineers, planners, economists and maritime stakeholders. Their contributions led to WXY architects to propose the creation of a Blue Dunes Research Initiative to continue to explore novel planning tools and resources that address physical ocean dynamics, geomorphology and habitats. The proposal itself is a string of barrier islands that mimic the geomorphology of coastal dunes and their associated ecological processes and biodiversity. The barrier islands span from southern New Jersey past Long Island Sound with a span of over 4000 miles, with various programs, including recreational opportunities in addition to their function as a defensive mechanism for the coastline. The project explicitly addresses inundation due to storm surge events, but does not address longer-term issues of sea level rise or coastal inundation. Instead, the project effectively gives time to communities in New Jersey and New York to adopt other adaptation and resiliency initiatives. By working across scales, from a single island dune formation to a regional scale with multiple dunes, the project challenges existing parameters of design interventions. While the project was estimated to be financially feasible, it requires a significant number of stakeholders cooperating across jurisdictions, including federal cooperation to maintain dredging operations and state-level insurance premiums for coastal properties. Blue Dunes highlights the capacity of landscape architects to design for coastal adaptation across scales and to be leaders in multidisciplinary large-scale projects. 2013 - 2014
1500 acres
33 feet above sea level