Offshore Towers

New York, USA 2020

The coast is a recursive environment for civilizations to thrive. Our ancestors sought the coast for its resource abundance, from food to transportation, presenting good trading opportunities that promoted development in strategic coastal spots. The trend of coastal development has not changed; in any case, it is accelerating. With an increasingly growing coastal population – expected to increase by 1.66 billion people in 2050 –the current built-up area of cities and the consequential anthropogenic effects, there is a niche to challenge our built environment's standards along the shorelines.

Some factors that contribute to the growth of coastal cities are the following:

-Urbanization: Nowadays, about 54% of the world population lives in urban areas. According to estimates, of all the current 7.7 billion inhabitants, 40% live within 100km of the coast. That is 3.08 billion people living in coastal areas and a market of 1.66 billion people incoming to a coastal city.

-Population growth: The current world population of 7.7 billion people is expected to increase to 9.7 billion by 2050; this means a 2 billion increase in population. At current rates, there will be an extra 800 million people depending on innovative coastal developments.

-Productivity: Coastal environments are the ones that contribute most to a country's economy. This drives the increasing demand for coastal land and reclaimed land. Innovation in the traditional land reclamation systems has a high potential to contribute to the location's productivity where it is implanted.

-Migrations: Inequalities in regards to employment opportunities, especially between the north and south hemispheres, makes of the northern countries a desirable destination for many migrants. Adding to this, in the southern hemisphere are found some of the fastest-growing population worldwide.

-Tourism industry: Worldwide, at 2016 levels, we were experiencing a tourism population of over 1.2 billion visitors per year. Cities like New York itself hosts about 60 million visitors a year. This industry increases land demands to absorb this temporal but constant population.

-City Sprawl: The sprawl of cities uses land that provides ecosystem services such as wetlands to combat sea-level rise or forests for climate adaptation. In a coastal city, the threshold between land and sea pushes the growth more intensively towards mainland.

"The Offshore Towers" is a water-based, mix-use development to adopt the growing cultural, resiliency, and technological needs of Battery Park, New York. The Offshore Towers seek to:

a) reduce gentrification pressures of the ever-increasing technological industry by building on newly created land.
b) improve the local coastal resiliency with a new buffer zone
c) improve logistics to the existing grid through the introduction of an automated last-mile logistics network.

This is possible by applying a modular land reclamation system that enables construction as soon as it is deployed and plugs with any infrastructure that the development needs. Caisson technology is the method used for land reclamation. These caissons are designed as hollow extruded hexagons to hold added infrastructure, such as a fully automated last-mile logistics network connected to warehouses, indoor farming, and recycling units. This network extends towards the existing mainland to provide services to the current city. In this sense, the Offshore Towers is an urban planning and an infrastructural complex that adds direct and indirect value to the existing area.