Amy Mielke and Caitlin Taylor address the global challenge of water scarcity

‘A’A’ Interview – An incredible vote of confidence

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    Surface image rendering.

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    Feature interview – Poreform: Water absorptive surface and subterranean basin, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    “Las Vegas has many faces. Downtown has little in common with the glamorous world of The Strip – it lacks civic spaces for the locals, places they can identify with. So the tanks serve two purposes – they are both crucial pieces of flood control infrastructure, and public spaces that connect people to their natural resources.” – (l-r): Caitlin Gucker-Kanter Taylor and Amy Mielke

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    Las Vegas park rendering.

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    The water sampling stations will reintroduce the idea of community fountains, where collective knowledge is a resource and grow stronger in their own agency of water as our precious fuel.

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    The water sampling stations will alert us if something in the system has failed or offer peace of mind that everything is in order.

L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui (‘A’A’) interviewed American designers Amy Mielke and Caitlin Taylor of Water Pore Partnership who won the LafargeHolcim Awards Gold 2014 for their Poreform project. Their approach repositions water infrastructure as a civic project: using a water absorptive surface and subterranean basin to capture rain runoff that adds over 75,000 megaliters to the water supply capacity of Las Vegas, USA. Capable of rapid saturation and slow release, the flood-control pores of this “urban skin” are inlets to a new infrastructure that reframes water as a valuable resource rather than a liability.

Last updated: February 20, 2017 Las Vegas, USA

L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui (‘A’A’) interviewed American designers Amy Mielke and Caitlin Taylor of Water Pore Partnership who won the LafargeHolcim Awards Gold 2014 for their Poreform project. Their approach repositions water infrastructure as a civic project: using a water absorptive surface and subterranean basin to capture rain runoff that adds over 75,000 megaliters to the water supply capacity of Las Vegas, USA. Capable of rapid saturation and slow release, the flood-control pores of this “urban skin” are inlets to a new infrastructure that reframes water as a valuable resource rather than a liability.

 

 

Any Mielke & Caitlin Taylor

‘A’A’: Could you describe the project you submitted in the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction and what is the current status of this project?

Amy Mielke & Caitlin Taylor: Poreform is a design proposal to recast floodwater and runoff as a local resource instead of a liability. It is an urban surface – an intelligent and flexible system of pores – that absorbs and collects water like a skin for the city. Capable of rapid saturation and slow release, the pores of this urban skin are inlets to a new adaptable infrastructure at its surface.

The project is currently in the prototyping phase, and we are eagerly preparing for large-scale, in situ tests hosted by the Landscape Lab at Yale University in mid-2017.

‘A’A’: What was the impact of this Award on your professional activity as architects?

Amy Mielke & Caitlin Taylor: The prize in the LafargeHolcim Awards was an incredible vote of confidence for our design ideas. It lent our project crucial leverage and visibility, which has been invaluable as we continue to work towards implementation. It was in many ways the impetus of our continued partnership.

‘A’A’: What are you main current projects? Are you still in touch with the LafargeHolcim Foundation’s network and/or other Awards competition prize-winners? If so; in what context?

Poreform Surface

Amy Mielke & Caitlin Taylor: Today we are dreaming about the possibilities for a network of communicative water quality stations that would be sprinkled throughout New York City, alerting us if something has failed and providing peace of mind when everything is in order. The project is inspired by a recent water quality crisis in Flint, Michigan and received a New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) grant in 2017 sponsored by the Storefront for Art & Architecture. 

We have been in regular contact with LafargeHolcim since the Awards, and they are hugely supportive of the continued development of Poreform. They have lent their expertise and insight as we navigate an unusual project delivery path, and will collaborate on the upcoming prototyping experiments.