studio erde.
office for anthropocene landscapes
Littoral Negotiation
The Baltic Sea and its Sediment Landscapes
The project challenges the widespread romanticized view of the Baltic Sea by decoding its vast ecological and infrastructural use on a global and local scale. The Baltic Sea is portrayed as a highly infrastructural, interconnected and urbanized space, where the Spheres of Ecology, Technosphere and Culture merge, creating highly dynamic, vulnerable and instable littoral interfaces, thus breaking with the old dichotomy between ocean and land. The project develops a radical strategy around those interfaces, based on models and statistics of the expected global sea-level rise until 2100, resulting in drastic consequences for the Baltic region.
The authors seek an alternative way of dealing with those growing uncertainties by working with the power and needs of the subject ocean, developing a negotiation strategy around the identified core processes, which reveal hidden landscape structures deep inside the land, constantly dynamize the ocean-land continuum and provoke our attitude towards the ocean.
This results in a resilient and dynamic framework of spatial categories and tactics (Fortresses, Mediators and Migrating Spaces) for the German Baltic coast, building a new resilience by implementing sediment landscapes based on a new sediment economy, profiting from those new forces. They are being tested on prototypes, where the introduced dynamics, aesthetics and identities are integrated into design strategies over time.
