This high-density urban housing landscape is designed as an environmental sponge absorbing climatic impacts and slowly filtering the captured water and energy back into their natural and human eco-systems as useful nutrients. The site itself reaches out through the park to create an alluvial delta comb recapturing passing river sediment to slowly replenish and build the high ground and its natural waterfront life, much as the natural delta, bayous and barrier islands originally functioned. These sponge-like delta fingers then reach back and up to form the housing blocks themselves, which in turn also function as absorptive, living tissue in the larger landscape.

The project will be fabricated almost entirely off-site using a hybrid, steel-frame/structural insulated panel system using no internal cavities and no water absorptive construction materials. The individual building units will be efficiently manufactured in three road-legal halves per typical two or three-bedroom flat and then stacked by crane as complete housing units on top of prefabricated, ground level retail and service cores built of water and termite resistant composite concrete panels. Earth excavated for building foundations is redistributed as water absorptive landscape berms creating a unified outdoor common space flowing upward from the river bank, through the public park and integrating into the geometry and eco-system of the individual house blocks.

Dwelling units share a common geometric order defined by the local urban street grid and housing typologies merging with the delta webbing of earth and water at the riverbank. Within the regular grid, the slightly sliding, rising and falling house positions create a readably syncopated rhythm, allowing the gardens and open space to shrink and swell across the roofs, creating variously sized and shaded outdoor gardening, dining and play areas. Community vegetable gardens, picnic and play areas weave as continuously linked walkways and platforms winding among the buildings above the parking level below, both defining internal community areas and flowing outward to the street edge as densely vegetated corridors of air and skylight, welcoming integration with the life and spatial massing of the larger neighborhood.