Poetics of Building with director Coleman Coker
Sea Rim State Park, Texas
Sea Rim State Park, Texas
In the wake of three devastating hurricanes in four years, Sea Rim State Park is having an identity crisis as they try to rebuild their facilities on the northern Texas coast. To draw in more visitors, the park decided to test a floating campsite in the wetlands, creating a completely immersive, primitive camping experience on water. In an area of the park only accessible by boat, the wetlands attract birders, fisherman, duck hunters, biologists, and now campers to experience the unique nature and wildlife in a part of the world overrun with petroleum refineries and pollution.
The studio worked as a team of 13 to develop design ideas, draw construction documents, and build and install the campsite at Sea Rim. While faced with many challenges including providing protection from local alligators, creating privacy for a bathroom, calculating loads for floating, harsh environmental conditions, building on water, and a micro budget, the platform still addresses the qualities of the site in a poetic way – revealing qualities that would otherwise go unseen.
SITE ANALYSIS: 1. Hurricane destruction after Ike, 2008 2. Typical ocean oil rigs represented by gray dots in the Gulf of Mexico 3. Typical crude oil refineries represened by areas in black 4. Narrow, shallow canals are the only way to access to the wetland campsite 5. Water levels vary from 18-36 inches throughout the day, depending on the tides, seasons, and storms - the striations in the grass reveal the variation 6. Common animals in the area include the brown pelican, snowy egret, blue crab, and the American alligator
Site Analysis
Sea Rim State Park is located on the Texas Coast at the Louisiana border. The primary industry in the area is oil – coastal drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and crude oil refineries in the coastal cities. The flat landscape is peppered with tanks or rigs on the horizon, the air is polluted with burning gases, the water is polluted with chemical run off, and the night sky is polluted with bleeding light from the acres of industrial facilities. Sea Rim and the wildlife preserve provide a safe haven for native animals and plants, while offering stewardship for the visitors, teaching them about the importance of wetlands in protecting the coasts.
Small lakes are accessible by boat through a series of canals. The water level stays between 18-36 inches, depending on the tides and rainfall, keeping the ground saturated for the decomposing matter to fertilize the flora and prevent human inhabitation. Tall grasses line the waters' edge and create a barrier between human and landscape, blocking the view of a kayaker. The shallow water is dark and mysterious and reflects the vast sky, separated only by the thin, flat plain of grasses that seems to stretch for miles. The crash of ocean waves is audible in the distance, and near the shore, the wind sings through the reeds.
Concept and Design Development
Through iterative design sketching and modeling, reflective analysis, meetings with the Texas Parks Department, and full scale prototyping, the team proposed and built a 14x20ft platform, with a 16ft tower. The base is structured in five bays, each supported by a 2x10ft HDPE plastic float. The height of the floats supports the deck surface approximately 30 inches off the water, which allows the platform to hover in plane with the grasses and discourages alligators from climbing on.
The tall tower serves as a private area for a bathroom as well as a way finding marker to help orient visitors when their view range is limited by their low perspective. The tower has a 3x5ft footprint which tapers to a 3x3ft square, creating a frame of the sky from the interior. When viewed from a distance, the tapered silhouette helps to distinguish cardinal directions. The tower is clad in three sets of panels, with the lower two sets as solid, and the taller, top set of panels as porous to allow wind flow for ventilation. Instead of a door, the entry is open - the platform uses its siting near a cove to act as the fourth wall on the south side. This eliminates the need for moving parts, which could easily break, and provides another framed connection to the landscape, looking out from inside the tower.
Two tent tie down rails and a perimeter, alligator protection rail stretch across the bays, adding structural support as well as satisfying functional needs. The primary structure, decking, and tower panels are built from pressure treated 2x2 and 2x4s, while the long spanning structural members connecting the bays and supporting the tower height are made from steel. Due to the experimental nature of the project in combination with the harsh and unpredictable climate conditions, the team was advised to design for a 5-10 year life span, making the inevitable rusting of the raw steel obsolete.
Construction
The platform was built in three weeks off-site and assembled in three days on site, in water. All of the construction labor and management was completed by studio members, with structural approval from a consulting engineer.
The platform was designed in five bays for easy transportation to Sea Rim. Their narrow dimension was calculated to allow them to float down the narrow canals accessing the lake. Primary framing was built with 2x8 pressure treated pine, with secondary joists as 2x6s. A pattern of 2x2 and 2x4 decking was also added off-site. The steel alligator rails, tent tie down rails, and entry steps were fabricated off-site, as well as the tower frame and privacy panels. 1/8" steel plate was welded to the panel frames to fill the gaps between the wood on the lower panels. This left a small air gap to encourage air flow, while still providing enough privacy for a bathroom.
Due to their top heaviness as individual units, the bays had to be transported upside down once on-site. The steel members and tower panels sat in the grasses until the platform was assembled and habitable. One by one, the bays were flipped and lag-screwed together across their joints as team members stood knee deep in the wetland mud, holding them in place. The 20ft long, steel tent rails were dropped in and bolted across the five bays, giving the platform enough stability to construct the tower. The tower frames were held on their sides while the initial bracing was welded in place. The upper tower panels were welded to the two angle frames, giving the tapered structure its shape and stability before the tower was lifted upright. The lower, privacy panels were welded into place while the perimeter alligator rails were installed. Entry steps connecting the two tent rails were welded on site to account for as-built tolerances.
After floating the finished campsite to its desired location in the middle of the cove, four, 100lb, concrete pyramid anchors were attached with 50lb galvanized chain and dropped from the corners. It would take days for them to sink deep enough into the soft mud and be effective against the strong winds off the coast. The completed campsite accommodates up to four people and is available as of summer 2016.
BUILT DETAILS: 1. Tower panels and screen privacy slats at bathroom entry 2. Entry Step, Tent Rail, and Alligator Rail 3. Alligator Rail crossing deck bay seam 4. Tent Tie-Down crossing deck bay seam 5. Tower base on deck 6. Tower base, Tent Tie-Down, and Alligator Rail
