Five Bold Ideas for Adapting a Historic D.C. Landscape to Sea Level Rise
Washington, D.C.’s 140-year-old Tidal Basin is sinking. Five architects offer radical redesigns for preservation in a new climate reality.
DLANDstudio’s proposal aims to connect the Tidal Basin to the rest of Washington, D.C., an idea influenced by the 1902 McMillan Plan for the development of a citywide parks system.
Tidal Basin Ideas Lab
Lined with cherry trees and home to larger-than-life memorials of key American figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., is a beloved public space with historical significance. But 140 years after the construction of a seawall atop a landfill in the Potomac River, the site is regularly submerged under water.
Sidewalks along the two-mile loop surrounding the man-made reservoir flood almost daily during high tide, forcing people to walk on the roots of the cherry trees — some of which regularly stand in as much as three feet of water. It’s the result of a combination of interrelated threats: sinking land, rising sea levels and a crumbling infrastructure unable to absorb the region’s intensifying rainstorms. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicts that the river will rise by over three feet by 2080, while experts say 1-in-100-year storms could become 1-in-25-year events by mid-century.