Hurricane Research Center: The Anti-Levee
What if flexible disposability rather than brute force is the best way to build on hurricane coasts?
The Hurricane Research Center looks to native flora for its hurricane-resistant features. Instead of forming a purely oppositional relationship with hurricane winds and flooding like typical levees and concrete bunker hurricane labs, this building is designed to accommodate damaging winds while still maintaining a baseline level of structural integrity. Like leaves on a tree, sections of the research center are designed to rip off without compromising vital structural and shelter elements. These sections are elevated by trunk-like concrete columns anchored to the ground by steel cable roots that lift them above the coastal flood plain.

Water World: From Toxic Scrap to Harmonious Village
The U.S. federal government has a big problem moored on the James River near Fort Eustis in Newport News, Va. David Phillip Walen, an architect in Charleston, S.C., has a solution, albeit an unlikely one given its necessary capital investment.

Architects Rethink Recycling
Frustrated with program requirements for a design competition for new recycling kiosks in Denver, Studio H:T Architects strayed from the guidelines to chart a new method of recycled waste collection. The Boulder, Colo.,-based firm envisions a “single stream” recycling system that would eliminate the intermediate step of collection by creating a city-wide infrastructure through which recyclables are delivered to sorting facilities. Their methods draw from the efficiencies of the recycling facility itself and from nature: electromagnets and a flexible membrane would mimic the smooth digestive muscle movement known as peristalsis to move the waste long distances, and even uphill.