Sediments: Performative Ecologies | Architecture Thesis on Regenerative Architecture

Site Context

The site for the intervention is located in Honda, Colombia. The railway line, which was drawn by humans abruptly, now serves as an interface between history and place. A path that veers off course and leads to a fishing vertical bio-filter tower—a performative artefact that matches the landscape.

The former railway line, which was originally intended to connect regions for trade and territory exploitation, is currently being reimagined as a route that reconnects the geologic, cultural, and fluvial ecologies of the region, a system that restores an endangered ecosystem by accumulating biological, historical, and anthropogenic sediments.

Design Process

The question “How to respond to a place where the only constant is change?” is the starting point of the research process. The collected satellite images reveal the choreography of the landscape in a permanently changing river condition, at the mouth of the Guarinó River into the Magdalena River. The primary water system that ties together Colombia’s landmass is derived from both the movement of water and the people, stories, and sediments that navigate it.

This abandoned piece, as the “violence,” was the starting point. A piece that has completely altered the location’s morphology while retaining its history and accumulated temporality. Instead, it aimed to become a “bio-lent” vestige that could connect biological processes and community to promote the recovery of the river ecosystem while also acknowledging the past.

The project is heavily influenced by technology (drone photogrammetry, 3D printing, CNC fabrication, satellite imagery, and animation), which increases its specificity and, consequently, its relevance and capacities, particularly those that are developed over time. Besides, adopting a community-based program and ecosystemic responsibilities. This required a hybrid approach to the entire process in terms of research methodologies and digital and physical translations. A methodology that is as complex and unfinished as the landscape: a scenario that blends layers, states of time, and matter.

Final Outcome

The bio-filter tower functions as a verticalization of the horizontal dynamics of the river, from matter to its inhabitants. Fishing, being a transient activity, involves a variety of performative tasks, such as bringing in the catch by canoe, lifting it for storage, weaving fishing nets, drying it, and relocating it across the Magdalena River. 

The structure takes on ecosystemic responsibilities; its facades act as a living river museum, collecting sediment, cultivating vegetation, and bio-filtering rainwater. In biological succession, the vertical serves as a scaffold for successive stages. A pedestrian pathway is constructed over the pre-existing railroad, providing a link that will restore people’s connection to the river and its cultural practices.

Static steel columns rise on concrete stilts amid a dynamic landscape, witnessing the constantly shifting vegetation and water levels. The project serves as a static observer of the landscape’s slow reclamation by nature. Its open design responds to river flows, wind, and rain better than other structures, and it makes it easier for fishermen to fish and for vegetation to grow.

Vertically, it collects rainwater and vegetation; horizontally, it filters water and accumulates sediment. The abandoned vestige integrates human knowledge with landscape restoration by reestablishing a connection between people and the river and its traditions, which is crucial for the history of the site (Honda). A landscape that brings people together, where traces of the past can serve as a new way of bringing the community and ecosystem together.

Conclusion: The project offers an architectural solution to the fragmented landscapes in Honda, Colombia, which are shaped by sediments due to local ecologies and weather. The Fishing Vertical Bio-Filter Tower preserves regional knowledge and restores ecosystems by integrating ecology and history. The project evolves based on sediment movements, river flows, rainfall, and sun exposure.

[This Academic Project has been published with text submitted by the student]