Project Name: Gowanus Lowline: Connections Competition
Landscape Architect: Jessica Leete
Year designed: 2011

Airing our Domestic Laundry as a Connection to Place: AGER Group's Boston Office Receives an Honorable Mention
The Gowanus Canal is located in the Brooklyn borough of New York City and is one of the only underdeveloped areas left for good reason. In 2010 the EPA put Gowanus Canal on the Superfund National Priorities List. The approximately mile long canal was built on an existing creek in 1869 and acted as a major cargo transportation hub between Brooklyn and New York City with manufactured gas plants, mills, tanneries, and chemical plants among the industries located there. In addressing the Gowanus Canal site and community, AGER focused on industry past, present, and future looking for connections that allow the legacy of this place to continue. The competition organizers, Gowanus by Design, set speculation on the value of urban development of postindustrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engages with the canal and surrounding watershed as the main competition objectives.
AGER's design approach is based on the belief that we can transform retrograde materialism into a healthy working industrial ecology where wastes are recycled, resources conserved, and community regenerated based on the existing foundations of a site. Using a variety of bioremediation and site cultivation methods our "Domestic Laundry" is aired through the language of the "Flushing Basin" or cleansing wetland, "Curtain" or vertical filter, "Mattress" or microbial matrix medium, and "Pillow" or soil cleansing berm. Through an opportunity for observation and participation in the processes of site remediation people are connected to place and the industry that makes it so.