Delaminating Waters: A Speculative Study of Water, Salt, and their Transformations

Delaminating Waters is a projective proposal for a salt shed and bath complex in Brooklyn New York. Reacting to new desalination technologies and cleaner New York waters, this proposal projects a future in which salt shed infrastructure becomes decentralized, allowing for renewed community engagement with its processes and the waters it concerns. 

 

Inspired by historical methodologies of solar salt production, Delaminating Waters lifts the salt flats from the water, using raised desalination units to provide enclosure and massing. These units effectively split the water into its component parts, providing salt for NYC and hot water for public baths. Free from the constraints of salt production, the water becomes a walkable landscape through the use of a semi-buoyant surface. Throughout each day and month this landscape shifts, morphs, and changes, responding to the environment and linking the user to the water. This fabric of the water is then lifted to form walkways and areas are scooped out of the ocean to become baths. From hot to cold, desalinated to salty, high to low, these baths aggregate into the ocean, ultimately integrating with the very waters that they came from. Below these baths is a didactic experience in which the viewer can see and understand the many ways in which the water is seen and experienced. They stand on the very surface of the water, subject to its every change and shift. They look down at holes in the fabric of the water, marking locations where that water has been relocated. They look up at baths rid of their component salt. They look further at the process by which the water is separated, coming face to face with Delaminated Waters.