Next Progressives: Future Cities Lab
Exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of a 2012 show entitled “The Utopian Impulse,” the Hydramax Port Machine project proposes how the San Francisco waterfront can respond to rising sea levels. Rather than barricade the city with dykes and seawalls, Hydramax offers soft tidal edges with responsive, biologically inspired architecture—aquatic parks, gardens, and wildlife refuges—that harness the water for drinking, power, and food production. The model displayed at the museum incorporates motion sensors that, when triggered by visitors, cause featherlike solar collectors and fog-catchers to wave slowly in the air.