After months of reading the site to understand its processes, how it feels to walk its streets, bridges, wetlands, beaches, abandoned parking lots, we’ve come to understand the Tacoma Tideflats in a series of themes that represent our understanding of the major forces and processes that have shaped the site to become what it is today:
STREAMLINE
EXTRACT
FABRICATE
STREAMLINE pertains to the channelization of the Puyallup river, the dredging of straight waterways, the armoring of those waterways to maintain adequate depths for shipping, the forceful removal of Puyallup Indians and Chinese workers in the name of efficiency and white economic development,. Streamline also encompasses the construction of streets, railroads, and bridges that maximize efficient collection of goods and raw materials from across the United States, efficient loading and unloading of those goods, and efficient exportation and importation on the global scale. The Port of Tacoma streamlined a tidal mudflat into a massive, global industrial Port, for better and worse.
EXTRACT pertains to the processes of lumber harvest, metal mining, oil extraction, and dredging of contaminated industrial sediments after toxic spills.
FABRICATE pertains to the skill and craft that have long shaped the port and driven Tacoma’s economy. Skilled workers have converted raw lumber, metal, and petroleum products into wooden boats, metal planes, energy, and myriad other products.
With those major forces summarizing our readings of the site, we move into the phase of our project where we take our readings and turn them into video narratives and spatial interventions.
As a framework for design, the spatial interventions will seek to:
AMPLIFY the visibility and legibility of the processes of STREAMLINING, EXTRACTING, and FABRICATING.
In addition to making those forces more visible, the spatial interventions will seek to layer in the following functions:
INTEGRATE
SUSTAIN
GENERATE
Each is loosely paired with an existing/historical site process and then seeks to enhance that process’s legibility while providing increased access, use, beauty, and health for human and non-human users.
STREAMLINE | INTEGRATE
FABRICATE | SUSTAIN
EXTRACT | GENERATE
Examples of INTEGRATE include bringing more access for people to enter and understand the larger processes at play in the port. Integrate may also include intentional acts against the STREAMLINING of rivers where it would not negatively impact Port function. SUSTAIN seeks to support the skills and knowledges that have been vital to the Port and allowed it to be a successful economic driver for Tacoma: maritime knowledge, railroad and transportation industry skills, international shipping and trade process understanding, fishing and habitat knowledge, etc. GENERATE seeks to boost existing processes and leverage the Port of Tacoma’s people’s skills and knowledges to diversify its economic opportunities, educate and invite others in to the vibrant space, and leverage the site’s immense natural resource and environmental potential to provide enriched habitat, ecotourism and local public health opportunities for people and animals.
