Engaging Ecology Through Architecture: Reconnecting Bedford to its Bay

Abstract

This thesis studies the relationship between the urban environment and ecosystem and the intersection between ecosystem and architectural project. While urban sites are commonly understood as separate and unique from their natural settings, this proposal for a hybrid urban ecology defines them as one and the same. The architecture in this proposal acknowledges the natural systems of Bedford Bay, Nova Scotia and facilitates a public interface with this provisional landscape. Local coastal building strategies are reimagined in this three-phased proposal and represented schematically at the regional scale of the bay and in detail at the Mill River estuary and DeWolf Park. The architecture is reconceived as landscape, infrastructure, and built-form and serves as a scaffold for the succession of an interdependent urban ecology that supports a public program centered around outdoor recreation.