Case Brown

is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Restoration Institute at Clemson University. He is Senior Research Associate at MIT’s Project for Reclamation Excellence (P-REX) .

 

 

This design was conducted during Berger’s 2007-08, Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture Fellowship. Special thanks to The American Academy in Rome.

 

 

Client:

Provincia di Latina Planning Agency, Latina, Italy

Consorzio dell’ Agro Pontino, Latina, Italy

The site strategy is to artificially re-introduce a gigantic new “wetland machine” for filtering, habitat, and biological exchange. Choosing a gigantic, consolidated wetland site will likely be more viable in the complex patchwork of land ownership. Given Latina’s situation, distributed treatment areas would be both enormously complex to purchase and ineffective to manage. The Wetland Machine’s  dimensions are directly related to the amount of wetland area needed to treat the amount of water in the Canale Aque Alte—the major collector for this highly polluted zone. At 220 l/s, with a load around 50+ mg/l of N, at least 2 square kilometers of treatment wetland will be required. The design retro-fits and widens existing canals to serve as flow distributors. Furthermore, soil cut/fill operations are used for terraforming shallow ridges and valleys to hold/treat water and make raised areas for new public space and program. At 2.3 sq. km., the new wetland machine will  drastically improve the regional water supply and provide needed open space for recreation. At only 6 km from Latina, the site could house programs and environments almost completely lacking in the region—large open landscapes with diverse vegetation. Extensive edge habitat diversity or programs—shallow shoals for juvenile fish and swimming, starker edges for fishing and water storage.