City Parks Association

Charles Loomis Chariss McAfee Architects

Chariss McAfee, Charles Loomis, Juliet Geldi, Gavin Riggall (KieranTimberlake Associates)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Waterwork, the winning project, was designed by a Philadelphia team of four: Juliet Geldi, Gavin Riggall, and Charles Loomis Chariss McAfee Architects. The team proposes a strategy to Van Alen Institute www.vanalen.org/urbanvoids City Parks Association reclaim vacant sites throughout Philadelphia by recreating them as public green filters by capturing and redirecting water flow.

This design strategy offers ecologically sound recreational and infiltration solutions for the use of naturally cleaned storm-water run-off. Waterwork proposes physical solutions at both a microscale and a macro scale. Waterwork incorporates a system to capture water on all the houses in a neighborhood and also proposes using existing city transit systems; railways and roadbeds, as sites for new underground gravel cisterns and byways. This would create and activate new urban streams, community spray parks and new biking and pedestrian trails. Radical in the simplicity of its premise, Waterwork illustrates groundbreaking and poetic ideas that add social and economic value to urban watershed. Resonant of Philadelphia’s industrial water-based past, Waterwork reinvents the precious symbiotic relationship water and cities once had.

“The Urban Voids competition has asked an ecological question, a sociological question, an economic question and a built-environment and governance question,” said Carl Anthony, Program Director, Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation and a judge. “The winning project, Waterwork deals with all these issues; with social reality, a sense of the ecological story of water, a sense of the built environment, infrastructure and so forth. The beauty of Waterwork is that it beautifully recaptures the value of the hydrological cycle that in the 19th century drove the industrialization of our cities, including Philadelphia. This project has potential application in a lot of places that would actually move an agenda.”

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First Round
Board A
Board B

Second Round