Watershed architecture focuses on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation

Derek Hoeferlin, chair of Landscape Architecture & Urban Design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Derek Hoeferlin, chair of Landscape Architecture & Urban Design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, leads students on a canoe trip along the Mississippi River, near the Chain of Rocks Bridge north of downtown St. Louis. The outing was part of Hoeferlin’s fall 2020 studio “Field Work 2.0,” which combined virtual and on-the-ground methods of documenting how various communities intersect with surrounding territories, watersheds and infrastructure. (Photo: Danny Reise)

For more than a decade, Derek Hoeferlin has studied the Mekong, ­Mississippi and Rhine (above) river basins, with a particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The three basins — detailed in Hoeferlin’s upcoming book Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for Watershed Architecture — reflect three different hydrological scales in three different states of management and development.

“It’s not about just letting everything go back to nature; it’s about finding ways to lace these different contexts, interest groups and ecologies together.”

Derek Hoeferlin

Back on the Meramec, new levees and big-box construction are further constraining the river of Hoeferlin’s youth. Storms the Meramec could once have absorbed now push it to flood stage and beyond. Nevertheless, Hoeferlin finds a hopeful counter-trend in the adjacent growth of nearby conservation areas such as Castlewood Park, Lone Elk Park and Washington University’s Tyson Research Center — which, though not located in the Meramec floodplain, are part of its larger watershed.

Read the entire article in Washington Magazine