The Gowanus Canal is a sewer. It has always been and will always be a sewer, by the simple fact of its geography. The  Gowanus lies at the bottom of a bowl. The sides of this bowl are referred to by the New York City Department of 
The sewer system as it was laid out over the years uses the Gowanus Canal as a receiver of last resort. When  surrounding sewers are overloaded they flow into the Gowanus. This happens on average 30-50 times a year. No  amount of S
Variations on a “soft” remediation strategy have been proposed, whereby the Gowanus is returned to some degree  of its pre-industrial state as a swamp. I would argue that, in fact, the Gowanus Canal is a case for a “hard” strategy  of t
This hard strategy takes advantage of the immanent post-Superfund moment -when the canal is drained and dredged to  place a canal beneath the canal, a sub-infrastructure. The surface level canal would, in essence, be “double  –bagged”
I n the infrastructure I propose there are opportunities for architectural insertions that can serve as higher intensity,  experiential, and incidentally pedagogic moments. By creating pathways and occupiable spaces that dramatically 
Occupying these spaces is subject to the natural ebb and flow of the canal, which overflows into the subcanal at high  tide. On the surface the project is revealed in voids; underground by a designed spelunking. The Gowanus Canal  bec
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