"Living Breakwaters" wins the 2023 Obel Award

The 2023 Obel Award, themed “Adaptation,” was won by Living Breakwaters, a project by New York studio SCAPE Landscape Architecture. The awards ceremony will take place at the Sydney Opera House on October 21, 2023.

This year’s competition challenged designers with creating urban spaces able to adapt to a changing world, mainly caused by climate change. Awarded annually by the Henrik Obel Foundation in Copenhagen and now up to its fifth edition, the Obel Award aims to promote sustainable projects focused on improving the environment in which we live, and making a significant contribution to the planet and humanity.

 

Living Breakwaters: an island of biodiversity

The winning project is green infrastructure designed for the coast of Staten Island, New York. Its name reflects the simple but ingenious idea behind the project, it consisting of a 750 m breakwater to protect the beach along Conference House Park. It will reduce erosion by attenuating stronger waves while also providing a range of habitat spaces for marine species, such as fish, mollusks, and aquatic vegetation. The breakwaters are composed of a mix of natural stone and ecologically enhanced concrete units positioned off the coast. As marine life is attracted here, it will begin to alter the design of the breakwaters, improving both their appearance and the ecological quality of the infrastructure by providing a natural habitat that will blend harmoniously into the landscape.

“Breakwaters are an ancient idea for protecting shorelines – and the people who live close to them – by building underwater seawalls to defend a harbor or a beach from the force of waves. Kate has designed an extraordinary, modern-day interpretation, Living Breakwaters, which will not only protect humans and revitalize the coastline of New York City, but also restore lost marine biodiversity. This is a visionary project that tackles the full task of adaptation, and which has the capacity to inspire and positively impact vulnerable shorelines worldwide”.
Chair of the Obel Award jury, Martha Schwartz

 

>>> Discover more about Adaptation, the theme of the 2023 edition of Obel Award

 

Obel Award 2023: the award and the ceremony

Living Breakwaters was selected by the jury because of its ability to respond to numerous needs: reduce coastal erosion through the attenuation of wave energy; protect marine ecosystems and restore biodiversity; and increase social resilience through the involvement of the local community over a ten-year period – i.e. the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC) – along with the development of educational programs for local schools.

“Winning an architecture prize is really important for a project like this that involved so many different people working together with a shared purpose. It is a true encouragement for community members, elected officials, landscape architects, ecologists, and engineers to come together and develop coastal adaptation projects wherever they are. It’s also an acknowledgment of the importance of thinking about design at a holistic, planetary scale. Our protective natural systems are in various stages of decline globally, and in order to repair them, we have to think and design systematically to tie the pieces back together. And that is an incredibly bold, creative act. Hopefully, this award can emphasize this point: that nature is a matter of design now, and that we have to work fast and work together”.
Kate Orff, founder of SCAPE

At the awards ceremony, scheduled for October 21 at the Sydney Opera House, the winners will be presented with a prize of 100,000 euros and an artwork by Tomás Saraceno.