Aquaculture
Kris Lucius
Prototypes with Aggregate Industries, Chelmsford, Massachusetts
2008
Asphalt Option Studio | Paula Meijerink | Harvard Graduate School of Design
Photos by Kris Lucius

American football stadiums host expansive parking lots, often exceeding 20,000 spaces, but paradoxically accommodating only a few games per year. This wasteful use of space is blatantly expressed at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, MA, where the asphalt surface has supplanted approximately 330 acres of woodland in a crucial hydrologic zone overlapping three separate watersheds and over a major regional aquifer.

Aquaculture explores maximizing the use of this asphalt surface to create a performative landscape through an accumulation of programs such as games, concerts, and retail while operating as an alternative energy production center. To achieve this, the asphalt surface is subtly regraded to create a series of cells that can act as both parking ‘islands’ and storm water runoff collection basins. At continuous (non parking) time periods, the basins are filled with water hyacinths, which can be used to produce alternative fuels, feed, and organic fertilizers.