Jeffrey Sipprell

The underlying issue to all of these groups is the levees - a word that is in our contemporary vocabularly after the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. The truth is, the levees in this area are in worse shape than they were in New Orleans, prompting Conan the Barbarian (yes, our governor) to include levee reconstruction in his new billions of dollars infrastructure proposal - now he's Arnold the Empire Builder (and he's up for re-election in November).

Roger Sherman has constructed the studio to examine five core interest groups - developers (which are basically our fictional clients), recreationalists, conservationalists, farmers and water interests (this last one being the people who seek to make money off of selling the abundant water to Los Angeles, San Diego, etc. - in a nutshell many islands are individually owned and if that person is able to flood their island they would create their own reservoir and be able to use their water rights as they see fit (think of the way air rights are traded and sold in New York City)). The success of the project hinges on your ability to adapt to these interest groups as possible market forces will play out over time.

My own personal inclination was to engage the water - the feature within the delta that all of the interest groups have a strong vested interest in. Prelminary research indicated that the water could be broken up into 4 core categories that all had varying degrees of engagement by these parties:

Cleanliness
Flow Rate
Depth
Salinity (or the resistance to the infiltration of salt water from the Pacific which would ruin the natural ecology and farmlands - it has been steadily creeping in through the last 25-30 years).
This chart shows the relative engagement of each interest group with those 4 core properties as well as a grouping of the 3 most important (turned out Depth wasn't such a big deal) into top level generic solutions of flow control and remediation. Archetypes of those solutions are illustrated in the next procedure setting up a library whereby similar forms can be composited to form an adaptive widget - a piece that can either control flows or remediate the water.

The concept here is that a mobile flow control system - here realized in mobile floating housing - could be deployed in such a way that the water network can be dynamically implemented. That is if southern California suffers a drought, more water can be diverted there or if the salinity is creeping in, more water can be pushed towards San Francisco Bay. A myriad of combinations could exist that could allow Calfed to actively engage the water system without relying on new permanent infrastructure - gates, canals, bypasses, etc. Such a project would be subsidized by housing developers who could create the sprawl they so desperately seek is this area of prized real estate - but here it would not be on land, but on water. Homeowners could move around freely or chain themselves together to form streets, communities or other networks that would also server as areas of water treatment. The sprawl therefore is beneficial as the more units that exist, the cleaner the water will become - leading to increased recreational use and money for the area.

The design right now is focused on developing the cell in a much less directional gridded way and to further develop the architecture to allow for a system of difference and public space to emerge within these larger aggregations. This approach was a shift from an earlier design where the project was thought of as more of an object - the first deltacon which was a mobile dam/hovercraft hybrid that would be recreational housing or a construction operations center - depending on how it was deployed by Calfed (the governing body of the delta).
It is so called deltacon since it kind of reminded me of a transformer.

You can see both approaches here:

Deltacon Prototype 1 - Object

Deltacon Prototype 2 - Network