The Olney Pond, located in Lincoln Woods, Rhode Island, is currently dammed by a pile of riprap, where water level is maintained by a culvert. My objective was to expose the culvert, using my system of bricks as check dams and baffles, to collect the pond’s overflow water into a sequence of bathing pools. Alongside those pools is a path, and adjacent to the path is the bathhouse and visitor center, organized such that in the event of a flood, wet spaces get wet and dry spaces stay dry, via check walls extending from the building.
I began the project intending to create a very heavy surface, a sloping impenetrable blanket, that could hold back earth and water, held in place by its own weight. It became obvious due to issues of installation that that blanket would have to be broken into many precast pieces. In the end the piece was a few different modules that could be configured to allow for different conditions of water, light and space: parallel steps, zigzagging steps, floors, and vertical walls. When constructed tightly, the system can retain both earth and water, and space; when stacked or laid loosely, the system can allow for controlled seepage and filtering of water and light.
