a speculative territorial model Just east of Haida Gwaii, Port Hardy is a small fishing town on the north end of Vancouver Island whose economy and identity have long depended on the fishing industry. The livelihoods of its residents remain linked to the health of marine ecosystems, yet these ecosystems are under increasing pressures from industrial activity, warming waters, ocean acidification and climate change. With two-thirds of regional salmon populations remaining below their long-term average, the alarming decline of wild salmon reflects a broader condition of ecological instability and economic precarity facing coastal communities across British Columbia. As resource-based industries become more vulnerable, communities are confronted with the need to imagine new forms of environmental intervention, ranging from ecological restoration to emerging geoengineering strategies. This proposition imagines a marine research centre off the coast of Port Hardy organised around a territorial basin model: a large-scale physical simulation of coastal ocean processes that integrates live environmental data with scientific experimentation. Zooming out beyond the local site to the territorial scale of north Vancouver Island, the model replicates the surrounding ocean floor, simulating existing conditions of water levels, temperature and acidity. The proposed north Vancouver Island model simulates salmon migration, carbon flows and phytoplankton dynamics to allow complex and slow ecological processes to be perceptible. It allows researchers to rehearse proposed interventions, such as iron nutrient release, in a controlled environment, testing nutrient dispersal, particulate movement and changes in water composition before any real-world application. The model can thus act as an ecosystemic and economic planning tool for envisioning the region’s future.
Unlike existing digital simulations confined to the screen, the physical model occupies architectural space. It can be walked through, debated and collectively interpreted. Drawing on Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt , the territorial basin model is understood as relational. Umwelt describes each organism inhabiting its own subjective world according to its own perception. Similarly, scientists, fishers, policymakers, Indigenous communities and local residents each encounter the same coastline through distinct forms of knowledge and experience. The model therefore does not privilege a single authoritative representation of the ocean; it allows multiple perspectives to coexist in dialogue. Just as climate models generate different futures by adjusting variables, the basin model constructs the conditions for experimentation, allowing multiple scenarios to be negotiated and co-produced. This proposition is necessarily speculative and didactic. It asks whether architecture can shift infrastructure away from extractive production and declining resource economies toward regenerative ecological systems. The proposed oceanic model operates as a platform for experimentation, continuous sensing and collective engagement, while making visible the intangible, often remote, processes of geo-engineering. However, instead of accepting geoengineering as an inevitable technological trajectory, the project proposes an institutional framework through which interventions can be tested and questioned before implementation in the real world. As shorelines increasingly become testing grounds for planet futures, architecture must provide these civic spaces that scrutinise the governance of environmental intervention. If the twentieth century built dams, canals and laboratories to engineer nature, perhaps architecture of the Anthropocene is to build the spaces where those ambitions are made accountable. *
1:100 Model of the Marine Research Centre, Port Hardy Extending over the water, the research centre is organised around a territorial basin model that functions as both a scientific instrument and an architectural space, making oceanic processes visible for research and public engagement.
Marly Ibrahim
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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