Located in the Imperial Valley in Southern California, just South of the Salton Sea, the Imperial County is one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the country, receiving all of its water from the Colorado River. The area is facing a worsening ecological crisis as the Salton Sea, which subsists of the agricultural run-off that moves northward through the County, becomes increasingly saline and polluted as it continues to evaporate. Located between two rivers, the Alamo and New Rivers, the proposal for the Gridlines of Resilience, at the scale of the county, grapples with the challenges of the competing demands of agro-corporations, Southern California water politics, and the inequitable distribution and privatization of water throughout the Imperial Valley.
The project operates as a "kit-of-parts"—a program-specific catalog of elements that can be deployed within a rule-based gridded framework locked into the existing one mile by one mile Jeffersonian grid that blankets the site. The components of this catalog often operate as unfamiliar hybrids, for example water towers that have observation decks, or housing aggregations that are equipped with plug-in greenhouse modules.
This design carefully recognizes and maintains existing agricultural and hydrological infrastructural elements while carefully weaving in new typologies to be hybridized with the existing context, rethinking and transforming commonplace elements by mobilizing new programmatic attributes to reinvigorate them or compensate for what may be lacking in the area with the purpose of collecting, cleaning, and redistributing water, according to a more diversified and communal method of production. These new hybrid types are then organized into four distinct zones—areas of greater density in the territory—and plugged into a multi-level gridded system. The project exposes specific possibilities for how the catalog of elements might be deployed showing how they would function within the one mile square gridded land parcels that define the organizational structure of Imperial County.