Urban Acupuncture

Instructor: Christopher Hight

Team Member: Chentian Liu, Ashley Jin, Metinee Ding

Role: 2D drawings, 3D modeling, lead in visualization

The project deals with areas along Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou after the construction of the new

highway. The design aims at mitigating the program, traffic and flood on site.

The site is understood as a series of nodes that may form points of interests for both locals and tourists.

Then, a greater degree of connectivity, both pedestrian and vehicular, is created between the nodes, stitching together the city fabric. This approach is like a microcosm of the city of Houston itself, made up of a series of nodes of program, but instead on a much smaller scale. The proposal aims to utilize the increased density due to the smaller area in which multiple nodes exist, to design a greater degree of interconnectivity between these areas, and in many cases allow them to bleed into one another.

By introducing bypass channels and multiple detention ponds, as well as regrading the edges of the bayous,

flood events on site is better mitigated.