4. Bridgeport Sealink
Advanced Studio IV, Spring 2018
Site: Bridgeport, Connecticut, USA
Critics: Adam Frampton
Collaborator: Alicia French
Bridgeport’s rich history of manufacturing is deeply intertwined with its maritime infrastructure, waterfront, and residential districts. Near the boundary of the South End and Downtown neighborhoods of the city, the diverse urban fabric reveals these histories: an operational coal and gas-powered power plant sits directly adjacent to nineteenth-century wooden-frame homes and a waterfront park; the University of Bridgeport’s stately mansions and mid-century administrative buildings are less than 1,000 feet away. A lighthouse sits on the eastern edge of this area, marking the mouth of Bridgeport Harbor at Tongue Point.
The majority of manufacturing operations (producing sewing machines, electrical motors, and household appliances, among other items) that constructed massive factory buildings in the city have left Bridgeport over the past fifty years. Like the United States at large, the city’s industries have shifted from producing goods to producing services.1 Although some argue that a service economy can allow for a better economic accounting of complex ecological and social components of human labor, it may simultaneously further alienate people from the physical products of their labor. Reintegrating selected forms of manufacturing into the economy may serve as an antidote to this alienation. Furthermore, as the citizens of the City of Bridgeport reconsider their relationship to the waterfront in the wake of flooding events such as Hurricane Sandy, and as they anticipate sea level rise and extreme storms, enhancing the maritime economies of the city may indeed prove prescient.
The Bridgeport Sealink maritime arts and sciences campus will simultaneously provide a pathway to jobs paying salaries above national averages in a host of related fields2 (lighthouse construction and maintenance, ferry operation and maintenance, boat building, dock design and construction, ecologically sound dredging, ocean navigation and mapping, etc.) and will create a link from the city fabric to the shoreline landscape with a matrix of open space. Pedestrian and vehicular pathways will connect the adjacent University of Bridgeport as well as the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Seaside Park to the new campus. The campus will incorporate classroom and workroom spaces for 1,000–2,000 post-secondary students of various levels working in small groups with faculty. Full- and part-time faculty will range from 150–200 positions depending on the season. The campus will additionally house an advanced study program for high-schoolers (about 100–150 students at a time), and will provide housing to a limited number of faculty.
Construction of the campus entails the dredging of a large portion of the Tongue Point area to create a new inlet for docking ships used for study on the campus. The site’s soil is primarily composed of fill contaminated by years of heavy industrial use, so soil remediation will be a major component of the early construction phases. The campus plan incorporates this cleaned fill into new topographies around the site that will mitigate flooding. Expertise gained during this phase of the project will be applied to the training of students who can eventually take part in regional dredging projects required to maintain Bridgeport’s status as a deep-sea port (it is currently in danger of losing its status).3 The main buildings of the campus study program will be shipbuilding sheds, three of which will specialize in different materials needed to construct boats (wood, steel, and fiberglass). A fourth, larger shed will house a dry dock and will be used primarily for the maintenance and repair of ferries and other civilian craft. A control tower on a jetty at the eastern edge of the site will also house classrooms and an auditorium for the campus in addition to a working control room serving the new inlet and ferry traffic to the north.
The campus additionally incorporates two public-facing elements into its design: a restored wetland that covers the southern part of the site, and a new ferry building on the northern end of the site. The wetland will connect to Seaside Park via a system of elevated pathways, providing a natural component to the public waterfront that will complement the stately nineteenth-century prominades of the current park. The wetland extension of the park will provide a softer water’s edge that will be able to better absorb the force of powerful storm surges than the hard edge of the current park extents. The ferry building on the north side of the campus will serve the proposed expanded ferry service to Bridgeport. This expanded regional service is proposed as an analogue to the success of expanded ferry service in New York City.4 In the same way that ferry service has spurred job creation in New York City,5 increased ferry service in Bridgeport will generate jobs and will work hand-in-hand with the Sealink campus to provide training partnerships and jobs for students and recent graduates of various campus programs.
1 Reid Wilson, “Watch the U.S. transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, in one gif,” Washington Post, September 3, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/09/03/watch-the-u-s-transition-from-a-manufacturing-economy-to-a-service-economy-in-one-gif/?utm_term=.51a73bfc39f2.
2 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Office for Coastal Management, “NOAA Report on the U.S. Ocean and Great Lakes Economy,” 2017.
3 John Burgeson, “As Silt Fills Bridgeport Harbor, Dredging Seems Years Away,” CT Post, April 29, 2010, https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/As-silt-fills-Bridgeport-Harbor-dredging-seems-468742.php.
4 Patrick McGeehan, “New York City’s Ferry Fleet Is Off to a Fast Start,” New York Times, November 29, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2Bxy7HL.
5 Mara Gay, “Expanded New York City Ferry Service to Create About 200 Jobs,” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/expanded-new-york-ferry-service-to-create-about-200-jobs-1489020528.