Living Breakwaters

Superstorm Sandy was a major wake-up call for New Yorkers. The storm hit the region hard in 2012, causing untold loss and putting climate change front and center. Staten Island was especially affected due to erosion of the beaches and reefs that once protected its shores. When the U.S. government launched a design competition to rebuild, SCAPE led a large, multi-disciplinary team to develop the winning proposal.

Living Breakwaters asks, how can we not just build back the way we were, but look to the future and thrive amidst the complex risks we will face? Situated in Raritan Bay off Staten Island, the project consists of 2,400 linear feet of near-shore breakwaters. These partially submerged structures are built of armor stone and ecologically enhanced concrete units that break waves, reduce storm surges, restore eroded beaches, and support habitats for myriad marine species.

Informed by extensive hydrodynamic modeling, the breakwaters are designed to slow and, eventually, reverse decades of beach erosion along the Tottenville shoreline.

The breakwaters also provide aquatic habitat for oysters, fin fish, and other marine species, reviving ecosystem services once provided by oyster reefs. For centuries, oyster beds were abundant in Raritan Bay, critical to the food source and economy of the native Lenape people and colonial settlers alike and proven by research to attenuate waves and protect the shore. By the 1900s, overharvesting, dredging, and declining water quality had decimated the oyster population and stripped the bay of their beneficial ecological functions.

Living Breakwaters restores many of these functions, drawing inspiration from the bay's historic landscape. "Reef ridges"—rocky protrusions on the breakwaters—and "reef streets"—the narrow spaces between the reef ridges—provide habitat complexity and support biodiversity. Oysters are a key engineering partner; they grow around this scaffolding to calm and clean the water, reducing impacts of climate-intensified weather and re-setting a regenerative cycle.

As a continuing effort to restore oyster population at the breakwaters, Billion Oyster Project has seeded the structures with over 70 million oyster larvae. Moreover, the SCAPE and BOP teams periodically return to the site to count and monitor naturally occurring oysters, of which there are hundreds.

Living Breakwaters has sparked interest nationally and beyond, elevating the discipline of landscape architecture within the field of coastal adaptation and nature-based infrastructure. The project has been featured in museum exhibitions and press worldwide as an exemplary case of how engineered solutions, ecological design, and social resilience can not only coexist, but come to fruition.

Living Breakwaters represents a paradigm shift, a broad investment in human-made nature that can help us adapt to an unpredictable future. More than a physical barrier, Living Breakwaters is a pilot for restoring our ecological systems and a replicable model for climate-adaptive, nature-based infrastructure.