Garett Lee | Ryan Tyler Martinez
This thesis reimagines architecture’s role in a post-flood world where the city becomes both a cultural memory and ecological frontier. Moving beyond infrastructural strategies of resistance, it adopts speculative design as a method to envision how life, settlement, and ritual might evolve within an amphibious terrain. The project constructs a series of architectural components: buoyant structures, adaptable infrastructures, and collective habitats that explore how water, rather than serving as a boundary or threat, might become a connective medium through which new forms of living and belonging are articulated.
By integrating ecological, social, and speculative narratives, the research seeks to define resilience as an imaginative and collective practice, rooted in coexistence rather than control. Ultimately, the thesis positions architecture as a speculative tool, proposing that the act of designing for a submerged future is also an act of reimagining what it means to inhabit a shared, shifting planet.
