Land-Water Interfaces in the Pier A Inlet of the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project
2024 – 2025
Waterfront Design: pier piles, horizontal tiles, tide pools, planters, and wall cladding
Project Team: AECOM, Siteworks, Posillico
The Goal
We are focusing on the pier inlet, conceived as a new waterfront and a space for marine ecology education. The goal is the integration of ecological concrete elements into the transformed pier and bulkhead, and to replace the rock rip rap with concrete terraces that create a seamless transition between terrestrial and marine vegetation. The surface design is unique and site-specific.
The Challenge
The South Battery Park City Resiliency Project focuses on mitigating future flood risk in Lower Manhattan in light of significant damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. As part of this initiative, the Pier A inlet needed to be redesigned to ensure flooding is a reduced threat under severe environmental challenges and conditions. This compact site features diverse elements such as pier piles, horizontal tiles, tide pools, planters, and wall cladding. However, the project’s complexity posed a challenge, requiring us to develop a modular system to streamline execution within budget and timeline, which involved extensive calculations.
How We Will Build It
ECOncrete collaborated with the project team—Siteworks, AECOM, and Posilico—to design and coordinate all ecological elements for the project. Our work included creating nature-inclusive cladding for the Pier A Inlet bulkhead, enhancing pier piles above and below the relieving platform, and integrating horizontal pier tiles, tide pools, planters, and veneer cladding across various walls. By embedding our sustainable concrete technology into the existing pier and bulkhead structures, we aim to replace the rock riprap with concrete terraces that support the growth of intertidal marine life and their ecosystems, while protecting both the waterfront and local biodiversity.
Thanks in part to ECOncrete’s nature-positive features, this project achieved WEDG verification with a remarkable 125 out of 215 possible points (surpassing the 115 points required).
Learn more about the project on the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project website and the Waterfront Alliance website.
