thread’s Gowanus Field Station will come to life, in a partnership with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, thanks in part to a NYSCA Grant. GCC recently created an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) curriculum for middle school students. STEM Gowanus is centered on a series of field lessons in which students observe and document the canal’s ecology, and learn how green infrastructure is a critical strategy to clean the canal waters. But training and field work can be hard to manage, in part due to poor weather conditions, lack of access to sites, and the storage and moving of equipment. In response to these challenges, GCC and thread collective have designed a Gowanus Field Station at the Salt Lot to support GCC’s various education efforts including the STEM Curriculum and the Bioswale Stewardship Training Class. The Gowanus Field Station embodies hands-on learning: it is an outdoor classroom designed to also be a storm-water “eco-machine” that will host a green roof, sit next to a bioswale, capture rainwater for reuse, and use a vegetated rain garden to clean sink water before discharging to the canal. Water testing and maintenance training will be a key part of activities hosted here. The field station design is comprised of three interlocking rectangular forms, set at an open angle to create several gatherings spaces that vary in size. Additional programmatic elements include a latticed roof deck for observation, sheltered classroom space, solar system, specimen display, interactive map, a watershed laser cut deck, and a platform for water sampling cantilevered over the banks of the Gowanus. more details can be found at the Urban Design Forum Gowanus Field Station site.
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