Brooklyn Iceberg

Biology-inspired Urbanism

Publication: InProcess 24, Pratt Institute, 2019 | Adaptive Urbanism, Pratt Institute, 2018

Location: Brooklyn, New York

Status: Proposal

Year: 2018

Architect: Yongmin Lee

Brooklyn Iceberg project is a fictional and imaginable urban design proposal. Through scrutinized research for biological Scanned Electronic Microscope (SEM) images such as flower, snow, ice, seed, plant and human bone, architect Yongmin Lee speculated on generating an architectural and urban form on Downtown Brooklyn area. After he created some of the form, Yongmin tried to apply it to the city scale design on the site, focusing more on the SEM images of snow, with his fictional imaginations in which New York City might be inundated by huge scale tsunami and flooding by 2050 of climate change and sea level rise. Therefore, the urban form would not only represent the future climate crisis but also show a possible biology-based architecture, urban design and landform design in the city scale. With this fictional urban proposal, Yongmin expanded the meaning of ‘Nature’ to the architecture, urbanism and landscape fields, combined with biology-inspired design methods.