2023 Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize: Kevin Robishaw’s Manatees and Margaritas: Toward a Strange New Paradise
by Kevin Robishaw (MLA I ’23) — Recipient of the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize.
Florida manatees gather in the warm water discharged from power plants, which they rely on during cold winters. The “55 and better” also seek warmth – and a life of leisure – at the state’s booming “active adult” communities. As human populations increase, human waste leaches into the lagoon and seagrass dies. Manatees starve in record numbers and are fed romaine lettuce in a last-ditch effort to keep them alive.
This project probes the strange ecologies of Eden in the Anthropocene – of romaine lettuce and power plants, manatees and margaritas. It finds, in landscapes of paradise, spaces where one can love nature, while killing it at the same time, where the “obscene” realities of the body – waste, aging, death – are concealed outside the figurative garden walls – to deleterious effects. This thesis proposes new visions of paradise for a world where this separation can no longer stand, where no ‘elsewhere’ remains and entanglement is unavoidable. A series of gardens, sited at Latitude Margaritaville 55+ Community, the wastewater treatment plant which receives its sewage, and the community’s beach club and along the shuttle route and waterways that connect them, serve as prototypes for a strange new Florida paradise. Between human composting, the conversion of human waste to heated water, and the replenishment of beach sand using crushed and smoothed glass from beer bottles, the obscene enters – and eventually becomes – the garden. New forms of coexistence – between the retiree and manatee, the human and the nonhuman – emerge.
A strange new paradise comes to life in Daytona Beach, Florida, amidst rapidly growing communities for the 55 and older, wastewater treatment plants stretched to capacity, hundreds of parcels on their own leaching septic systems, a local airport (the shipment of retirees’ bodies “back home” to the north for burial has been called the “coffin run”), and a recent die-off in Florida manatees following algal blooms.
Florida manatees have come to rely on power plant discharge for winter warmth, while excess nutrients in waterways, largely from the leaching of human waste, have decimated their food sources. Here, an obscene new machine enters the garden: an anaerobic digester (seen in the background) converts human waste to heat, using a current source of the manatee’s plight – human waste – to generate new warm water refuges for the sea mammal.
The floating drum anaerobic digesters rise and fall with the amount of biogas within them. Here we see one digester at three different points in time. A ramp allows retirees to occupy the digesters at different heights.
Handrails double as pipes carrying warm water into coves where retirees can swim at night, mist rising from dark water warmed by their own excrement.
New coves are created adjacent to the Margaritaville Manatee Club. Calving coves – visible only from afar, marked by a folly emerging from the water – provide the solitude female manatees seek while giving birth, as columns descend into artificial reefs below the water.
Tape grass seeds, harvested from the aquatic nurseries in the 55+ community’s water retention ponds, are distributed from floating buoys. The buoys also serve as a warning to boaters – whose propellers frequently scar manatees – that the sea mammal gathers in the location.
Latitude Margaritaville 55+ Community establishes the “Margaritaville Manatee Club” adjacent to the wastewater treatment plant which receives its sewage. A series of anaerobic digesters, which produce biogas from sludge, are used to heat water coves for manatees, while aquatic vegetation, incubated at the 55+ community and transplanted by retirees, provides food.
In the town center of Latitude Margaritaville 55+ Community, the thing that paradise seeks most to avoid – the “obscene” reality of death – enters the garden. Instead of having their bodies shipped “back home” to the north for burial, retirees can have their bodies converted to soil when they die, with the soil used to grow aquatic vegetation for manatees in Margaritaville’s water retention ponds.
The water retention ponds at Latitude Margaritaville 55+ Community are transformed into terraced underwater nurseries for growing aquatic vegetation: manatee food. A metal mesh walkway provides access for transplanting. From above water, however, the walkway can give the impression of walking on water.
In front of Margaritaville’s Beach Club, sand is replenished using crushed and smoothed glass from beer bottles. With the beach – like the majority of Florida’s beaches – losing sand faster than it can be replenished, the detritus of the “good life” is used for beach nourishment, as the obscene – i.e. waste – becomes the garden itself.