The 2014 DredgeFest Symposium and Workshops gathered a range of professionals working on sediment transportation and dredging throughout Southern Louisiana and the world. The workshops hosted at the LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture (January 13-16) examined innovative methodologies of sediment manipulation at multiple scales. Three workshops were led by RRSLA faculty and visiting professionals who pushed the participants to explore new technologies and theories.

The “Adaptive Devices” workshop led by Bradley Cantrell (LSU), Justine Holzman (LSU), and David Merlin (Tulane) explored how sensing and real-time feedback can alter the flow of sediment at localized sites. The participants explored this concept using a small scale fluvial model and physical computing to prototype a range of devices and interactions.

The “Hybrid Landscapes” workshop led by Richard Hindle (LSU), and Alexander Robinson (USC) was a morphological investigation of the wetland- and marsh-building method of “bay bottom terracing.” Using both digital and physical modeling tools, the participants explored alternate morphologies for existing terracing operations in Louisiana’s Vermillion Bay, investigating the relationship between form, landscape performance, and aesthetics.

The “Regional Choreography” workshop led by Case Brown (PREX), Jeff Carney (LSU), and Matthew Seibert (LSU) tracked and located the sediment necessary to facilitate the locally driven, land-building projects within the Mississippi Delta. The team rigorously produced a series of diagrams and mappings that highlighted sediment sources and proposed tactics for bringing it to the Delta for land-building purposes.