The underwater ‘gardens’ helping rehabilitate marine environments

As far as Alex Goad is concerned, his marine structures are a type of garden. They grow wilder and denser with every year – and the more encrusted these structures become the more colour, texture and dynamism they have.

“We describe it as underwater gardening. That is what our studio does,” Goad says.

Reef Design Lab’s MARS II is designed to be underwater, but aesthetics are still important. This render shows how it will look at the MPavilion.Credit: Reef Design Lab

This is gardening without soil, terrestrial plants or really any of the classic cultivation techniques you might incorporate in your backyard. In fact, these are gardens that you might need a mask and snorkel to see.

In the same way people are creating naturalistic landscapes to encourage more biodiversity in our cities, these submersible structures are helping to foster more liveliness in our seas.

At Reef Design Lab, the Melbourne-based studio Goad founded in 2016, these structures are described as substrates upon which a whole host of organisms can thrive. First they are colonised by microalgae and then – depending on the climate – sponges, coral, oysters, mussels, seaweeds and other types of marine life follow.

Anyone who has swum around the timber posts supporting a coastal pier will know the look.

Goad says it’s the same with the underwater parts of offshore oil platforms. These rigs have become ecologically diverse oases. Such habitats might be accidental, but they are habitats all the same.

There is nothing accidental, however, about how the Reef Design Lab structures work. Designed and fabricated at the studio’s Mentone warehouse, they are expressly created for sea life to attach itself to and hide behind.

“We want as many different species to colonise these substrates as possible,” Goad says. “We want to encourage so much complexity and texture that eventually these substrates just disappear.”

Artificial seawalls in Sydney, an eroded coast off Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula and a damaged coral reef in the Maldives are some of the marine environments currently being rehabilitated with the help of Reef Design Lab structures.

They have also been installed in Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, a marina in Singapore, the Port of Gibraltar and Sweden, among other places. And many of these projects are collaborations between Reef Design Lab, ecologists and marine researchers.

Reef Design Lab’s Living Seawalls at Fairy Bower beach in Sydney.Credit: Chris Chen

But aesthetics also play a role. While only some of these structures are made for intertidal zones and seawalls and are thereby sometimes in public view, all of them are designed with beauty in mind. Even those systems that will live out their entire life underwater are sculptural and playful, with lattice forms and organic shapes.

They are as enchanting as coral even before anything starts growing on them. The National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have both acquired – and exhibited – entirely bare Reef Design Lab structures.

In little more than a week another will go on show at Melbourne’s MPavilion in the Queen Victoria Gardens.

The lab’s modular MARS II system, made of cast concrete units put together like pieces of Lego, will sit in the pavilion’s reflecting pool as part of the Every Living Thing program of events looking at the relationships between humans, other animals, plants, fungi and microbes.

Its complexity will only be highlighted by the spare design of Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s pavilion. Indeed, some of us might start hankering for one to put in our own garden pond.

But Goad says the aim is not to encourage domestic use but to highlight the ecological benefits of these structures in degraded marine environments.

Every detail of these systems has a utilitarian side. The overhanging parts provide spaces for small fish to hide behind, the ledges platforms to which coral can attach, and the ridge-like texture ensures grooves that small species can nestle into and find protection from predators.

Alex Goad with one of the Reef Design Lab structures, at the studio’s Mentone base.Credit: Penny Stephens

“Some people have said that it’s going underwater, so who cares what it looks like? But we don’t believe that,” Goad says. “Aesthetics are one of the driving forces of what we do. We also want them to look like manufactured forms, so that even in the future people can see that these were restoration efforts.”

But fruitful as these restoration efforts are proving, Goad is at pains to emphasise that they are not a solution to the climate crisis. “We can’t change what’s happening with global warming or with coral bleaching. We can’t replace the Great Barrier Reef with a human-made structure. This is for targeted environments where scientists have deemed restoration is necessary.”

Underwater gardening, as Goad shows, can be as life-enhancing as ground-based growing.

The Every Living Thing program of free events, workshops and installations is at MPavilion (mpavilion.org) from February 15 to March 6.

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