HYDRANTIS

The San Gabriel River has been managed, channelized, and redirected for 250 years — yet its flood infrastructure remains entirely invisible to the settlements built around it. Hydrantis proposes to reverse this: a proto-city whose street grid, housing typology, and public space are derived entirely from the flood management system. Through GIS-based hydrological mapping, archival research, and computational modeling in Grasshopper, the project reconstructs Irwindale's relationship to water as a generative urban logic rather than an engineered constraint. Street networks follow the geometry of natural drainage paths, public spaces double as retention and detention landscapes, and riparian corridors are restored as ecological spines that structure neighborhood identity. The result is an urban framework in which infrastructure is no longer buried beneath the city but becomes the very armature from which civic life emerges.