The river is mostly scenery

Some news: a project of mine was recognized by the National High School Design Competition, hosted by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and it's now featured on the national interactive map as part of Bexar County. Something I sketched in San Antonio is on a Smithsonian map. That's a strange sentence to type, so I'll type it once and move on.

The project started with an observation that felt too obvious to be useful. I live in San Antonio. The River Walk is the first place we take anyone who visits. And the river itself is mostly scenery. People walk beside the water and take pictures of the water, and the water just sits there. It's the one part of the River Walk nobody actually gets to use.

So the design puts a modular floating pod system on it. Each pod is solar powered, with seating, Wi-Fi, and charging built in. Docking stations make entry easy and inclusive. Because the pods are modular, the amount of accessible public space can expand over time instead of being fixed the day it opens.

The point is to turn underused water space into functional space. Students and remote workers get somewhere to sit with Wi-Fi and an outlet. Tourists and locals get a reason to be on the river instead of shuffling past it. And every person on a pod is one less person on a crowded walkway, so congestion drops without anything touching the character of the place. The postcard view stays the postcard view.

The goal from the start was to take an iconic part of San Antonio and rethink what it does for the city as the city grows. The hard constraint was leaving the character alone.

The map is public and covers student work from across the country. Bexar County is on it now, and if you go looking, mine is the project with pods floating on a river. I'd like San Antonio to be a city where the ideas on that map occasionally get built. This one comes with its own power supply.