This is a picture of one of the year’s five most impressive civil engineering projects, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. It’s a completely reengineered part of the Lake Michigan shore, preventing erosion and creating eco-friendly recreational areas.
For 10 million dollars, the coastal area belonging to Wisconsin’s Concordia University went from eroding wasteland to a beautiful park. According to landscape architecture firm JJR:
Concordia University came to JJR with a clear problem: It was literally losing acres of its waterfront campus to Lake Michigan due to a continually eroding, 130-foot high bluff that steeply dropped down to the Lake Michigan shoreline. JJR’s master plan and final design focused on stabilizing the bluff and providing armored shoreline revetments and beaches to halt the continued erosion caused by the severe Lake Michigan wave environment. This project also included recreational and environmental enhancements down the face of the bluff itself.
Read about more runners-up for 2009’s best engineering projects via the American Society of Civil Engineers and Popular Mechanics.
Images of the Concordia University project via JJR.
