Utting, BrittanyFinley, Dawn2024-05-212024-05-212024-052024-04-18May 2024Brancaccio, Anna. After Beaches: Designs for Unstable Grounds. (2024). Masters thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/116026https://hdl.handle.net/1911/116026Beaches are highly dynamic, shifting hourly, and seasonally with changing tides and weather. This relative instability poses issues for coastal development which relies on fixed ideas of land ownership and construction. As a result, massive coastal defense infrastructures, such as sea walls, jetties, dikes, and bulkheads, have been deployed across these shorelines to fix the ground in place. Rather than preventing change, these fixed or fixing infrastructures accelerate certain kinds of movement, drawing distinct patterns of erosion, flow, and sedimentation into the grounds they occupy. Set in Galveston Bay, on the northeast Texas Gulf Coast, After Beaches: Designs for Unstable Grounds is a proposal for alternative methods for designing and constructing coastal ground based on movement rather than fortification, imagining how a dynamic understanding of ground could shift strategies of coastal development towards more seasonal and provisional approaches. Sediment is borrowed for the construction of temporary public beaches and recreational facilities.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.Beachesfishing piererosionarchitectureinfrastructureMarshesGalvestonTexas City DikeThesis2024-05-21