ELINA CHEN

Located along the edge of the Río de la Plata, the Buenos Aires Blue Carbon Banking Research Center serves as a scientific hub responding to the city’s growing vulnerability to climate change and sea level rise. At the core of the project is the ecology of a “thickened surface”—a vertical field extending twenty-five feet above and below grade—which becomes the project’s primary spatial and environmental strategy.

Set within an infrastructural landscape of train tracks and an underground highway, the research center occupies a strategic site linking Plaza de Canadá, the emerging urban district of Catalinas Norte, and the coastal edge. Conceived as both a private research facility and a public platform for exhibiting new discoveries in blue carbon banking, the building acts as an urban attractor that draws people toward the water.

From a distance, the center reads as an undulating mass suspended above its triangular site. Its roof surface wraps at the height of the tree canopy, hovering twenty-five feet above the ground before folding downward to form a cave-like volume that houses the public program. Along the research wing, the building opens to reveal layered strata, with curtain wall systems recessed behind each exposed band.

At ground level, a raised promenade threads through blocks of constructed wetlands, creating a sequence of entrances while extending across the site toward Catalinas Norte. This elevated ground plane not only addresses flooding and tidal fluctuation, but also establishes a porous public landscape that mediates between laboratory, city, and coastline.