The Holding Edge — Ziyu Rowan Liu

Ziyu Rowan Liu

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Exhibition

Montage Generator II

2025

The Holding Edge

Site: Round Lake, Syracuse, NY
Award: 1st Place, Technological and Ecological Integration Award
Instructor: Dennis Sola
Team: Tianchi Joe Zhao

Drone View From South

This project intervenes at the edge of a fragile lake, transforming stormwater runoff from a source of contamination into a visible, working part of the landscape. It begins from the premise that infrastructure does not have to disappear to do its work — that the systems protecting an ecosystem can be inhabited, witnessed, and eventually undone.

Round Lake is meromictic — permanently stratified, its deep water sealed from the surface, unable to recover from what reaches it. It sits at the lowest point of its watershed and receives every storm. Above it, an RV parking area has compacted the ground into stone; rain crosses that surface quickly, gathering sediment and pollutants, and falls toward the lake along a thirty percent slope.

The Holding Edge meets that descent. Part dam, part architecture, it gathers roughly 60,000 gallons of runoff and lets gravity carry the water through a terraced sequence of filtration system shaped by the grade itself.

The building is built to be unbuilt — holding the lake’s edge for as long as the lake requires it, and no longer.

Filtration Sequence Diagram

Worm-Eye View Water Filtration Diagram

Axon Cut

A thirty percent slope concentrates the flow. The building meets the water at this convergence — the precise point where speed, volume, and contamination meet the shoreline. The structure spans the slope and collects roughly 60,000 gallons of runoff. That volume set the spatial requirements of the filtration system, and the architecture grew outward from it.

Perspective Section

3F Zoomed-In Floor Plan

1F Zoomed-In Floor Plan

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Exhibition