Blue Junction: Improving Spatial Experience Through Ecological Water Management at Carleton University

Although the earth's water supply is finite and is indispensable to the survival of all living things, it is routinely understood to be a single-use, disposable element framing a relationship which causes increasing environmental degradation. As with all things in our culture that intersect with the waste we generate, our relationship to water has resulted in strategies that largely conceal water from our daily experience. At Carleton University this camouflaging is in full effect: extensive impermeable surfaces and buried stormwater drains allow unimpeded surface runoff into the Rideau River while sewers send untreated sewage directly into Ottawa's strained sewage network. In response, this thesis explores how implementing ecological water management systems for both stormwater and wastewater at Carleton University, seen as the responsible path forward, can be entwined with architectural experience to reverse what is the secret life of wastewater and improve human relationships and attitudes towards water management.