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Landscape architect Kate Orff is unapologetic about her obsession with oysters. She envisions the bivalve delicacies as busy builders, ready to erect New York’s defense against flooding induced by global warming.

Orff led one of five teams of architects that reconceived sites around New York harbor to adapt to climate change. Their brainstorms are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” which runs until Oct. 11.

In a museum currently devoted to Marina Abramovic’s naked doorkeepers and Tim Burton’s cartoon figures, Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief architecture and design curator, is unleashing architectural talent in the service of issues, not just entertainment.

Working from a two-year study of threats to New York’s harbor and coastline, the teams grappled for eight weeks in an architect-in-residence workshop at PS 1, the contemporary-art outpost in Queens.

If, over decades of global warming, sea levels rise two feet or more, New York could protect its harbor with an incalculably expensive storm-surge barrier. Or it can help oysters (whose labor is free) build a protective “oysterpalego.” So contends Orff, a principal of the Manhattan landscape architecture firm Scape.

Free-swimming juvenile oysters would happily attach themselves to a framework of nubby ropes. Growing and spreading, they would eventually create a reef to dissipate the energy of storm-driven floods.

In the process the oysters would filter the water of pollutants and the reef would capture drifting sediments to form islands, marshes and shallow bays — all of which can slow flooding, add recreational appeal and support diverse wildlife.

A project by the Architecture Research Office suggests striping some Lower Manhattan streets with lush greenery as a way to absorb storm-water runoff, a major source of sewage overflows.

The team also suggests carving three shallow bays that would cleanse water with a sunken marine forest and wildlife-rich marshes. This would inconvenience occupants of much of the World Financial Center, which would need to be bulldozed.

In exercises like these, architects never hesitate to think big.

The Manhattan firm Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis proposes to fissure the low-lying, hard-edged topography of New Jersey’s Liberty State Park into a network of inlets that make room for floodwaters while hosting landscapes that evolve from upland hillocks — desirable for development — to shellfish-friendly shallows.

A team led by architect Matthew Baird evokes a tragic majesty in the repurposing of rotting fuel tanks and listing shipwrecks that line the industrial waterway Kill van Kull, fronting Bayonne, New Jersey. They would picturesquely rise amid bio-fuel production and restored beaches.

Whatever climate change does to us, the best of this work opens our eyes to the enormous possibilities in scandalously neglected waterfronts. 

Bloomberg