A pilot installation at Morningside Park in Miami is examining whether the concrete barriers lining South Florida’s shoreline can do more than hold back water. A team from Florida International University’s Institute of Environment has mounted a set of 3D printed tiles, produced at the university’s Robotics and Digital Fabrication Lab, onto an existing seawall. The project, headed by principal investigator Shahin Vassigh, investigates how flood-defense structures might simultaneously serve the ecosystems they typically displace.
Conventional seawalls shield roads, buildings and public areas from erosion, storm surge and rising water, yet their smooth vertical faces offer almost nothing to the species that once inhabited natural shorelines. The initiative, called BioCAP (Biodiversity Improvement by Optimizing Coastal Adaptation and Performance), addresses that shortfall with modular, interlocking panels that retrofit onto walls already in place. Each robotically printed unit incorporates ridges, grooves, recesses and shallow pools intended to give marine organisms places to settle, hide and develop.
“Our goal is to rethink what shoreline protection can look like in urban coastal areas,” Vassigh said. “Instead of treating seawalls only as barriers, these tiles allow us to transform them into living surfaces that support marine life, improve habitat complexity and enhance coastal resilience.”
Designed Around the Tidal Gradient
The tile geometry varies according to position along the wall. Sections near the upper tidal range are shaped to accommodate crabs and limpets, the mid-level textures give oysters and barnacles anchoring points, and the submerged portions provide shelter for organisms such as sponges.
Hydrodynamic performance was assessed before deployment. In laboratory wave testing, the team found that the textured faces reflected less wave energy than plain concrete, suggesting the panels may also improve how seawalls handle incoming water.
Monitoring Begins in Biscayne Bay
With the tiles now in the water, the research shifts to long-term observation. The team will document how marine life colonizes the surfaces and assess whether the added habitat influences water quality and overall shoreline behavior. Two of the installed panels carry embedded sensors recording temperature, salinity and water-quality parameters.
For coastal cities, the appeal lies in adaptation rather than replacement: BioCAP works with infrastructure that already exists instead of requiring new construction. Findings from Morningside Park could shape future shoreline work across South Florida and in other coastal regions confronting similar pressures.
BioCAP is funded by the EPA and led by Vassigh, Pezeshk, Bogosian and Ozer through FIU’s Robotics and Digital Fabrication Lab, the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts and the Institute of Environment, with supplementary NOAA funding under Todd Crowl and contributions from field scientists Ben Binder and Nicholas Evans alongside numerous students.
The Gap BioCAP Targets: Coastal Defense That Excludes Ecology
Rather than proposing new construction, BioCAP challenges the conventional function of seawalls through a retrofit approach that repositions existing infrastructure as a habitat interface capable of supporting ecological processes instead of acting as a hard boundary.
The project joins a growing wave of additive manufacturing efforts aimed at marine restoration. In Florida, construction firm 1Print shifted from terrestrial construction into marine infrastructure, producing 3D printed reef structures that stand 8 feet tall during production and, once settled on the seabed, serve as foundational structures for marine life colonization.
Academic groups have pursued parallel routes. Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology exhibited 3D printed coral structures made with PARTANNA‘s carbon-negative concrete at the Venice Architecture Biennale, through its Maritechture initiative addressing coral degradation driven by climate change.
BioCAP stands out in this landscape for one reason: it upgrades what already exists. If the Morningside Park data holds, the model could scale wherever concrete meets the sea.
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Featured image shows 3D printed tiles placed on an existing seawall. Photo via FIU.
