Coastal Assembly

Coastal Assembly PBC grew out of ten years of research at MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, where wave-tank experiments and simulations showed that the forces that strip sand from a beach can be guided to return it. Its site gives "est. 2017". The team is led by Skylar Tibbits (CEO), Sarah Dole (COO) and Walter Zesk (CTO), and mixes physicists, architects and computer scientists working with marine biologists and Maldivian partners.

The modelling side is what the company calls its intelligence platform: it ingests years of satellite imagery, wave and current records, tide and swell data and seabed bathymetry, extracts how a coastline has moved, projects where it is heading, and flags the stretches eroding fastest. Every studied site stays on the map as a growing record of coastline behaviour. From that model the company designs the spacing and angle of reef structures for a specific site, casts them nearby and lowers them onto the seabed from a barge; there is nothing to run or maintain afterwards, and the structures are meant to become reef habitat. Each site is then tracked against the model's forecast.

The worked example on its site is the JW Marriott Maldives, where fifty-four structures in a hexagonal pattern about thirty metres long are credited with ninety feet of new beach in six months without pumped sand, and a later satellite pass showing the beach still gaining. Clients named are JW Marriott Maldives and Taj Exotica. It is a commercial service sold by assessment.

Status: operating, with deployments in the Maldives. Coverage quoted on the company's own page says more projects are planned for Boston.