Watch Metabolic Studio build a new irrigation system using L.A. River water

With the roughly decade-long approval process in the rear-view mirror, shovels have hit dirt (and concrete) in the Los Angeles River, where Metabolic Studio is finally building a long-proposed system to use river water to irrigate Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Live cameras perched just south of the North Spring Street Bridge in Chinatown offer a look at progress on the project, which is known as "Bending the River Back into the City." The project draw water from the river through an underground pipe using solar-powered pumps. The water would then move hundreds of feet from the river channel, then below a railroad right-of-way into a stilling well located on land owned by Metabolic Studio. After that point, the water would be transferred into a wetland treatment system, and then distributed for irrigation in Los Angeles State Historic Park and Albion Riverside Park.

"Bending the River is an adaptive reuse of the LA River infrastructure that reimagines the relationship between Los Angeles and the river that brought it into existence," reads a description from the Metabolic Studio website. "The city of Los Angeles has continually grown and so has the need for water to sustain this growth. In response to this growing need, scarcity of resources, and the ongoing affects of climate change, Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio are exploring new ways to respond. Located on Tongva land, Bending the River is evolving through conversations with artists, native communities, activists, local communities, and the many government agencies needed in order to realize this work. Over 75 permits across varying levels of government within the city, county, state, and federal jurisdictions and the first private water right in the city of Los Angeles, this work will be completely off-grid, using solar, gravity and salvaged floodplain to cultivate and regenerate the web of life."

The site of the project, as noted by Curbed in 2019,  is not far from the location of a water wheel from the 1860s. That structure was designed to feed river water into the famed Zanja Madre, the primary source of drinking water for what was at the time a small town with fewer than 5,000 residents. While the project was initially conceived as a water wheel which would replicate the historic structure, the project evolved into the current design roughly one-and-a-half years ago, according to representatives of Metabolic Studio. The current design, though it lacks a signature wheel, can more easily be replicated at other locations.

Work on the project is ongoing, and Metabolic Studio is planning to soon begin an eight-day period of round-the-clock construction within the river channel starting on August 15. Completing work within the river corridor is key to keeping the project on track, since construction within the channel is curtailed during the rainy season, which the Army Corp. of Engineers considers the six months between mid-October and mid-April.

Metabolic Studio bills Bending the River as the "culmination" of a transformation of neighboring Los Angeles State Historic Park, which began in 2005 with the temporary installation Not A Cornfield. That project involved planting 1 million corn seeds on 32-acre brownfield site that eventually became the park.

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Author's Note: While the project was long planned as a water wheel, the design has since been changed to make use of a stilling well. The article has been amended to reflect this change.