With the inevitable effects of climate change ranking among our top collective fears and concerns, it may be time to pose hard questions not just to the science and environmental communities but to others as well.

It is not often that the art world steps into the breach of a major global dilemma, but a new project and exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Rising Currents,” does just that.

An “initiative to create infrastructure solutions for New York’s Waterfront,” “Rising Currents,” conceived by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA and head curator of “Rising Currents,” has brought together architects, engineers, and landscape designers for an eight-week architects-in-residence workshop starting last November. The experts were charged with proposing infrastructure solutions to make New York more resilient to rising water levels. He says he wanted the museum to address “issues that are so compelling that a museum should not wait until they have already happened in order to exhibit them but should serve as an incubator to make them happen.”

A study conducted by the Latrobe Prize team — a multidisciplinary group affiliated with Princeton University and led by structural engineer Guy Nordenson — serves as the backbone and inspiration for the workshop and exhibit. The study provides the kinds of warning signals that suggest action is not just an option but a dire necessity: By 2080 the waters surrounding New York City are predicted to rise by at least 2 feet, and potentially devastating storms will inundate the metropolitan area with greater frequency. On the doomsdayish map with which the presentations began, the audience saw the shores set to disappear under the rising tides.

Perhaps more important, the study made clear the need for an ecologically oriented approach consisting of “soft” infrastructure like piers and reefs that will take into account our new water-centered world, as current solutions of dams and barriers seem merely to defer or even deny the realities of the 21st century. Specifically, the study confirms what many have already suspected – that Army Corps of Engineers “hard” infrastructure alone cannot solve the problem. Memories of bursting levees in New Orleans serve as poignant reminders.

With this in mind, the five teams set forth with water as the focal point for their projects. Last weekend, museum-goers at PS1 got a sneak preview of the projects, scheduled to go on display at MoMA on March 24.

Using two-dimensional models, maps, and PowerPoint presentations, the teams presented optimistic and creative guides for mining opportunity from potential catastrophe. Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell of Architecture Research Office (ARO), with Susannah Drake of dlandstudio, presented a re-envisioning of lower Manhattan, the most densely populated part of the harbor. ARO, responsible for the design of the Union Square Park North End Expansion and other public and private projects in the city, foresees the reintegration of a green shoreline with the city’s existing infrastructure. Wetlands, estuaries, and tidal planes would surround the island, removing the distinct land/water division that now exists. Zoning laws would allow water to flow from land to harbor after rainfall and would work within one unified filtration system. New York may be a New World city, but its current sewage system resembles a Byzantine hodge-podge of diverse, unconnected networks and make-shift solutions that this project addresses.

Another project, titled Water Proving Ground, led by LTL Architects — the award-winning firm that represented the U.S. at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale — takes the idea of reorienting New York towards its harbor quite literally. It envisions the area of the harbor primarily defined by Liberty State Park “as a catalyst for a sort of new Central Park in the harbor area” and notes that “if you live below 14th Street, it is actually closer than the center of Central Park.” Like ARO, LTL eschews the binary approach of keeping water and land separate and has designed a landscape defined by slopes and mega-piers that would lengthen the coastline and protect the islands during high tides and storm surges. This new, more amphibious zone would also allow experimental agricultural, aquaculture, and recreational zones as part of the urban terrain.

The team led by SoHo’s Matthew Baird Design took on the post-industrial landscape of Bayonne — once the largest dry dock on the East Coast and the site of the region’s first oil refineries. Like the other teams, they focused on new, “soft” infrastructure such as crenellating the edges of the coast, building reefs made of glass New York currently sends to Asia for recycling, maximizing shipping by developing New York as a regional port, building a solar highway that embeds solar panels into the road surface to create energy, containing the existing petroleum facility, and generating biofuel. It may seem uncompromisingly utopian and fanciful, but, as Baird noted, “This is not pie-in-the-sky science — this is actually going on in other cities.”

Which is not to say that those wishing to see utopian designs were disappointed. Brooklyn’s nARCHITECTS introduced their New Aqueous City — an elevated city where a waterline rather than a skyline defines the landscape, neighbors gather on public rooftops, and a tramway in the harbor connects various points of the boroughs to New Jersey. The team also explores less fanciful public initiatives, like the deployment of the types of barriers Holland already uses to preventing flooding of their flat, low-lying areas, and an archipelago of islands that would develop into a network for attenuating waves and alleviating the effects of a flood, rather than risking all on a single line of defense.

Sometimes, the best answer to a complex question is a seemingly simple one. Enter the oyster. Amazingly, the little bivalve that once made New York its capital can provide solutions to sea-level rise, storm surges, and water quality. As Kate Orff of the Manhattan-based SCAPE Studio team explained during her team’s presentation of their “Oystertecture,” “the fascinating thing about oysters is that they agglomerate to make rich reef mosaics, and reefs are the most effective way of attenuating waves, because they go deep into the water column, stopping the velocity low, where it starts to do damage.” And one oyster alone can filter 50 gallons of water in one day – it ingests algae, detritus, sediment, and pollutants and give us clean water in return. And if all goes well, by 2050, the oyster cart, from which rich and poor alike feasted in the 19th century, may just make its return.

If water levels do rise as research suggests, rethinking — and re-embracing — the city’s relationship to its waterfront may be the only way to go. And local solutions can provide global lessons. As Matthew Baird emphasized, “The history of planning is such that often when you are confronted with a problem, you tend to erase the past and adopt the tonic of the moment. And we actually think that we can confront our own ruin head-on — it’s a bit of alchemy, but I hope it’s the future.”

Barry Bergdoll has been tracking “Rising Currents” on MoMA’s Inside/Out blog and invited guest bloggers to comment from now until the proposals go on view at MoMA on March 24, at which point the blog will open for contribution from the general public.