Experts call for a hazards-reduction program for floods. Image courtesy Architecture Research Office / Guy Nordenson Lower Manhattan with proposed barrier islands, from the influential study On the Water: Palisade Bay (2009). For those of us involved in the 2010 exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the question we’ve been asked most frequently since Superstorm Sandy is “Could things have been different?” The honest answer is mostly no. The barrier islands and reefs proposed in the Rising Currents show were there to break the waves in storms to form a