Coastal Assembly grew out of ten years of research at MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, where the question was never how to hold the ocean back, but rather how to get it to build. The team is a deliberate mix of physicists, architects, and computer scientists, working alongside marine biologists and Maldivian partners who know these waters firsthand. What binds them is a single conviction: the same forces that erode a coastline can be guided to rebuild it.