The University of Suwon International College · Transcript · · Updated
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Video by The University of Suwon International College · Watch the original on YouTube
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- Coastal cities need architectural and engineering solutions like dikes, dams, levees, and wetlands to respond to rising sea levels and severe storms.
- Hamburg architects designed Hofun city buildings with parking garages on the lowest floors so that only the parking gets flooded if water levels rise.
- Dutch architect Koen Altuis builds larger floating structures using foam and concrete foundations, allowing homes and offices to sit on water.
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We've all heard about global warming and rising sea levels, so we can all understand the need for architectural and engineering solutions for coastal cities.
In other words, we need to find creative ways for cities to respond to rising sea levels, disappearing land, and increasingly severe storms. For a long time, our approach has been to build dikes, dams, or levees to keep the sea out.
These are all basically walls or embankments to prevent flooding. Think about the Netherlands, a country mainly below sea level, where dikes have kept the land mostly dry for hundreds of years. However, we saw that the levees failed to keep the water out of New Orleans in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina.
As a result, water destroyed much of the city and caused as many as 90% of residents to leave. Last class, we looked at how cities can maintain wetlands as a way to reduce the impact of rising water levels and bad storms.
We also talked about Hofun city, a riverside district in Hamburg, Germany. There, architects designed buildings that have parking garages on the lowest floors. That way, if the water levels rise, only the parking will be flooded.
Now, no one wants a flooded car, but at least the higher levels that have the living spaces, offices, and even metro stops will stay dry. The idea is that there are three different areas in the city. One zone that can be flooded, one that is protected and floods only rarely, and a level that will never flood.
Today, I'd like to focus on the work of Koen Altuis, a Dutch architect. Many of the architects doing interesting work in this field come from the Netherlands for obvious reasons. There are almost 16 million Dutch people, over 60% of them leaving the one-third of the Netherlands that lies below sea level.
For a thousand years, they have built dykes, pumps, and draining systems to keep the water out. In fact, they have to keep pumping all the time, or within 48 hours, 30 to 60 centimeters of water would cover much of this land.
One way the Dutch deal with the fact that they have plenty of water, but not much land is to live on houseboats. There are 60,000 houseboats in the Netherlands. But the typical houseboat can only be about 5 meters wide and 20 meters long.
Altuis has found a way to build a larger structure that can sit on the water. Basically, he builds a foundation of foam and concrete that floats. He uses the same technology as cruise ships to get water and electricity to the buildings and to remove waste.
His firm, Water Studio, has already built more than 200 comfortable homes and offices on the water. Now, they are working on a resort project in Dubai and a school in Bangladesh. Because his buildings float, they can move from one place to another.
They can build them in units, take them apart, and put them together in places that need them. Altuis thinks this kind of portable building could work for the Olympics. Today, cities have to build a lot of new structures to host the Olympics. But what if they could simply move structures around and repurpose them? Pretty cool idea, huh?