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Waterstudio published in “Floating Houses- Living over the water”

Floating Houses –  Living over the water

Two projects of Waterstudio are published in the book “Floating Houses –  Living over the water”.

Waterstudio.N L www.waterstudio.n1 Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands Photos © Architect Koen Olthuis – Waterstudio.NL

Villa `Ijburg’ – plot 13

This design was done for an Amsterdam urban expansion site where one specific area was designated to have only floating houses. As with the other dwelling for this same area, limitations in the building outline were strict, forcing the design to be clear and powerful’ within these regulations. Pushing the regulations which only allowed half of the top storey to be used. This design quite literally took the complete rectangular outline of the building envelope as a frame in which transparent facades were placed. Within the frame the several functions were placed, defining where the glass paneling should be transparent or closed. The top storey still only occupies half of the floor surface, but the white frame now encloses the remaining outside terrace, visually completing the basic and almost austere volume. Within the frame, glass panels were used with several slightly different colours, adding some subtlety to the scheme.

The lower floor, which is partly beneath waterlevel. contains the bedroom, a bathroom with sauna, as well  as some storage and a study-rooms. On the ground  floor, where the entrance is situated, two blocks in  the layout create an, entrance hallway, and close off  the stairwell, leaving the rest of the surface almost  completely open. The blocks contain the toilet, storage  space, and kitchen equipment. The whole of the floor  is used as a large living-kitchen. On the upper floor the volume containing the living-room was given a curved outline, which give a little playfulness to the otherwise I is geometric appearance.

Waterstudio.N L www.waterstudio.nl Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands Photos © Architect Koen Olthuis – Waterstudio.NL

Villa jjburg’ – plot 3

This plan was designed for an urban water-development area in Amsterdam. Strict limitations of the building envelope and 2,5 storeys,, while maximizing effective floor space for the principal, forced the designers to, come up with a strong architectural principle that organized the dwelling with only modest means. The location at the end of the pier, where the view should be focused on the water while shielding off the dwelling from adjacent houses, provided the initial starting point. The architectural concept comprises of two basic shapes, filled in with glass panels. The main volume is enveloped by a white stucco slab that runs along the le storey floor, covers the entire back wall and roof, forming a continuous line that frames the living area and the open view. This simple yet elegant shape is complemented by a second shape in wood formed by the terrace floor and curving up to form the banister. Together, these two simple gestures define a distinct, almost iconic appearance.

On the lower floor, which is partly below waterlevel, three bedrooms and the bathroom are situated. The ground floor is largely an open layout where only the toilet and some storage space separate the entrance area from the main space. Two large swinging doors can be used to close off the hallway. A neatly designed cupboard containing television is the only main element in the open space. Behind this, two stairs lead to the lower storey and to the working-area on the top floor. The ceiling of the living room is made in the same wood as the outside shape to really carry through the concept of the two curved shapes making up the dwelling.

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Continuing Education: Floating Buildings

By Katharine Logan
Architectural record
April.1.2017

As the ice melts and the seas rise, building on waterfront and flood-prone sites begins to look a lot like foolishness, yet backing away from the water takes more willpower than most cities and towns can muster. Ever since the first settlements took root on flood-fertilized riverbanks, next to the water is where people have always wanted to be.


The floating houses designed by Waterstudio, which make up a neighborhood on Amsterdam’s Lake Ijssel, have “foundations” formed in a single pour to eliminate joints.
Photo © Waterstudio

The Waterstudio’s Villa De Hoef, in the Netherlands, normally sits on dry ground alongside a waterway. But when it floods, the house floats.
Photo © Waterstudio

A developer is currently seeking zoning approval to build 29 Waterstudio-designed private floating islands on an inlet north of Miami Beach.
Image © Waterstudio
Denizen Work’s proposal for a floating and relocatable church for the Diocese of London features a roof composed of a pair of asymmetrical, pleated wings. These are lifted, like the pop-top of a vintage camper, once the vessel is docked.
Image © Denizen Works

Denizen Work’s proposal for a floating and relocatable church for the Diocese of London features a roof composed of a pair of asymmetrical, pleated wings. These are lifted, like the pop-top of a vintage camper, once the vessel is docked.
Image © Denizen Works

Carlo Ratti’s scheme for Currie Park in West Palm Beach, Florida, consists of interconnected piazzette. The park, which will float on Lake Worth Lagoon, incorporates amenities such as a restaurant, an amphitheater, and a circular pool.
Image © Carlo Ratti Associati

Carlo Ratti’s scheme for Currie Park in West Palm Beach, Florida, consists of interconnected piazzette. The park, which will float on Lake Worth Lagoon, incorporates amenities such as a restaurant, an amphitheater, and a circular pool.
Image © Carlo Ratti Associati

So what are the options for staying put and living with water rather than moving away from it? They range from keeping water out— with barriers, stilts, and raised ground planes —to letting water in, with ground floors designed for periodic inundation, to, ultimately, rising above it all, with floating architecture. Yes, really. “Whether it’s New York or London, Bangkok or Dhaka, all these cities are growing, all these cities are next to the water, and all are threatened by the water,” says Koen Olthuis, founding principal of Netherlandsbased Waterstudio. “Floating developments can be part of the solution.”

The technology of floating architecture isn’t new. Each of the projects considered here uses tried-and-true technology adapted from marine applications to achieve its unusual results, whether it’s a floating house, an island, a church, or a plaza.

Houseboats, for example, have been around for centuries, and the floating houses that make up a neighborhood in Ijburg, under development in Amsterdam’s Lake Ijssel, are “really just better houseboats,” says Olthuis, “built to the same standards as a house on land, using the same methods and materials.”

For all their similarities to houses on terra firma, however, the float houses Olthuis has designed for Ijburg differ in a crucial aspect: their buoyant “foundations,” or lower levels. Formed in a single pour to eliminate joints, and emphatically free of cracks, a prefabricated concrete tub—or hull—is designed to displace a volume of water with a weight equivalent to the weight of the house. The hull is submerged the depth of half a story and secured to telescoping piles at diagonally opposite corners, allowing the house to rise and fall with the water but not wander about. (Typically, bedrooms are located on the partially submerged level, and the water reduces heating and cooling loads on the house.) As a refinement, automatic air-water balancing tanks help keep the house level when the residents invite more than a few friends to a party.

A buoyant foundation can also be used to build amphibious architecture on flood-prone land. Amphibious architecture retains a connection to the ground under ordinary circum- stances and floats as high as needed when flooding occurs. As a flood-mitigation strategy, amphibious architecture works with natural cycles, instead of trying to resist them.

Waterstudio’s 1,440-square-foot Villa De Hoef, for example, usually sits in a garden beside a waterway in the small Dutch town of De Hoef. When the waterway floods, which happens every 10 years or so, the house floats; as the flood recedes, the house returns to its original position. With a maximum anticipated flood level for the site of only 4 feet, the project’s engineers deemed it safe to tether the house with cables and surround it with a wooden deck, in preference to telescoping piles. A skirt of nylon net prevents flood debris from becoming lodged beneath the house. “Low-tech, low-maintenance,” says Olthuis. Maintaining the amphibious system requires periodic visual inspection of the cables and deck, and, every five years, a recalculation of the house’s added or moved live load to determine and adjust its center of gravity. This is in case the occupants have accumulated more belongings or rearranged the furniture.

Expanding the applications for floating architecture, Waterstudio is now designing private islands that will float on a patented platform moored to the seabed. With projects under way for Dubai and the Maldives, the firm’s Amillarah project is currently seeking zoning approval for a “villa flotilla,” as the Miami Herald dubbed the proposal, with 29 floating islands on Maule Lake, an inlet north of Miami Beach.

Expected to sell for about $12.5 million each, the floating islands will make only a few hundred very wealthy people happy, notes Olthuis. Ultimately, however, he sees a more egalitarian future for the technology, as a solution for people worldwide who live in slums that are close to open water and vulnerable to flooding. Improving these so-called wet slums is almost impossible, since governments are unwilling to condone illegal settlements by sponsoring upgrades and because lenders are unwilling to invest in something that will be flooded out.

But, building on their experience developing floating islands, Waterstudio has proposed simple schools and critical infrastructure, such as water-treatment plants, that would sit on small floating islands and be connected to the slums. The firm has recently completed a prefabricated floating school that will be shipped to Dhaka and assembled next to a wet slum there. Such facilities typically qualify as temporary solutions, which makes them acceptable to government officials. They can be relocated as needed, retaining their value, which makes them attractive to investors. And they can be leased for limited periods, which makes them accessible to the communities that need them. “It’s a delicate system, where you get investors, regulators, and users all together to improve life in these wet slums,” says Olthuis.

A versatile, affordable, and mobile solution is exactly what the Church of England’s Diocese of London was looking for when it commissioned London-based Denizen Works to design a floating church and community hub to support the diocese’s outreach program along London’s waterways.

With the rocketing cost of land, London’s waterways are the busiest they’ve been since the industrial revolution, with a floating bookshop, cinema, restaurants, and even a puppet theater, as well as a significant residential component. The activity on the water could soon be eclipsed, however, by the activity of new development along the water’s edge. In 2015, the mayor’s London Plan identified key brownfield “Opportunity Areas,” many of which lie along these waterways.

With its floating church, the diocese is responding both to the anticipated growth of new waterfront communities on brownfields and underdeveloped lands, and to the difficulty of finding space in the rapidly redeveloping city for a new church. “We spotted this opportunity,” says Hayley Harding, program management officer with the diocese, “and felt that it was something that could grow and support development and change.”

The priority for the diocese is to establish a presence in emerging communities—on and beside the water—as early as possible, and in a space that the local parish can own and manage, running both secular and worship activities as it sees fit. The floating church will moor at key regeneration sites for threeto five-year periods, offering services, and developing relationships with growing communities. Ultimately the Diocese will evaluate whether and how to build a permanent facility.

The competition brief for the project called for a multifunctional space that could accommodate a diverse program of worship and celebrations, art exhibitions, yoga classes, parent-and-toddler groups, and supper clubs. “They’re not just looking to bring the church to these emerging communities,” says Murray Kerr, director at Denizen Works, “but a sense of community as well.”

Denizen’s winning scheme, developed in collaboration with Turks Shipyard and based on a traditional wide beam canal boat, provides 500 square feet of interior space, plus decks, in a vessel that is 60 feet long and 12 feet wide but less than 6 feet above the waterline, so that it can easily clear the London canal system’s low bridges. The design, which is projected to cost about $370,000, includes an innovative roof that generates a play of light and volume. Once the vessel is docked, the roof’s two asymmetrical segments can be raised to reveal pleated sides much like the bellows of a church organ (or, more prosaically, the pop-top of a vintage camper). The longer wing shelters the hall, while the shorter one covers the ancillary spaces, including a kitchen and an office. Crafted from resinimpregnated sailcloth, the translucent bellows will provide a soft, ambient light during the day and act as a Chinese lantern at night, says Kerr, “creating a warm, inviting glow for passersby and imbuing the interiors with a celestial quality.”

“They delivered something we weren’t expecting,” says Harding. “This beautiful volume is something that can be a sacred space as well as a community asset. And Denizen’s partnership with a shipyard demonstrates that it is viable.”

The church will be Denizen’s first project to float. By contrast, the work of Turin, Italy– based Carlo Ratti Associati demonstrates an abiding fascination with water, so it’s no surprise that the firm’s 2016 master plan for the Currie Park waterfront at West Palm Beach, Florida, incorporates a significant water-based element. What is unexpected is the use of a technology adapted from submarines to carve volumes of habitable space into the surface of the Lake Worth Lagoon.

“One of the aims of our work is to imagine an architecture that adapts to human need, rather than the other way around—a living, tailored space that is molded to its inhabitants’ needs, characters, and desires,” says Carlo Ratti, the firm’s founding partner and the director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Water is a reconfigurable material, and it allows us to develop adaptive, ‘fluid’ designs.”

The plan envisions a floating plaza (or, perhaps more accurately, a series of floating piazzette) projecting out onto the lagoon. The plaza will hang in the water, with its surface about 5 feet below sea level, providing views across the water from this unusual perspective. The project is anticipated to have virtually no environmental impact, floating in the lagoon just like a midsize boat, using no fuel, and discharging nothing into the water.

As part of the 50-acre master plan, the plaza will connect to West Palm Beach’s city center along a pair of leafy promenades, and will incorporate such facilities as an organic restaurant with its own hydroponic cultivations, a circular pool, and an amphitheater.

Now in design development while seeking municipal approvals, the plaza will consist of a series of lightweight steel modules composing a peninsula of about 5,000 square feet. The structure’s deck will be made of galvanized steel (similar to boat construction), with teak finishes. Beneath the plaza, a series of sensoractivated air-water chambers will open and close, releasing or taking in water according to the number of people walking on the surface, and adjusting for a height differential of up to 20 inches, which accommodates loading changes of up to 100 pounds per square foot. “The use of responsive digital technologies is often employed to introduce movement and complexity to static architecture,” says Ratti, “but it can equally be used to achieve stasis and equilibrium within a moving landscape.”

With this project, West Palm Beach aims to reclaim its connection to the natural environment it is part of, give shape to a vibrant new district, and, says Ratti, “radically redefine the relationship between architecture and water.” Ratti has identified the theme that unites these disparate examples of floating architecture: a floating plaza that engages with water in a playful new way; a floating church that enables an ancient institution to reach out to its changing city; floating islands that uplift the few and the many; amphibious architecture that celebrates a river even in flood; and a floating neighborhood that provides a city with new “ground.” All of these offer new possibilities for changing waterfronts and new possibilities for us to stay where we really want to be—by the water.

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Olthuis: ‘Bouw amfibische wijken in overstromingsgebieden’

By Architectenweb
September.5.2016

 

Over de hele wereld ontwerpt hij drijvende gebouwen, zelfs hele drijvende wijken; architect Koen Olthuis van Waterstudio.NL. Op donderdag 15 september geeft hij op Architect@Work een lezing over de mogelijkheden van drijvende steden. Architectenweb hield met de architect een voorgesprek.

“De steden die we al eeuwenlang op het land bouwen volgen ook maar een concept”, begint architect Koen Olthuis van Waterstudio.NL. “Het is een bewezen concept, maar ook een die niet optimaal functioneert. Onze boodschap is: kijk ook eens naar water en welke mogelijkheden dat biedt om tot een andere stedenbouw te komen.”

Water biedt de stad in Olthuis’ optiek veiligheid, ruimte en flexibiliteit. Om met dat laatste aspect te beginnen: met de verplaatsbaarheid van drijvende gebouwen kunnen steden veel minder statisch worden. De tijd die steden nodig hebben om te reageren op veranderende sociaal-economische vragen, de response time zoals Olthuis het noemt, kan dan flink omlaag.

Als voorbeeld noemt Olthuis steden die enkel in een bepaald seizoen gebruikt worden, seasonal cities. Kunnen die gebouwen off-season niet op een andere plek ingezet worden? “Laat steden met het gebruik meebewegen”, benadrukt Olthuis.

Dat sommige steden dicht bebouwd zijn, betekent volgens hem nog niet dat ze ten volle gebruikt worden. “Ik noem dat de efficiency van het gebruik.” Sommige functies kunnen op het water – als verplaatsbaar gebouw – intensiever gebruikt worden dan wanneer ze op het land zouden blijven.

In Libanon werkt de architect momenteel aan een drijvende woning die uit twee U-vormen bestaat. Hierbij heeft de buitenzijde van de U-vorm een gesloten gevel en de binnenzijde een open gevel. De toekomstige bewoners kunnen straks met beide bouwdelen spelen en ervoor kiezen om de woning volledig gesloten te houden, deze deels te openen, of deze helemaal te openen. Zo kunnen de bewoners bijvoorbeeld inspelen het veranderende klimaat door het jaar heen. Van volledig gesloten naar volledig geopend kost volgens Olthuis maar een paar uur tijd.

Amfibische steden

Wat betreft waterveiligheid vindt Olthuis het interessant wat momenteel in steden als Bangkok, Tokyo en Shanghai gebeurt. Het water heeft daar meer ruimte nodig. Daarom zijn er veiligheidszones ingesteld die nog niet ontwikkeld kunnen worden. Omdat ze bijvoorbeeld eens in de zoveel tijd onder water lopen. “Amfibische wijken of steden kunnen daar een uitkomst zijn.”

Een permanent drijvende woning biedt niet voor iedereen het gewenste comfort, geeft Olthuis toe. De meeste mensen wonen toch het liefst aan een straat met een eigen tuin. Een woning die normaal gesproken op de grond staat, maar bij een overstroming bijvoorbeeld eens in de vijf jaar korte tijd drijft, kan dan een uitkomst zijn.

“De grootste bedreiging in Nederland komt niet van de stijgende zeespiegel, maar van hoge waterstanden in de rivieren en hevige regenval”, stelt Olthuis. “Een aantal van de meer dan 3.500 polders in ons land zouden we daarom in moeten richten als noodopslag voor water. Hier kunnen vervolgens amfibische wijken gerealiseerd worden.” In China en Thailand werkt Olthuis al aan plannen voor dergelijke wijken.

Kansen in Nederland nog onbenut

Ondanks dit alles is het in Nederland de afgelopen jaren opvallend stil rond het bouwen op water. In Rotterdam wordt een drijvende boerderij gebouwd, in Amsterdam worden enkele tientallen waterkavels op de markt gebracht voor particuliere woningbouw. “Onder de 70.000 woningen die jaarlijks in Nederland gebouwd worden zijn misschien honderd waterwoningen.”

“Nederlandse ontwikkelaars zijn lui”, constateert Olthuis. “Nederland is op dit punt gewoon meer een innovatieland dan een uitvoerland.” De hele wereld bekijkend is de architect echter zeer optimistisch over drijvende architectuur. Overal is daar grote interesse in.

Richting architecten heeft Olthuis ook een boodschap: “Zie water als een extra ingrediënt in de stedenbouw dat veiligheid, ruimte en flexibiliteit biedt.”

Architect@Work vindt plaats op woensdag 14 september en donderdag 15 september in Rotterdam Ahoy. Als mediapartner heeft Architectenweb rond het thema architectuur en water een gevarieerd lezingenprogramma samengesteld. Binnen dit programma geeft architect Koen Olthuis van Waterstudio.NL op donderdag 15 september om 17:30u een lezing met de lengte van een uur.

De lezingen tijdens Architect@Work zijn gratis bij te wonen. Registreer je wel van tevoren even. Ga naar www.architectatwork.nl, klik op de knop Gratis Bezoekersregistratie en registreer je met de code 455.

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AquaTecture, Buildings and cities designed to live and work with water

By Robert Barker & Richard Coutts
RIBA Publishing

 

Water plays a vital role in shaping our built environment, as it has done for centuries. We depend on it, we use it, we live with it and we must respect it. Aquatecture is the first book to outline new ways of ‘designing for water,’ using examples from around the world to illustrate methods of utilizing water innovatively, efficiently and safely.

The first part of the book explores the historical relationship between water and architecture, examining how cities and civilisations have been drawn to water and have attempted to control it. The chapters go on to assess how this relationship has changed over time, and introduce readers to a range of brand new techniques that will revolutionise the way we think about water, design and urban planning. Solutions such as amphibious housing, wet-proof buildings, zero carbon development, rain gardens, flood storage and new methods of waterfront design are discussed and their effectiveness assessed.

Full colour illustrations and international case studies are used throughout the book to bring these new theories to life; practical, technical advice sits alongside truly ground-breaking and ambitious ideas for the future. This book is an ideal reference tool for all architects, urban designers, planners and sustainability experts who have an interest in creating a beautiful, sustainable, intelligent and pleasurable built environment on land, in water and with water.

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The Floating Dutchman

By Kerstin Schweighöfer
FUTURE PERFECT
December 2015

 

Koen Olthuis | © Architect Koen Olthuis, Waterstudio.NL

The Citadel is a floating apartment complex near Naaldwijk, Netherlands. | © Architect Koen Olthuis, Waterstudio.NL

 

THE FLOATING DUTCHMAN

In the tradition of his water-taming nation, Dutchman Koen Olthuis designs floating islands to dwell and live on – not least because climate change calls for new solutions in architecture.

A vacation doesn’t get more wonderful than this: a white sandy beach, a green-blue, glistening sea and an exotic underwater world to thrill any snorkeling enthusiast. All you have to do to explore it is jump into the Indian Ocean from your personal jetty, because the elegant vacation villa where you’re staying is floating on the water. In a Maldivian lagoon, this dream is currently becoming a reality as the construction of 185 floating vacation homes is currently underway. They’re arranged in the shape of a giant flower on the water. Hence the name of the project: Ocean Flower.

It was designed by Koen Olthuis, a Dutch architect who is considered a pioneer of what is called Aqua Architecture: “I build exclusively on the water,” says the 44-year-old with a strawberry-blonde mop of curly hair. His buildings are made to withstand floods and climate change because everything Olthuis designs can adapt to the level of the sea. It is not by accident that his office in Rijswijk near The Hague bears the name waterstudio.nl.

Bracing for climate change, without leaving a trace

In order to make such bold projects as the Ocean Flower a reality, Olthuis partnered with a fellow Dutchman, project developer Paul van de Camp, to found the company Dutch Docklands. It buys water properties all over the world to use them as building sites. This opens up completely new perspectives – not only for densely populated cities or countries where building sites are in short supply and hence, expensive: “It also helps residents protect themselves from the consequences of climate change.”

There is a reason Dutch Docklands launched its first project in the Maldives. It’s not just to cater to the recreational interests of spoiled tourists: The 300,000 inhabitants of the island nation will soon literally be up to their necks in water, because 80 percent of the Maldives are located barely a metre above sea level. The government had already announced plans to buy to land elsewhere in order to survive. Until Olthuis and van de Camp assured them that this was quite unnecessary: “We made the President of the Maldives understand that climate refugees can be pioneers of climate management,” said Olthuis. They understood immediately.

The Ocean Flower is just the beginning: Four more lagoons with floating vacation lodges are to follow, as well as a floating conference centre and one of the world’s most spectacular golf courses that will spread over several man-made islands to be connected by underwater glass tunnels.

And all this can be done without leaving a trace in nature or inflicting any damage, for Dutch Docklands is committed to what it calls the scarless approach: “Our units can float anywhere on the water for 200 years, yet if the area is needed for some other purpose, they can just be hauled away,” Olthuis explains. They will be gone without a trace.

The Dutch know how to live with the water

It isn’t surprising that the pioneers of Aqua Architecture are Dutch: Like no other people, the nation at the mouth of the Rhine River has spent centuries learning to tame the water or to keep it in check with dikes, dams and levees. As the proverb goes: “God created the world – and the Dutch the Netherlands.”

Whether it is in New Orleans or in Bangladesh: The expertise of Dutch hydraulic engineers and architects is in high demand throughout the world – today more so than ever, thanks to climate change, which brings swelling rivers, rising sea levels and more catastrophic floods around the globe.

The Dutch have long recognized that building ever higher dams won’t be enough. Therefore, the former nemesis is instead given more space: Polders are being flooded, retention basins are being built, tributaries being carved out and filled-up canals dug free again.

The old seafaring nation now has even less residential land available. Yet the Dutch discovered that the flooded polders and artificial water basins offer more benefits than just a controlled channeling of excess water.

Trend and challenge of generation climate change

As a consequence, aqua living has since become a trend in the Netherlands; all over the country, people reside in what is called waterwoningen. Their foundation consists of a concrete tub filled with Styrofoam, which is considered unsinkable. To keep them in place, they are moored to poles with rings so they can easily adapt to rising sea levels. Electricity and water lines are connected via hoses and cables.

Olthuis has designed countless waterwoningen: transparent villas sitting elegantly on the water, such as in Aalsmeer, Zwolle, Leiden or Amsterdam, which received an entire floating neighborhood in 2012, the steigereiland. In Antwerp, Olthuis designed a floating boulevard on the Scheldt, in Paris he created a restaurant on the Seine. And in a polder between The Hague and Delft, he wants to build de Citadel, Europe’s first floating apartment complex on a foundation of 140 by 90 metres. “Technologically speaking, all of this is easy to do,” he stresses.

The technology developed and patented by Olthuis virtually eliminates size limits on foundations for waterwoningen. In other words, the foundation can be a platform large enough to accommodate entire blocks of houses, complete with yards and parking garages: “The larger an object, the more stable it is on the water,” the architect explains.

Olthuis is therefore convinced: The city of the future consists of floating platforms that can be moved around like floes of ice. “It will evolve one step at a time,” the bold Dutchman predicts: The next fifteen years will see churches, schools and sports fields move out onto the water, then in 50 years, we will have platforms as large as 200 by 200 metres, with houses, roads and parks – until a century from now, the city of the future will be a reality: a flexible delta-metropolis of floating elements. For Olthuis, this new type of urban design, this new flexibility is “the great challenge for the architects of the climate change generation.”

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Why Blue is Better

Annelie Rozeboom
Hi Europe
October.2015

 

Architect Koen Olthuis draws on a roll of paper while explaining why we should be building our cities on the water and how he is planning to help the poor with his ideas. “As an architect, you can design towers, but every child can do that in their Minecraft game. Plus none of the towers we build now will be there in 300 years’ time. What I want to leave behind at the end of my career are concepts and ideas, the main idea is that we need to push our cities unto the water.”
Green is good, blue is better is the motto of this Dutch architect. “Our cities don’t change fast enough. We build houses and building and expect them to be used for ever, but our society changes every ten years. If parts of our cities float, we are much more flexible. The center of Amsterdam will always be the same, but the neighborhoods around it change all the time. If buildings float, you can just pull them away and put them somewhere else,” Olthuis told Hi-Europe.


Pict: selimaksan

Working with the Water

One-half of the Netherlands is flood-prone and about one-quarter is below sea level, so it’s no wonder the Dutch spend their time developing ways to incorporate water into their style of living. The philosophy is shifting from fighting the water to living with it, or rather, on it. Instead of trying to claw back more land from the sea, developers are exploring the cost-efficiency of building homes that rise and fall with the tides. “We need to start working with the water in a more intelligent way,” Olthuis says.

This relatively new amphibious architecture is attracting interest from around the world, with floating and amphibious homes and schools now being designed for flood plains everywhere. Amphibious architecture is for both dry and wet conditions, so the houses stay dry and on the ground during normal times and then when the water arrives, they can float up.


Pict: Architect Koen Olthuis – Waterstudio.NL

Waterstudio

Olthuis wants to do much more than build a few villas. His architectural bureau Waterstudio.NL has designed complete apartment complexes, which could accommodate hundreds of people. And that is just one project. There is also a 33-meter-tall trees that can float. “Our cities have become sick environments. Green has been pushed away, but bees and other insects need quiet places. Our sea tree is like a cut-up park, which floats at a safe distance from the shore. Nature will take over on the platform and create its own ecosystem.”

Olthuis is also planning to help people in the slums of the world, which are often located on flood plains. “Worldwide you see that the most vulnerable people are being pushed into the water,” he says. This coming month he will send a floating school to Dakar – it’s a container that floats on empty plastic bottles. “The way to upgrade a slum is by installing facilities like schools and internet cafés, or easily movable small buildings that slum entrepreneurs can use. We have designed a kind of toolbox, which have 20 functions inside. This way, the entrepreneurs can choose what it is they need.”
Olthuis exports his concepts all around the globe, including to the flood zones of Hainan Island. “They have land there that they can’t use, but they will if they take our technology.” He also sells floating islands to Dubai. “Making artificial islands out of sand doesn’t work. In Dubai they built some, but they are too far away from the coast, and there is no electricity or drinking water. We are now going to put floating islands in between.”


Pict: Architect Koen Olthuis – Waterstudio.NL

Fight Against the Sea

The Dutch are famous for their age-old fight against the sea, and they have the best flood management technologies in the world. In the beginning, the people in this low country put their homes on artificial hills called terpen, but they soon started building dikes. Popular in the middle ages were wierdijken, earth dikes with a protective layer of seaweed. Later dikes had a vertical screen of timbers backed by an earth bank, but these were replaced by stones after the timber was eaten by shipworms. When the polder windmill was invented in the 15th century, it meant that land could also be drained.

The dikes around the rivers were maintained by the famers who lived next to them. Special water board directors would come to check every three years. This changed radically after a devastating North Sea flood in 1953, which resulted in 1,800 deaths. The government adopted a “never again” attitude, and built dams all around the country, guarding all main river estuaries and sea inlets. According to computer simulations, today’s defenses in the Netherlands are supposed to withstand the kind of flood so severe that it would occur only once in 10,000 years.
“We have pretty much won the fight against the sea,” architect Olthuis says. “The problem now is rainwater. Holland has 3500 low-lying polders enclosed by dykes that function as sponges – they soak up excessive rain water. However, more and more of this land is now used for housing. These are ideal places to build amphibious houses.”


Pict: Architect Koen Olthuis – Waterstudio.NL

Rising Sea Levels

Dutch scientists predict a rise in sea levels of up to 110cm by the year 2100. “We can make the dikes higher, that’s not a problem at all. Technically, all that is possible. The problem with a high dike is that when it breaks, more water will come in,” he says.

There is also growing pressure on existing land. The Dutch government estimates that 500,000 new homes will be needed in the next two decades. Most of the land suitable for conventional building has already been used up, so Dutch architects are encouraged to experiment with new solutions. “The palace in the center of Amsterdam was built on 13.654 wooden poles. It’s the densest forest in the Netherlands. There was real innovation in those times. We are built on places where there shouldn’t be land at all. It’s not about giving up, it’s about continuing to grow,” says Olthuis.

Koen Olthuis

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