Architecture, urban planning and research in, on and next to 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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Nederlandse architect ontwerpt duurzame golfbreker

By Duurzaamheidsleven.nl
December.22.2015

 

Architect Koen Olthuis van architectenbureau Waterstudio heeft een duurzame golfbreker voor een haven aan de Hudson rivier in New York ontworpen. De dijk beschermt niet alleen de boten, maar genereert ook energie.

Golfbreker De Panthenon is ontworpen voor een haven aan de Hudson rivier waar de golven sterk zijn. Het design geeft de golfbreker een dubbelfunctie: door het water niet tegen te houden zoals een gewone golfbreker, maar het water door de muur te laten stromen ontstaat er de mogelijkheid om energie op te wekken. De opgewekte energie wordt opgeslagen in een betonnen box achter de pilaren.

De Panthenon is niet de eerste golfbreker die een dubbelfunctie heeft. Bij Denemarken is een hybride windmolen geplaatst door de Duitste start-up Nemos. Deze windmolen gebruikt naast wind ook golven om energie op te wekken. Dankzij drijvers die aan de windmolen verbonden zijn, kan er extra energie opgewekt worden.

Veel technieken die de stroming van het water gebruiken, liggen deels boven water. Net als de Panthenon ligt bij New Wave Technology, eveneens ontworpen door Teamwork Technology, het systeem volledig onderwater. De stroming van het water zorgt ervoor dat de drijvers onderwater energie genereren. Een eerdere versie van de New Wave Technology werd tot 2008 door het Nederlandse bedrijf Teamwork Technology getest in Portugal.

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Floating Sea Wall Makes Energy from Rivers

By Samantha Joe
The Green Optimistic
December.10.2015

 

Waterstudio, led by Koen Olthuis, is a Dutch firm that explores solutions in urban planning and research as it relates to water. One of their concepts is a floating sea wall, named The Parthenon.

The Parthenon serves multiple purposes: it slows water as it pushes into a harbor, and harvests the energy that water generates.

The concept of the floating sea wall was illustrated using the Hudson River in New York, a 315-mile long river that runs through the eastern part of the state. With 39 percent

of the American population living on the shorelines of the country, harnessing water as an energy supply would be a strategic move.

In a harbor like one in the Hudson River, the waves are so strong that a sea wall protects the boats inside of it. The strong current continuously pushes water against and through this fixed wall, resulting in more and more damage of the wall.

With a floating sea wall like the one made by Waterstudio, not only with the wall work with the force of the current, it will use the water’s movement to generate electricity. Made up of many columns, they rotate at a low speed to create energy.

The cylinders are filled with water to ensure that there is a certain amount of flexibility in the structure without reducing the effectiveness in protecting the harbor. This energy is then contained in a box inside the floating platform. The entire structure is anchored to the riverbed, while the top can be utilized in different ways, such as a boulevard, a harbor extension, or for green space.

 

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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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‘Maak van Bangkok opnieuw een drijvende stad’

By Nirmal ghosh
© Courtesy of the Straits Times
September.22.2015

De amfibiewoningen van het Nederlandse bureau Waterstudio inspireren Aziatische architecten om hun traditie van drijvende architectuur te moderniseren. Foto: rr

Nu de klimaatverandering de zeespiegel doet stijgen, grijpen kustgebieden terug naar eeuwenoude bouwwijzen: drijvende architectuur moet wonen in overstromingsgebieden mogelijk maken.

Van de poldergebieden van Louisiana in de VS tot de delta van Bangladesh, overal ter wereld onderzoeken architecten en ingenieurs hoe ze eeuwenoude drijvende architectuur kunnen moderniseren om het hoofd te bieden aan stijgende zeespiegels. Ontwerpers van amfibische huizen en scholen verzamelden onlangs in Bangkok voor de eerste International Conference on Amphibious Architecture, Design and Engineering.

Het was vooralsnog een bescheiden bijeenkomst van een vijftigtal mensen – goed voor 80 procent van de internationale experts in deze vorm van bouwen. De keuze van de hoofdstad van Thailand was geen toeval. Honderdvijftig jaar geleden was Bangkok voornamelijk een drijvende stad en alles wijst erop dat ze dat over minder dan honderdvijftig jaar opnieuw zal zijn. Een groot gedeelte van de stad ligt immers onder de zeespiegel en blijft verder zinken.

Een van de deelnemers aan het congres was Koen Olthuis van Waterstudio, een Nederlands bedrijf dat overal ter wereld drijvende huizen voor de superrijken bouwt. Olthuis wil die technologie nu overbrengen naar de sloppenwijken van de wereld, die vaak op het water liggen of eraan grenzen. ‘Wereldwijd leven ongeveer een miljard mensen in sloppenwijken. Zestig tot zeventig procent van hen woont dicht bij het water, of wordt erdoor beïnvloed. Maar niemand wil in die gebieden investeren, omdat het juridisch grijze zones zijn.’ Een luxevilla op het water kan duizenden mensen blij maken, ‘maar we kunnen tienduizenden mensen blij maken door huizen en scholen in sloppenwijken te bouwen’, aldus nog Olthuis.

Amfibiehuis

De duizenden mensen die tijdens de overstromingsramp van 2011 in Thailand uit hun woningen werden verdreven en wekenlang tot aan het middel in het water overleefden, zullen het waarschijnlijk met hem eens zijn. Volgens een schatting van de Wereldbank kostte die overstroming Thailand 41 miljard dollar aan schade en verloren economische activiteit. Bangkok, dat in een overstromingsgebied ligt, is slechts een van de grote steden in de regio die kwetsbaar zijn voor hoge waterstanden, een stijgende zeespiegel en extreem weer. Onder meer Dhaka en Jakarta verkeren in hetzelfde geval. Tientallen kleinere steden aan delta’s en kusten lopen eveneens gevaar.

De Thaise architect Chutayaves Sinthuphan, een van de organisatoren van het congres, heeft onlangs een experimenteel amfibisch huis ontworpen voor de Thaise National Housing Authority. ‘Amfibische architectuur bouwt structuren voor zowel droge als natte omstandigheden. In normale tijden staan de huizen op het droge, maar tijdens een overstroming stijgen ze met het water mee’, zegt de aan de universiteit van Columbia opgeleide architect. Het huis dat hij in de provincie Ayutthaya heeft gebouwd, rust op een fundering van in staal gevatte blokken piepschuim, met voldoende speling om het huis op een stijgende vloed te laten drijven. De blokken kosten 30 procent meer dan een normale fundering.

Chutayaves zegt dat het ideaal zou zijn als alles op palen kon worden gebouwd, zoals in de traditionele Thaise dorpen. Maar in het sterk verstedelijkte land is die traditie een uitzondering geworden. ‘In de Thaise gezinnen blijven de volwassen kinderen thuis wonen. Er komen kleinkinderen, er is meer plaats nodig en de benedenverdieping wordt in gebruik genomen. De lege ruimte van vroeger wordt dus woonruimte.’

Een andere congresganger is Fatos Omar Othman, een sociale ondernemer uit Maleisië en een van de stichters van Vlot Homes, een in Petaling Jaya gebaseerd bedrijf dat in opdracht van de premier van Penang de eerste drijvende huizen voor de staat heeft ontwikkeld. ‘De huizen zijn er, maar voorlopig blijft het bij prototypes. Wij beschouwen Maleisië als een proefterrein’, zegt hij.

Luchthaven op het dak

‘We moeten met de natuur leven in plaats van ertegen te vechten’, zegt architect Chutayaves over de amfibische architectuur. ‘Wij onderzoeken hoe Bangkok kan overleven als het water verscheidene meters stijgt. We voeren concrete studies uit, bijvoorbeeld voor een luchthaven bovenop een gebouw.’

Architecten die denken zoals hij worden in Thailand echter nog als buitenbeentjes beschouwd. ‘De mensen hebben een kort geheugen. Het zal waarschijnlijk nog eens tien jaar duren voor het publiek begrijpt dat er in Bangkok echt iets moet gebeuren.’

De Standaard is lid van het Climate Publishers Network. Daardoor kan de krant de beste klimaatverhalen uit 25 internationale kwaliteitskranten aanbieden.

 

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Floating City Apps: A Lifeline for Slums

By Carol Matlack
Bloomberg Businessweek
September.2015

 

Dutch architecture firm Waterstudio uses shipping containers to build structures that benefit people living in flood-ravaged shantytowns.

Firm: Waterstudio
Location: Rijswijk, Netherlands
Total Cost: $28,000

More than 600 million people worldwide live in shantytowns that suffer chronic flooding. Because these settlements are often illegal, entrepreneurs and community groups can’t get the building permits, insurance, and bank loans to open grocery stores, health clinics, and other essential establishments.
Dutch architect Koen Olthuis thinks he has a solution: His Floating City Apps are structures built from shipping containers that can be docked alongside waterfront slums. The first, set to be deployed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this fall, will be outfitted with 20 computer workstations. It will be used as a classroom in the daytime and as an Internet café in the evening. Unesco and local non-profit are subsidizing construction. Because the units are vessels, they will qualify for insurance and private financing, which may also make them attractive options for local business.
Olthuis’s firm, Waterstudio, specializes in waterborne architecture and building floating resort in Maldives. He wants to put some of that know-how to work for the benefit of the poor. “The architecture is simple”, he says. “But you need to have a business model”.

This demonstration unit in the Netherlands is outfitted as an education and communications center, with 20 touchscreen workstations.

SOURCE: FLOATING CITY APPS

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