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Living Above and Below the Water

By Christopher F. Schuetze
The New York Times
April.23.2015

 

Living Above and Below the Water’s Surface in Amsterdam

Floating houses built on man-made islands make up the new neighborhood of IJburg in Amsterdam. Center, the home of Monique Spierenburg and Kees Harschel, whose seven-meter sailboat is docked right next to the living room. CreditFriso Spoelstra, Boat People of Amsterdam, Lemniscaat, 2013
AMSTERDAM — When asked about his three-story floating house in a gleaming new part of Amsterdam, Kees Harschel, a 65-year-old native Amsterdammer, likes to compare his living situation to winning the lottery.

“This house fits us like a second skin,” said Mr. Harschel, a retired physical education teacher, sitting in his dining room on the ground — or in this case water-level — floor of the house he has shared with his wife, Monique Spierenburg, since the couple had it built seven years ago.

In Mr. Harschel’s case, the comparison with a game of chance is more than just pride of ownership: To become part of the community of 36 houses floating on an artificial lake on Steigereiland, one of several man-made islands that make up the burgeoning new neighborhood of IJburg, Mr. Harschel competed with more than 400 applicants.

“My wife said: Go on, gamble — you won’t win anything, so try it,” said Mr. Harschel, who lived in a house on the Amstel river before moving to IJburg. But winning a spot in the small community — which the couple did in 2007 — was just the first step in a journey that would include hiring a renowned architect and battling the bureaucratic wrangling that comes with being a building pioneer in Europe.

The result is an expression both of one couple’s love of the water and of innovative living for which the Dutch — long known for their centuries-old ornate houses — are garnering an international reputation.

IJburg, home to about 20,000 people currently, is expected to eventually house 45,000. It has been rising over the past decade on a succession of artificial islands to the southeast of the city center, conceived to ease a chronic housing shortage. The area attracts many young families and professionals who, with a newly built tram line, can be in the heart of Amsterdam in 10 minutes.

The city has taken care to create a mixed community, with mansions, social housing and both market-rate and fixed-rent apartments, all sharing courtyards, public squares, parks, shopping centers and canals.

And while the 36 houses in Mr. Harschel and Ms. Spierenburg’s part of the neighborhood are all individually designed and built, those across the lake are by a single developer. Some are rented and some are owned by their inhabitants.

The couple’s house, which is nine meters, or 30 feet, high, rises just seven and a half meters above the water surface (the submerged 1.5 meters is part of the fully functional bottom floor) and is seven meters wide and 10 meters deep. (The width of the house is set by the size of the lock connecting the IJmeer to the little lake that would become its home.) Over all, the design accommodates 175 square meters of total floor space, or 1,880 square feet, with a 35-square-meter roof terrace.

The interior is the essence of Dutch simplicity. The main floor has a kitchen and dining room, where the couple do most of their socializing. Vast windows ensure the interior is flooded with diffuse reflected light and offer views of the IJmeer and the rest of the floating neighborhood.

The top floor is divided between an indoor living room and an outdoor patio. When the doors are open in the summer, the space becomes one, evoking architecture from much warmer climates.

Built to suit the couple, the basement includes two bedrooms, a master bathroom, an infrared sauna, a study and, according to Mr. Harschel, one of the most important rooms in the house: a two-and-a-half-square-meter woodworking and repair shop.

Although the house feels like a normal house, it is actually floating on its concrete basement foundation. (Power, water and other services are supplied via the fixed dock, which also acts as the land access, installed and maintained by the city.) Eye-level windows in the basement afford just-over-surface views.

Its unusual construction allowed the house to be built miles away from where it now floats, and if Amsterdam’s building code did not forbid it, the owners could simply take it with them when they moved.

“I’m a sailor,” said Mr. Harschel, who pilots saloon boats — canal boats often used for private day trips — around Amsterdam. His seven-meter Thalamus Working Boat is docked right next to the living room.

“On summer evenings we can just take some beer, wine and toast and have dinner out on the water,” said Mr. Harschel, who last summer sailed to the south of England, departing from and returning to the side of his house.

On the rare occasion when the lake freezes over, Ms. Spierenburg straps on her speed skates and takes to the ice without having to leave her house to reach the rink.

“It is much more a gateway to freedom than it is just a place to live,” said Koen Olthuis, who designed this house and whose architectural office, Waterstudio, specializes in designing floating buildings all over the world. “Skating around the house, swimming around your house — it’s marvelous.”

Both owner and architect concede that being one of the first houses on the pier came with costs.

“They paid a bit for the things we learned,” said Mr. Olthuis, explaining that the pioneering families did pay — in money, time and frustration — for what the city was learning about urban planning on water.

“It was a book this thick, but we were free,” joked Mr. Harschel, waving an imaginary building code volume.

Mr. Olthuis noted that the house had been built following code for land houses, which, in keeping with a mandate to build greener houses in the Netherlands, stipulated triple-glazed windows, heavy insulation and even a heat exchanger to retain heat from effluent — something that most houseboats, which tend to be light houses on a heavy foundation, avoid.

Mr. Harschel estimates that the couple spent 350,000 euros, or $380,000, to build the house (the lease for the lot is €600 a month), and guesses that the value of the property has probably more than doubled in the years since it was built.

“These people living here are pioneers; they are willing to take a risk, they are willing to try stuff out,” said Mr. Olthuis. “They all have a very strong feeling of freedom. That’s why they came here.”

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Koen Olthuis, Hong Kong design week

By Today’s living
BODW
February.2015

 

The business of Design Week (BODW), organized by the Hong Kong Design Centre, has been a key event for the local design community since 2002. BODW 2014 saw the arrival of leading designers from Sweden and all over the world,, carrying with them invaluable insights from the fields of architecture, fashion, technology and culture. Today’s Living talked with six of the design heavyweights present at this year’s event, namely Anna Hessle, Erik Nissen Johanson, Koen Olthuis, Lisa Lindstrom, Thomas Eriksson and Marcus Engman. In this issue, we introduce you to three of these interior and architectural leaders, all of whom are masters of their industry.

 

 

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Dutch solution to Miami’s rising seas? Floating islands

By Jenny Staletovich
Miami Herald
August.23.2014

 

 

Maule Lake has been many things over the years: industrial rock pit, aquatic racetrack, American Riviera. Now it is being pitched as something else entirely: a glitzy solution to South Florida’s rising seas.

In the land of boom and bust where no real estate proposition seems too outlandish — Opa-locka’s Ali Baba Boulevard connects to Aladdin Street in one of the more kitschy bids to sell swampland — a Dutch team wants to build Amillarah Private Islands, 29 lavish floating homes and an “amenity island” on about 38 acres of lake in the old North Miami Beach quarry connected to the Intracoastal Waterway just north of Haulover Inlet.

The villa flotilla, its creators say, would be sustainable and completely off the grid, tricked out to survive hurricanes, storm surge and any other water hazard mother nature might throw its way. Chic 6,000-square-foot, concrete-and-glass villas would come with pools, boathouses or docks, desalinization systems, solar and hydrogen-powered generators and optional beaches on their own 10,000-square-foot concrete and Styrofoam islands.

Asking price? About $12.5 million each.

If this sounds like a joke, think again. This, as the Dutch say, ain’t no grap.

“We’re serious people,” said Frank Behrens, vice president of Dutch Docklands, which has partnered with Koen Olthuis, one of Holland’s pioneering aqua-tects.

Still, it’s hard not to be skeptical.

“It’s both fantastic and fantastical,” said North Miami Beach City Planner Carlos Rivero, before adding, diplomatically, “This is quite a departure.”

Behrens won’t say exactly how much the company has invested so far but suggested it is enough to take the plan seriously.

“Look who I’m sitting next to,” he said during an interview, pointing to Greenberg Traurig shareholder attorney Kerri Barsh and Carlos Gimenez, a vice president at Balsera Communications and son of the county’s mayor, both hired to help ensure the project’s success. “This isn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s buy a lake and do a project and make money.’ It’s ‘Let’s buy a lake and show people what we’re capable of.’ ”

Together Dutch Docklands and Olthius’ firm, Waterstudio.NL, have completed between 800 and 1,000 floating houses in Holland along with 50 other projects including — if there were any question about their design chops —a floating prison near Amsterdam. The team is also constructing the first phase of a 185-villa floating resort in the Maldives — Behrens said 90 have already sold. Olthius also designed a snowflake-shaped floating hotel in Norway, floating mosques in the United Arab Emirates and even a floating greenhouse out of storage containers usually used by oil companies.

The team believes that by building an extreme example of a floating house in Miami, with every bell and whistle imaginable, it can open up a new American market to a way of building that has addressed rising waters in the Netherlands for a century.

“We chose Miami because we know this city is one of the most affected cities by sea-level rise,” Olthuis said by phone from Holland. “Once it’s done, you’ll see it’s a beautiful archipelago effect in the lake.”

So can you get a mortgage? Buy windstorm insurance? Declare a homestead exemption?

Yes, yes and yes, Barsh said. Practically speaking, the barge-like structures are considered houses, not boats, she said. A 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision on a Riviera Beach houseboat that Barsh helped argue cleared the way by declaring floating homes real estate. After the victory, Barsh started talking to Behrens — they met through the Dutch Chamber of Commerce he founded in Miami in 2011 — about Dutch-style floating homes in the United States.

“Before, there was a lack of clarity,” Barsh said. The court decision “opened up an opportunity for this development to go forward.”

Barsh, who also represents rock-mining interests, says such projects could potentially provide a valuable way to reuse rock pits scattered throughout South Florida.

But what would it mean for the manatees that lumber through the saltwater lake, which is designated critical habitat?

Protections would remain in place, the team said. And the islands, with specially contoured undersides, could provide a habitat for sea life, Behrens said.

Still, making the project fit local laws could be tricky. In a preliminary review by the North Miami Beach city staff, Rivero raised questions as mundane as the need for parking. The city’s civil engineer wondered about stormwater runoff, among other things. And police say they would need a boat from the developer to patrol the islands. There’s one other thing: North Miami Beach’s rules for such developments so far apply only to land.

Luis Espinoza, spokesman for the county’s Division of Environmental Resources Management, said county officials would need to evaluate the islands for environmental impacts. And there’s the matter of taxes.

“If it’s a permanent-type fixture, then it will be assessed as property,” property appraiser spokesman Robert Rodriguez said.

Over the next 100 years, scientists predict climate change will alter water on a global scale. Seas will swell and coasts will shrink. Weather will become more extreme, with stronger hurricanes, harder rains and higher floods. Even routine tides will rise. And almost nowhere else will those effects likely be more dire than in South Florida, where beachfront highrises and marshy suburbs sit on soggy land kept dry by a complicated network of canals, culverts, pumps and other controls.

So solving the problems of coastal living in the 21st century could be lucrative.

“Here in Miami, it’s an artificial landscape, manipulated by mankind at a very high cost,” said Dale Morris, an economist with the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C., who is not connected to the Amillarah project. “So to think it can be maintained at no cost is nuts. I’m an economist. Nothing is free in this world.”

The floating islands, he pointed out, do nothing to solve larger climate problems for cities in South Florida, where flooding now occurs with normal high tides in Miami Beach.

Florida, like Holland, will have to tackle gradual sea rise in addition to event-related flooding like hurricane storm surges, Dutch landscape architect Steven Slabbers said at a recent workshop on resilient design in Miami.

“It’s an inexorable, decade-by-decade phenomenon,” he said.

Considering other Dutch designs — protective dunes tunneled out to hold parking, parks that become ponds and highways that float — a rock-pit-turned-floating-housing by using drilling rig technology might not seem so farfetched.

In recent months, the last new project on Maule Lake, Marina Palms, has shown that demand for lakefront property with Intracoastal access is high. Condos in the first of two buildings, which got the glam treatment this year on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing Miami, sold out. But Maule Lake has not always been a twinkling star in the real estate firmament. It began life as a rock pit, when E.P. Maule moved from Palm Beach in 1913. Maule Industries would become the state’s largest cement manufacturing plant before falling into bankruptcy in the 1970s after it was purchased by Joe Ferre, whose son, former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre, managed the company.

“That area was rich in rock pits, quarries and concrete manufacturing,” explained historian Paul George, who said the rock pits pocked the largely industrial area well into the 1960s.

The porous limestone mines fill with water from the area’s high water table. The new lakes provided even more waterfront property to an area already rich with water views, creating a developer’s dream — and possibly an environmentalist’s nightmare.

In addition to worries about marine life, building on the lake may raise concerns about water quality and potential effects on the nearby Biscayne Bay aquatic preserve and the Oleta River, another protected ecosystem. There might also be a question of encroaching on some of the area’s rare open space.

“We have a history in South Florida of viewing open spaces as a pallet for more product to be built on,” said Richard Grosso, a Nova Southeastern University law professor and director of the Environmental and Land Use Law Clinic. “Florida’s always been a place where we’ve suspended the laws of nature and physics and people haven’t always taken into account that there’s a finite amount of space.”

Gimenez, the public relations executive who is also a land use attorney, said the Dutch team has already met with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers about concerns. The team also plans to meet with neighbors. And while nothing has officially been submitted, he said no one has raised objections. The 7- to 13-foot-deep lake, he pointed out, is too deep to harbor much marine life or sea grass.

Gimenez also said floating islands are better than the alternative: filling the lake and building highrises. Once mined, rock pits are sometimes refilled with construction and demolition debris. Developers in Hallandale Beach, for example, are filling a 45-acre lake with debris to build an office park. Rivero, the planner, said a North Miami Beach ordinance prohibits the lake from being filled, although property trustee Raymond Gaylord Williams, who had the property listed with a local Realtor for $19.5 million, could challenge that.

But getting a variance from a county ordinance regulating waterways could be a feat, since so few are granted, said land use and environmental attorney Howard Nelson.

“Let’s face it, [what developer] wouldn’t rather replace a houseboat with a houseboat office,” he said. “All of a sudden you don’t have the bay anymore. You just have dock space after dock space after dock space with offices.”

Behrens, a former banker who grew up in Aruba and was CEO of a Miami-based Dutch distillery, said the team has been meeting with various regulatory agencies to size up the obstacles since 2013 and will resolve issues as they come up. They hope to have permits completed within the next year and a half, he said.

“It’s a step-by-step approach,” he said. “But we’re Dutch. …We know how to stay and how to make success.”

 

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Villa IJburg plot 3

Archilovers, Jan 2014

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 1e 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. The top floor only occupies half the floor-surface, creating a wide terrace where again the wooden decking continues inside. When the large sliding doors are open, inside and outside space blend together.

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Against the tide

Fast Company, Jeff Chu, November 2013

For centuries, the Netherlands has suffered from catastrophic floods. As the rest of the world now reckons with the same fate, the Dutch are sharing–and selling–what they’ve learned.

Huib de Vriend was 5 years old when the great flood of 1953 hit. It was a chilly Saturday night, and the local radio stations had gone off the air at their usual hour near bedtime, just before the full force of the storm blew in. What shook young Huib more than the whistle of the wind or the thrum of the rain was the panic in his grandmother’s voice. “She was yelling: ‘The water is coming! The water is coming!’ ” he recalls. That was when he knew something was wrong. His grandmother was usually a voice of calm in the family.

They fled to the attic. Huib’s father ventured down to the ground floor, which had filled like a bathtub, to raid the pantry for provisions. A few days later, soldiers arrived in dinghies to help the de Vriends evacuate to their local church, which was built on the village’s highest ground; not long after, they were moved by rail to a town 10 miles away, where Huib attended kindergarten for several weeks before his family was allowed to return home. “Only later did I realize that my grandmother belonged to the generations with an inbred fear of water,” he says. “She never even learned to swim. It was not normal to swim. So you can imagine that even a meter of water was enough to make them nervous.”

The de Vriends survived, but more than 1,800 of their compatriots did not. Three hundred thousand Dutch were left homeless, and one-tenth of the nation’s farmland flooded. The famously pragmatic Queen Juliana, who had banned her subjects from bowing and curtseying to her, pulled on rubber boots to join the relief effort. “God,” she declared, “now calls upon our powers of resilience.”

In the Netherlands, that resilience ultimately meant far more than a season or two of furious rebuilding. De Vriend grew up to become a coastal and fluvial morphologist, a kind of scientist that studies the dynamics of shores and rivers. Though he insists the floodwaters did not set his career path, he acknowledges that “you don’t forget something like that.” (He also learned to swim.) He meanwhile became part of a growing army of engineers, designers, and scientists who since 1953 have made it their life’s mission to work with water, as the Netherlands built itself into the world’s premier laboratory for how to tame the rivers and the seas. Today, the country’s ideas and expertise may be its most valuable export. “Retreat is not an option, though we know it’s dangerous. The only option is to protect ourselves,” says Free University of Amsterdam professor Jeroen Aerts, the world’s foremost expert in flood-risk management. “If we invest right now in innovative measures, we can avoid a lot of damage in the future.”

Visitors who come to the Netherlands in the hopes of seeing a foolproof system of flood control that they can easily duplicate back in their home countries are bound to be disappointed. The Dutch have learned the hard way that no single solution will suffice. Their rebuilding efforts since 1953 have evolved away from post-disaster clichés–We’ll show the storm who’s boss!–to something far more sophisticated. What you see there now, especially what has been built in the past few years, is indeed the architecture of the future, as the fight against rising tides goes global. But it’s also the attitude of the future. The Dutch have lately been working with nature instead of battling it, lowering barriers against the water instead of raising them. They’re harnessing the power of the cloud–enormous amounts of data and cutting-edge computer modeling–to predict the consequences of the clouds. They’re building seawalls so beautiful you wouldn’t recognize them. And as I discovered, the most important lessons they are trying to impart might not be about dikes and dunes at all.

Nearly half of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the sea, and hundreds of millions more reside in river valleys. In Hong Kong and Singapore, New York and Shanghai, thousands of acres of new waterfront land have been created through the magic buildup of landfill–and then stacked with luxury condos and gleaming office towers. Yet the risk of coastal living has grown in lockstep with that land’s soaring value. Seas are rising. And land is sinking. The soil under Jakarta, Indonesia, for instance, drained steadily of groundwater, is collapsing 4 inches a year.

As scientists predict a wetter, stormier future for much of the planet, the Dutch have become a nationwide consulting company, fanning across the world to talk about water. They are working on water-related projects from the Mississippi to the Mekong, and their thinking was a cornerstone of New York’s $20 billion post–Hurricane Sandy protection plan. “We are branding this knowledge around the globe, and we are benefiting from it,” says Piet Dircke, who is widely known as the “water guru” at the Amsterdam-based engineering-and-consulting firm Arcadis. “You don’t need too many Dutch,” he says, “but a few can help you a little bit!” Dircke is a jovial evangelist for better water management, who speaks of dikes with a passion usually reserved for football teams and refers to New Orleans’s revamped levees as “absolutely fabulous!” He spends about 200 days a year away from home, and his recent itinerary reflects the demand for Dutch help: Bangkok, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Dhaka, Shanghai, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco.

When Dircke started at Arcadis 20 years ago, it was mainly a Dutch company–“95% of our business was Dutch,” he says. Last year, just 12% of the firm’s $3.35 billion in revenue came from the Netherlands; the U.S. was by far its largest market. Arcadis is working with the Army Corps of Engineers on wetlands rejuvenation in the Mississippi Delta. It is helping to restore the Los Angeles River’s natural flow. And it did hydrological-modeling work for the Bloomberg administration on Jamaica Bay in New York, hoping it will lead to more post-Sandy flood-protection business. “If I were a New Yorker, I would be very excited,” he says. “How fantastically interesting!”

And for the Dutch, how fantastically lucrative. It’s undeniable, says Matthijs van Ledden, an executive at the engineering firm Royal HaskoningDHV, that the surge in Dutch business is closely related to the surge of global disasters. After Katrina, van Ledden moved to New Orleans for four years to lead a team that helped the Army Corps strengthen the city’s levees. Governments fund most of the water business, but lately, Royal HaskoningDHV has seen strong growth in corporate spending, too. In Thailand the 2011 floods crippled factories of multinationals like Honda and Canon, stalling their supply chains. Today, they’re devising their own risk-reduction plans. “They could wait for the government,” van Ledden says. But in many locations they are choosing to move forward independently, and as fast as possible.

While these Dutch companies are competitors, they also collaborate. Arcadis, Royal HaskoningDHV, and a third major Dutch contractor, Boskalis, won business in Louisiana after teaming up with the Dutch government on a post-Katrina plan that offered the Army Corps ideas for rebuilding. They did the same for New York after Sandy last year. All three companies also belong to a research consortium that is testing new flood-protection solutions in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, five smaller engineering and design firms have banded to form an export-focused group called Dutch Water Design, which now has projects in Belgium, Brazil, and India.

Dutch ambitions go well beyond retrofitting. Architect Koen Olthuis’s atelier, Waterstudio.nl, does only water-based projects and has designed several floating houses in the Netherlands. Now, in the Maldives, he–in partnership with the developer Dutch Docklands–is building a resort, complete with an 18-hole golf course, that will float entirely on a Styrofoam-and-concrete foundation. He sees it as an early step into a wholly new market; eventually, he’d like to build floating housing for the poor in the Maldives and Bangladesh. “Building on water gives so much more freedom than land,” Olthuis says. “The next step is not going higher into the air, like 50 or 100 years ago. It’s going over the water.”

Such futuristic talk may reinforce the Netherlands’s reputation as a magical nation of water whisperers, a notion that van Ledden finds laughable. When he lived in New Orleans, he says, some people spoke to him as if he were some sort of Dutch saint. “People look at you as if, when you touch something, everything will become dry. But we need to be honest. It took us about 10 centuries to come to the conclusion that we needed to develop a long-term strategy, because short-term measures did not work.” Indeed, his homeland suffered gravely to get all this expertise–and all this business.

here are 16 million Dutch crammed onto a piece of waterlogged land that, if it were part of the U.S., would be one of the smallest states. “Everyone sees the Netherlands as a place with people who know how to deal with all this,” says Taco Kuijers, a designer at the urban-design firm Posad. “But we’re not geniuses. We’ve just learned a lot from our mistakes. And we’ve learned slowly.”
If you praise the Dutch for being “ahead” in flood protection, you must also acknowledge that they have been “ahead” in waterborne woe. They’ve been losing lives to floods long before the 20th century–the killed as many as 10,000 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes. Perversely, St. Elizabeth is the patron saint of widows, dying children, and the homeless.

Still, it was the 1953 flood–a Netherlandish Katrina–that truly mobilized the country. It inspired unprecedented investment in a massive, multidecade project, known as the Deltaworks, to fortify the coast. Traditional dike-building materials–clay, sand, fear–were replaced by steel, concrete, and confidence in modern engineering. Rotterdam got a new guardian angel, the Maeslantkering, which looks like a giant drawbridge toppled sideways into the water. Thousands of tourists visit each year to marvel at its wings–gates, each as wide as the Eiffel Tower is tall, that swing shut to protect Europe’s largest port. The Delta­works effort also led to the 5.6-mile-long, $3.5 billion Oosterscheldekering, completed in 1986, which forms the world’s largest storm-surge barrier. A monument at one end captures the Dutch sense of conquest-by-construction: hier gaan over het tij de maan de wind en wij–“Here the tide is ruled by the wind, the moon, and us.”

Huib de Vriend, as an academic at the think tank Delft Hydraulics, built models predicting how water would flow through and past the Oosterscheldekering. He also tracked how the barrier disrupted the flow of sand needed to replenish tidal shoals and beaches that naturally help to slow waves and soften storms. He says, in professor-speak, that the shoals “evolved negatively” because of the Oosterscheldekering. In laymen’s terms, they shrank because they didn’t get enough sand.

Dutch law compels the government to maintain the coastline at 1990 levels. This is politically sensible and ecologically stupid–a waterfront home may seem permanent, but shorelines shift. This strategy, which keeps the beach a half-mile wide in places, requires a costly annual deposit of 1 million cubic meters of sand. Which compelled a group of scientists including de Vriend and his Delft colleague Marcel Stive to solve an interesting puzzle: Can nature be harnessed to help do this unnatural thing?

Two years ago, the Sand Engine was born. Twenty million cubic meters of sand were mounded to form a half-mile-wide, 1.25-mile-long beach extension. Hydrologists and engineers had calculated that currents would eventually move 60% of the sand northward, 40% south. “Look what happens if you build a sand castle at the edge of the surf and the tide comes in,” says Stive. “You see the wave diffuse around it. The sand is not gone. It just spreads in all directions. If a sand castle disappears in half an hour, the Sand Engine is supposed to last 20 years.”

The Sand Engine, which is shaped roughly like a stiletto stepping onto the existing shoreline, does mostly what its designers expected: It buffers a vulnerable coast while delivering recreational and ecological benefits. The lagoon created by the “heel” has become a popular kite-surfing venue as well as an important habitat for juvenile flatfish. Flocks of gulls loll on the sand. Sea grass has taken root, dotting the white expanse with green. The sand has traveled roughly according to plan. Already, local governments in France and England have initiated projects mimicking the Dutch design.

This might be premature: The Sand Engine team also expects surprises. “All models are built with inputs, a system, and outputs. But what if you don’t know how the inputs will vary?” says de Vriend, who is now 66. Usually he has a gentle, grandfatherly mien and thinks for a few beats before speaking. But as we stand on an escarpment carved by the waves since his last visit to the Sand Engine, he seems like a giddy 4-year-old. “Isn’t this fantastic?” he tells me. “The dynamics are always changing, and it’s very challenging to understand. Models are never more than what we already know.”

Six miles north of the Sand Engine sits the district of Scheveningen, which has two distinct stretches of seafront. The northern section is chockablock with cheap souvenir stands and neon-lit bars. On the southern stretch, the sky feels bigger. Construction crews here are finishing a new, $100 million promenade that’s all bright and clean, bleached wood and powder-blue steel, as if the scene had been run through an Instagram filter called “New Dutch.”

There was no dike here before–it was one of the coast’s least-protected sections–and only the most knowing observer would notice the one there now. The rest of us would see an undulating waterfront park, sloping seaward from the dunes to a one-way street for cars, then to a bike path, then to a pedestrian area and beach. The largest project of architect Age Fluitman’s career, it is an artful demonstration of how to integrate traditional beachside amenities with sophisticated protections against future storms. “Making a dike here was quite extreme. You want something 10 or 12 meters high, and 30 meters wide–a big thing!” says Fluitman as we stroll the promenade. Dressed in a half-buttoned check shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops, he looks more like a beachgoer than a boardwalk builder. Originally, he explains, the government hired Spanish architect Manuel de Solà-Morales, who was renowned for rejuvenating Barcelona’s waterfront. Fluitman worked with Solà-Morales and took over after his boss died last year.

Building a multilayered dike hidden under a beachfront is not easy. Regulators decreed that no single object on this dike, which is designed to withstand a storm even stronger than the one in 1953, could weigh more than 700 kilograms; anything heavier could puncture the seawall mid-storm. Fluitman, lanky and athletic, lopes over to a pedestrian bridge linking the dike-top roadway with the pedestrian promenade. “It looks like steel, right? But it’s actually built of composites,” he says, beckoning me to join him underneath the bridge. Crouching, he points out the small nuts and bolts studding the ends of the beams, explaining that they’re calibrated to detach in a major storm surge. “This bridge can support 500 people. But what other bridge in the world is designed to fall apart into hundreds of pieces?” At one point during the planning process, he adds, one local official asked, “Can’t we plant some palm trees?” In response, Fluitman designed 36-foot-tall lampposts crowned with arms reaching in different directions–stylized palm trees. He smiles. “These fall apart too.”

Fluitman seems especially pleased by the contours of his promenade. He came to this beach as a boy and recalls it as straight and flat; given the chance to redesign it as an adult (he’s 36), he created horizontal and vertical curves to increase visual drama. “See these gentle hills?” Fluitman says. “This makes you interested: What’s over there? What’s beyond that bend?” He discovered that Dutch regulators didn’t want a different beach. They rejected the curved proposal, arguing that straighter beaches make stronger barriers. But Fluitman asked for evidence. He suggested that rather than rely on conventional wisdom, they do some new modeling. And in the end, he was right: A curvy coast dissipates wave forces in a way that a straight seawall cannot.

The Dutch love data. Fluitman got his curves because of it. And a Dutch sense of caution has compelled everyone working in the field of flood control to collect and analyze immense amounts of it to make a watertight case. The government has mapped by air, to astonishing detail with laser and radar, the entirety of the nation’s topography. That information has inspired one of the most promising–and exportable–new innovations: 3Di, a cloud-based system that can simulate the effects of a rainstorm or a levee breach, storm surge or a water-main break. “The Netherlands is very conservative. We think we can solve everything with a bit of sand,” says Jan-Maarten Verbree, who heads IT at Nelen & Schuurmans, the water-focused consultancy behind 3Di. “But we say that with a bit of IT, you can increase safety even more.”

The computer system is based on the work of a professor at the Technical University of Delft. Wytze Schuurmans, Nelen & Schuurmans’s principal, says 3Di is 1,000 times faster–and can be accurate “more or less to the inch”–than any conventional flood models currently in use. In the Nelen & Schuurmans lab, a Spartan collection of desks located in a house in the medieval heart of Utrecht, Verbree and his colleague Olga Pleumeekers hover over an on-screen projection of the city of Delft. Pleumeekers decides to dump nearly 4 inches of rain on Delft in just one hour, “just to see.” This is not realistic, she tells me. “It’s a lot of water.”

She zooms in on a neighborhood between a key canal and Delft’s Cathedral. Within minutes, the floodwaters reveal the town’s topography–though the canal has spilled its banks, some canal-side streets remain dry while roads further inland are awash. Within three hours, water laps at the Cathedral’s apse, and as Pleumeekers zooms out for a regional view, a spreading quilt of blue reveals the extent of the storm. Any sane person would want to flee, but not northward–the model shows that the A4, the main artery to Amsterdam, is now underwater too.

The goal here goes beyond disaster planning for the Netherlands; the firm hopes to build a web-based version of 3Di that would allow a Manhattan building manager to simulate, say, a hurricane’s effect on his apartment tower. What 3Di most resembles is an aqua-centric version of SimCity–“but with realistic data and calculations,” says Verbree. When Pleumeekers switches to a machine holding data for Long Island–less detailed than what it has for the Netherlands, but sufficient to do basic simulations–I can see the potential.

What should we do, she asks? “Make it rain,” I reply. We center a cloud over an area on the edge of New York that was hard-hit by Superstorm Sandy and unleash 2.5 inches of rain. Within two hours, widening blue ribbons streak across the area. After five, the water has drained from the higher ground. Even after a day, low-lying coastal areas are still wet.

If you were to choose a person who best represents how Dutch thinking about water management has evolved over the past two decades, it might not be an engineer or architect at all. In fact, it might be Tracy Metz, who was appointed in 2007 to a national task force convened to propose ideas for the next 50 years of flood preparedness. Metz was, in her own words, “a representative of the people.” She was a journalist, with a typical awareness of the importance of water in the country’s past as well as in its policy making–an awareness reinforced by the 200-to-300-euro-per-person levy that every resident pays for local flood protection. But beyond her own story–born in Los Angeles, she moved to the Netherlands in the 1980s and jokes about growing up in a place with too little water, only to end up in one with too much–she says she was no water expert.

Over time, she became one. She learned that the dream of Holland as watertight fortress–canals are moats, straighter rivers are safer rivers, higher walls are better walls–is compelling but flawed. She discovered that the materials deployed in the Deltaworks, the country’s coastal bulwark, were sophisticated, but the methodology was essentially “the way they’ve done it from the Middle Ages.” Last year, she wrote Sweet & Salt: Water and the Dutch, the seminal book on Dutch water management. One of the book’s lessons is how Metz’s own education coincided with a shift in the official Dutch mind-set: They now accept that Mother Nature may be hard to tame but she seems willing to partner. “We used to defend against the water as our enemy,” Metz says. “You could say that there’s a new attitude: Water as our frenemy.”

This attitude has become as crucial to the Dutch as their technical sophistication–if not more so. And once again, floods helped bring about the change. In 1993 and 1995, as Deltaworks finally neared completion, floods hit the Dutch from behind. The Rhine, Meuse, and Waal rivers swelled with Alpine snowmelt, forcing 250,000 people from their homes. The decision was made to strengthen river defenses, but this time in a different way. For centuries, the Dutch had tried to channel rivers and streams into ever-narrower courses and canals. But gradually they came to realize that river systems were akin to greyhounds; you can try to confine them to small spaces, but they will always need room to run.

Hence, Room for the River, an initiative with 34 interconnected projects, including, most ambitiously, the digging of a new 2.5-mile channel in the city of Nijmegen that will alleviate the pressure at a particularly tricky bend in the river and create an island from what was a peninsula. In some places, dikes will be bolstered and raised. In others, they’ll be lowered, a radical, even heretical notion in a land where dikes have been piled ever higher for more than a millennium.

The largest dike to be lowered will be in the Noordwaard, an area in the southwestern Netherlands. For the past century, this area has been polder–wetland turned into fertile fields. Within the next two years, a 1.5-mile stretch of a 25-foot-tall dike will be lowered by 10 feet, creating new spillways for the New Merwede River. Nearly 8 square miles of fields once planted with potatoes and wheat will be “depolderized,” with large portions of the land flooding during times of high water.

Dikes are relatively easy to deconstruct. But entire livelihoods–especially those of a people who have, for centuries, clawed dry land from sea and swamp–are tougher. “This is a national safety project. But even with national aims, we have had to deal with personal interests,” says Hans Brouwer, a senior river expert with Rijkswaterstaat, the federal agency for flood protection. Fifteen farms were condemned, along with low-lying homes that will be threatened by the new spillways. “There were 75 families living in the Noordwaard. Forty will stay. It has been difficult. It has been painful.”

The government has done little to buy influence, refusing to pay above market for condemned properties. But neither has it deployed eminent domain. Vic Gremmer, a social worker who moved to the Noordwaard “to stay in nature,” says his payoff and the building subsidies offered by the authorities didn’t cover the costs of his new land and construction of his new house, down the road and up a small but significant rise from the old one. “We lived there for 21 years,” he says as we sip coffee in his new kitchen. He gazes out at his new patio and the new reed-edged canal beyond that. “We’ve got this new house, and these beautiful sights. But the old house, we were used to it–the keys go here, that goes there. Our children were born there.”

Perhaps the most innovative element of Room for the River is how officials built relationships with those whom the program will displace. Room for the River has project managers whose main job is to talk with residents. One whom I met was formerly a political lobbyist at EU headquarters in Brussels. He calls his current work “lobbying at the kitchen-table level.” The long-term approach in the Noordwaard has relied heavily on humility; officials repeatedly struck various compromises to help win residents’ support–or at least acquiescence. And slowly, through these conversations–15 years and counting–the officials helped Gremmer and most of his neighbors to understand the science behind the project as well as the necessity.

An effort like the depolderization–and more broadly, Room for the River–“is not only about engineering and design and technical innovation. It’s also about collaboration, a regional approach, and a mind-set,” says Henk Ovink, a former director-general at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, who has been exported to Washington, D.C., to serve as special adviser to Shaun Donovan, secretary of housing and urban development. “You can’t build a levee with a mind-set–you need money, you need ideas, and you need innovation. At the same time, you will never build those things if the mind-set isn’t right.”

Gremmer says there’s much to like about his new home. It sits 13 feet above sea level, so it’s unquestionably safer. He’s an avid birdwatcher, and a variety of species have been arriving in greater numbers. And if he’s hungry for fish, he just slides open the big glass doors to his patio and casts his line. The canal out back teems with eel, carp, and his favorite, snoekbaars–pike-perch. “Filet it,” he says. “Put it in a pan with a little bit of lemon, salt, pepper, butter. Delicious.”

“Are you happy here?” I ask.

He sighs a little before replying: “We’re not there yet.”

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Schwimmende Holländer

Drinnen & Draußen,Nadine Oberbuber, October 2013

Weil die Niederlande viele Einwohner, aber wenig Platz haben, bauen sie einfach ins Wasser. Und fluten dafür sogar ihre Polder. So lernen Hausbesitzer das Schwimmen.

Natürlich kann man es verrückt nennen, was die Holländer tun. Eigentlich dürfte es einen großen Teil ihres Landes nämlich gar nicht geben. Dass Gegenden wie Westland trotzdem existieren und viele Menschen dort wohnen, das verdanken sie Pumpanlagen, die das Land trockenlegen. Zuerst bauten die Holländer Windmühlen, später gigantische Pumpwerke. Die befördern das Wasser, das von unten in die Polder drückt, über den Deich nach draußen in die See. Das ist verrückt. Aber nun sollen viele Pumpen abgestellt werden und die Polder voll mit Wasser laufen. Warum? Damit dort noch mehr Menschen wohnen können. Denn Holland hat ziemlich viele Einwohner, aber nur sehr wenig Platz und baut künftig seine Häuser aufs Wasser.

Einer, der vormacht, wie das geht, ist Architekt Koen Olthuis. Er hat sich international als Wasserarchitekt einen Namen gemacht und seine Idee von der schwimmenden Stadt auf den gefluteten Poldern schon vielen Ungläubigen erklärt. „Ihr verrückten Holländer, hört man die Menschen geradezu denken“, sagt er manchmal amüsiert, „es kostet stets eine Menge Mühe, ihnen zu erklären, dass es sehr logisch ist, was wir hier tun.“ Denn es ist nun einmal so, dass mehr als 16 Millionen Einwohner in diesem Land leben, das nicht einmal so groß ist wie Niedersachsen, aber dreimal so dicht besiedelt.

Ein Fünftel der Landesfläche vom Wasser bedeckt

Kaum irgendwo auf der Welt quetschen sich so viele Menschen auf engsten Raum wie in den Niederlanden, 400 Einwohner je Quadratkilometer. Wir Deutschen kommen nur auf 231. Doch während es bei uns dünnbesiedelte Landstriche gibt mit Wiesen und Wäldern, gibt es in denjenigen Teilen Hollands, in denen wenige Menschen wohnen, vor allem eins: Wasser.

Rund ein Fünftel der Landesfläche ist vom Wasser bedeckt, etwa vom Binnensee IJusselmeer. Flevoland, die Provinz südlich davon, existiert nur, weil die Holländer diese Polderregion dem Meer abgetrotzt haben. Gut ein Viertel der Niederlande liegt unterhalb des Meeresspiegels – dummerweise genau die Fläche, in der über 60 Prozent der Bevölkerung wohnen, im Städteknubbel zwischen Amsterdam, Rotterdam und Den Haag, die langsam aus allen Straßen und Grachten platzen. Die Region würde sofort voll Wasser laufen, wenn die Pumpen stillstehen, das nächste große Hochwasser kommt oder der Meeresspiegel wegen der Klimaerwärmung steigt. Dann bliebe bloß ein schmaler Rand entlang der deutschen Grenze übrig, der noch aus dem Wasser schaute. So weit das Katastrophenszenario.

Damit es nicht dazu kommt, haben die Holländer insgesamt 3000 Kilometer schützenden Deich aufgetürmt, die das Land dauerhaft trocken halten sollen. Selbst wenn sich der Meeresspiegel um bis zu 1,3 Meter heben würde, wie Klimaforscher bis 2100 prophezeien, schwappte das Wasser kaum über alle Deiche. Aber sie zu erhöhen wäre immens teuer. Deswegen findet Olthuis: Die Holländer hätten schon immer eine Hassliebe zum Wasser gehabt, es sei nun an der Zeit, sich mit ihm zu versöhnen. Er will, dass seine Landleute das Wasser weniger fürchten, sondern es besiedeln. Sie könnten Wasserstraßen bevölkern, weite Hafenflächen in den überfüllten Großstädten oder das IJsselmeer. Demnächst wohnen sie in Amphibienhäusern und schwimmenden Siedlungen, und wenn das Wasser steigt, hebt es die Häuser einfach um ein paar Meter an.

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A visual log

cities@sea, Samuel David Bruce, October 2013

TRACY METZ, AMSTERDAM FRAMER, AND KOEN OLTHUIS

Here’s an excerpt of the match report Archie, my roommate from Glasgow wrote. I didn’t play because of the egg sized mound I grew on my forehead after getting knee’d in the head last weekend. I’m traveling quite a lot in October and I want to keep the limited mental capabilities I have working in ship shape. But still I got a shout-out!

The game started brightly for the Rotterdammers, within 5 minutes putting pressure on the men from Utrecht. The ball was snapped out inside the 22 from captain Mikey ‘12:30 SHARP’ Hornby to stand-off ‘Uncle’ Archie Pollock, pop-passing to new boy Sander Korel, who bashed his way through 3 defenders to crash down for 5 points. It was the first showing of a strong game from the young upstart Korel, who was to finish as joint man of the match. More points soon followed, as Dirk ‘here comes the hot stepper’ de Raaff ghosted by the Panther defense, breaking his side stepping virginity past one player in a particularly strong solo run. The step was so powerful however, that it damaged his tendons, and de Raaff will now be sidelined for several months, along with other notable injuries Pieter ‘we score more points, we win de game’ Joosse, Frank ‘crabhand’ Nijenhuis, ‘Bram the tram’ van den Pasch, and ‘so good they named him thrice’ Samuel David Bruce, who expertly donned the club bear mascot outfit and added at least 10 points to the score line.

On friday I took the train up to Amsterdam to meet Tracy Metz, a journalist who recently published a book called ‘Sweet and Salt: Water and the Dutch.’ The book is a beautiful artifact. It explains how the Netherlands’ manages its complex and dynamic relationship with water and points out what the rest of the world can learn from the Dutch. Alongside co-author Maartje van den Heuvel, Metz’s writing and use of photography, art-historical analysis, and architectural design shows how the Netherlands’ battle with both sweet (fresh) and salt water has evolved over the centuries.

Her book has put her into the global spotlight. She’s the spokesperson at water management conferences, a lecturer all over universities in the U.S., and a go-to for journalists and writers investigating these issues. Although she described herself as “no expert,” she certainly is.

Ms. Metz told me that she is shell-shocked about the success she’s had on her book. She hears her name called all over the place, but automatically thinks ‘who? me?’ We talked for an hour about the research I’ve done so far. She seemed to enjoy flipping through my sketchbook. Her lunch date at the end of my hour with her was with the Consul General of the United States in Amsterdam, Randy Berry. From the State Department: Mr. Berry’s career with the State Department has also taken him to postings in Bangladesh, Egypt, Uganda (twice), and South Africa, as well as Washington DC.  Mr. Berry holds a State Department Superior Honor Award, and is a nine-time Meritorious Honor Award recipient.  He speaks Spanish and Arabic. It was very cool to get to shake his hand and tell him about my Watson project. He told me he could connect me with some people in places I’m heading out to later on in the year.

Later on that Friday afternoon, I stumbled by a print shop. Reproductions of old maps of Amsterdam caught my eye. I went inside and started chatting with the shop owner, an Amsterdammer who has lived in the city his whole life. I never caught his name, but he started telling me some pretty interesting things–his hypotheses about why the Dutch are the way they are. Growing up, his Dad was a collector, so thats how he starting getting into collecting maps, prints, etchings, and other artworks that he now sells in his tiny little underground shop. He sells original works and reproductions. The shop owner seemed to be very knowledgable about Dutch history–probably because he knows a lot about the background behind the images he sells. These three things from our conversation stuck out–

1. Because of the North Sea fishery there was always a great abundance of fatty, fresh herring. The Dutch never had to worry about feeding themselves and could focus on other issues, like patching up and draining their deltaic landscape, building ships, making trading routes, and inventing technology. The fish set Dutch up on a platform for success.

2. Because of the nature of the delta landscape, survival required co-operation. The Dutch needed to work together, look each other in the eye, make compromises, quell their individual egos and work together to create a landscape that was habitable. They needed to use their collective talents. This essentially explains how the water boards began. Dikes were built by the farmers who would directly benefit from them. But as the systems for water management became more complex, they needed an overseeing body to govern. Nothing could be accomplished alone.

3. Because of the work required on the land, the Dutch were naturally tall and built…during the Roman ages, Cesar’s royal guards were often from the Netherlands because of their beastly stature.

It was a fun experience, getting some Dutch cultural history from a guy in a printshop.

oday I traveled to a suburb in between the Hague and Delft to meet an architect, Koen Olthius who exclusively builds on water. In 2007 he was #121 on Time’s list of the world’s most influential people. He was such a friendly, outgoing guy and instantly made me feel as though he was as interested to talk to me as I was to talk to him. Besides all the fascinating things he taught me about his work and how it has developed over time, I saw first hand how important it is to treat people you’re with with interest and kindness. My hour with Koen Olthius reminded me of this article here, where the author talks about his encounter with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). In short, the author meets Hugh Jackman on the street and has a great first impression. Here’s the short of it:

In three minutes, Hugh Jackman turned me into a fan for life–but he didn’t sell me. He didn’t glad-hand me. He just gave me his full attention. He just acted as if, for those three minutes, I was the most important person in the world–even though he didn’t know me and has certainly forgotten me.

Just like a CEO, as an entertainer he is his “company,” and even though I’m sure it wasn’t his intention, I now see his “products” in a different, more positive light. 

That feeling totally occurred after my meeting with Mr. Olthius. When I got there, one of his colleagues gave me a free copy of his book, ‘Float!’ We sat down and talked, the whole time he explained things, he’d diagram what he was saying on architecture tracing paper so I have this long 8 foot string of tracing paper with a visual transcription of our conversation. It’s very cool.

I’ll say more about our conversation in the next post. But this is a fantastic overview of his vision. Great for anybody interested in urban issues and/or architecture!

His main point is to make cities more dynamic by opening up space up inside the city by building on a floating foundation. In doing so, he can combat a number of problems that arise from urban growth and climate change.

It was an absolute treat to talk to him!

Tomorrow, I’m back up to Amsterdam to meet a professor at the University of Amsterdam. Prof. Dr. Jeroen Aerts works at the Institute for Environmental Studies. He is a professor in the area of risk management, climate change, and water resources management.

I have a painting in the works of Tracy Metz, but I unfortunately ran out of paint and don’t think it’s worth it to spend money on more because I don’t to lug it around as I travel around Europe in October.

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Meet the man who builds things on water, from slum schools to $14 million villas

Quartz, Siraj Datoo, Aug 2013

Dutch architect Koen Olthuis specializes in building things that float. His structures, he concedes, use a similar technology to oil rigs. Yet Olthuis’s focus is elsewhere—on combating rising sea levels, floods, and a growing world population. As he outlined in a TEDx Warwick talk last year, the work he’s doing is quite literally putting land where there wasn’t any before.

Olthuis is the founder of architectural firm Waterstudio.NL, and as a native Dutchman, he often cites his own country’s history as inspiration. “In Holland, we have always been fighting against the water… 50% is under sea level,” he said in his talk. Yet he finds this ongoing battle with water “strange”, arguing that it makes the country susceptible to danger. “What if something breaks?” he said in a phone call with Quartz. His solution: “Why don’t we just use the water?”

His projects include designing homes in Holland, schools in slum neighborhoods in Bangladesh, “amphibious houses” in Colombia, a star-shaped conference center, and a 32-island golf course (with, yes, underwater glass tunnels linking the islands) in the Maldives. He’s also looking to sign a contract to design villas in Florida.

How does it work?

There are three main elements here. The floating base:

[It] is the same technology as we use in Holland. It’s made up of concrete caisson, boxes, a shoebox of concrete. We fill them with styrofoam. So you get unsinkable floating foundations.

And the bit on top?

The house itself is the same as a normal house, the same material. Then you want to figure out how to get water and electricity and remove sewage and use the same technology as cruise ships.

How it is anchored to the ground?

In Dubai, they just put sand into the water and made artificial islands. Once you put sand into the water, you can’t go back. We can go back after 150 years and there’s no damage to the habitat.

That’s impressive. So what do you do exactly?

[In the Maldives], these houses are connected to a floating boulevard… Those are connected to the sea bed with telescopic piles and as the boulevard rises up from sea level and the house rises up.

And all that means that if there’s a rise in the sea level, due to a flood or tsunami, the island will just rise?

Yes.

“We don’t believe in donating money,” he tells me. “It didn’t work in the history [sic] and it won’t work in the future.” When you give money to charity, he argues, you rarely know what impact it has had.

His response to this is the City Apps Foundation. Instead of donating money for food and aid, companies provide financing for “apps”—interchangeable, prefabricated units such as classrooms, social housing, first-aid stations, or even parking lots. Like the apps on a smartphone, they’re designed to be easy to install and launch with the minimum of fuss. After an initial free trial, schools, governments and local municipalities can lease specific “apps” for a monthly fee. The fees yield a return for the investors, and when the apps are no longer needed they can simply be packed away and assembled in another city. The foundation has raised funding from a number of Dutch companies, and Olthuis and his company provide the technology.

The foundation’s first major project is a school in a slum in Dhaka. Olthuis says that slums have specific problems that appeal to him—in particular their instability. At any moment “the government can say that we’ll take the slums out or landlords might kick them out,” so slum-dwellers tend not to invest in their communities.​

City Apps gives power to these neighborhoods, Olthuis argues, especially because they are often situated on the edge of water. In Dhaka, the school app will be a white container that stands out from the rest of the slum to create what Olthuis, perhaps inadvisedly, calls a “shock and awe effect”. The schools will contain iPads for use by the students, and women will use the space for evening classes. Within 12 weeks, the schools will have been built, transported to Dhaka, assembled and ready to use. If the community is forced to move, the school can move too with relative ease.​

Olthuis says there are two ways that the City Apps foundation is a better system for investors:

It provides accountability. Cameras inside the containers will allow investors in the project to show off the fruits of their social spending to clients or shareholders in real time.

Although the initial school app will be free, slum-dwellers will have to pay to lease extra apps, such as what Olthuis calls “functions” for sanitation (this could be anything from a toilet to a fully-fledged bathroom) — or even just the ability to print. If the slum no longer wants a specific “function”, it can be easily taken away and used elsewhere. Investors get money if more “apps” are leased

“[It’s] stupid that each [sic] four years, we build complete neighborhoods and then they leave it there.” And it kind of is. The British government spent almost £2 billion ($3.1 billion) on venues alone for the Olympics and Paralympics village for London’s 2012 games. Instead, Olthuis suggests, Olympic cities should lease floating stadiums and property. This could be assembled in advance of the games and packed away afterwards, and would be far cheaper than creating new stadiums and neighborhoods every four years. While it would certainly remove some of the sparkle around the event, it would cut a good deal of waste. In Britain, talk of how the OIympic venues could be used after the games has already faded away.

Work on the “ocean flower”, part of a project that will see 185 new floating villas, has already begun and the first villa will be inhabitable as soon as December this year. Americans, Chinese, Russians and even hotel operators have already forked out the $1 million cost per villa.

Olthuis has a contract with for 42 amillarah islands (private villas in the Maldivian language). These will be 2,500 sq. meters (26,910 sq. feet), and, at $12 million-$14 million, for the “stupidly rich”, Olthuis lets slip.

You can take a speedboat-taxi from the airport in 15 minutes or a three-person “U-boat” submarine will get you there in 40. (Russian president Vladimir Putin was seen modelling the five-person version.) Alternatively, spend three weeks learning how to maneuver a U-boat and a license is yours.

What if there was a hotel-cum-conference center in the middle of the ocean? Construction on this complex will begin towards the beginning of 2014 and with it come some interesting innovations. While a starfish has five “legs”, Olthuis’s company will build six. This means that if a section needs to be renovated, they could replace one leg with the spare (kept at the harbor) within three days instead of having to cordon off the area for months.

In his TEDx Warwick talk, Olthuis jokes that even if you’re on honeymoon in the Maldives, after a few days of glorious swimming, you kind of just want to play golf. And while the golf course might not be swarming with newly-weds, it might attract a new set of tourists from Russia and China.

Even if you’re not much of a golfer, it’s likely you’ll make a trip just to walk in the underground tunnels between the islands. And yes, the tunnel will be transparent.

Colombia has three big flood zones and every time there’s a flood, local municipalities have to pay a lot of money in compensation, according to Olthuis. To combat this, the local government has signed up Waterstudio.NL to build 1500 “amphibian” houses with a floating foundation.

So while the above photo depicts a floating house in a dry season, the house will simply rise in a wet season. While it’s a fairly simple concept, it has radical implications.​

Olthuis’s biggest impact so far has been in Holland, where a number of water villas have already been completed. With over 50% of the country below sea level, this provided the perfect playground for his concepts to become a reality

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