floating Archives - Page 6 of 23

Flotter vers Léau-dela

By Gabrielle Anctill
Esquisses
2016 volume 27 nr 1

Projets exemplaires

Carré d’eau

Waterplein (square d’eau), Rotterdam (Pays-Bas), De Urbanisten. Illustration: De Urbanisten

L’ennemi des villes de demain sera l’eau. En première ligne, Rotterdam aux Pays-Bas, qui doit se préparer à combattre les pluies torrentielles causées par les changements climatiques. Pour vaincre les flots, une arme : la place publique.

Gabrielle Anctil

Plutôt qu’une catastrophe à prévenir, la Ville de Rotterdam a décidé de voir les changements climatiques comme une occasion à saisir. C’est pourquoi elle a mandaté en 2005 la firme de recherche urbaine et de design De Urbanisten pour trouver des solutions novatrices en matière de gestion de l’eau. De ces réflexions a émergé l’idée du waterplein ou « square d’eau », une place publique servant aussi de bassin de rétention des eaux.

« La mission du square est de réconcilier la population avec l’eau. Nous voulions créer la même magie que lorsqu’un enfant joue dans une flaque d’eau », explique Dirk Van Peijpe, ingénieur et cofondateur de la firme. Un premier spécimen, le Waterplein Benthemplein, a vu le jour en 2013. Composé de trois bassins de différentes profondeurs, le plus profond faisant office de terrain de basketball, il est conçu pour servir principalement d’espace public. La communauté, qui a participé pleinement à sa conception, se l’est rapidement approprié : en plus des sportifs et autres flâneurs, on peut même y croiser des fidèles assistant à un baptême, gracieuseté de l’église avoisinante.

Lors d’une averse, les trois bassins servent à stocker l’eau de pluie. Avec style. « Nous avons voulu mettre l’accent sur le design », précise Dirk Van Peijpe. Ainsi, les gouttières en acier inoxydable qui transportent l’eau depuis les bâtiments adjacents vers les bassins sont assez larges pour accueillir les planchistes par temps sec. D’autres détails permettent de contrôler la façon dont l’eau atteint les bassins, pour rendre le tout le plus spectaculaire possible. Une fois les égouts libérés, l’étang cède de nouveau l’espace à la place publique.

Le square d’eau est un concept qui porte ses fruits : la firme en planifie déjà un deuxième dans la ville de Tiel, toujours aux Pays-Bas. « La beauté du square, c’est que nous avons repris une idée simple : l’eau descend », souligne Dirk Van Peijpe. Comme quoi certaines idées novatrices coulent de source…

Soigner contre vents et marées

Hôpital Spaulding, Boston (États-Unis), Perkins + Will. Photo : Anton Grassl/Esto

Sous sa façade grise, l’hôpital Spaulding est comme Superman dans les habits de Clark Kent. Portrait d’un bâtiment prêt à tout.

Gabrielle Anctil

L’ouragan Katrina qui a frappé La Nouvelle-Orléans en 2005 a causé un choc dans le milieu hospitalier américain. « Le monde médical a vu les hôpitaux hors d’usage et s’est dit : plus jamais », se remémore Robin Guenther, architecte et associée principale chez Perkins + Will, une firme d’architecture américaine. Mais, lorsque l’ouragan Sandy est tombé sur New York sept ans plus tard, les télévisions ont encore une fois relayé les mêmes images.

C’est avec ces leçons en tête que l’architecte s’est attelée à la conception de l’hôpital Spaulding, à Boston. « Notre client était parfaitement conscient de ce qui s’était passé à La Nouvelle-Orléans et voulait construire un hôpital qui résisterait aux effets des changements climatiques », explique Robin Guenther. Situé dans le port, le bâtiment devait absolument être à l’épreuve de la hausse du niveau de l’eau. Une mission de taille, compliquée par la quantité de données avec lesquelles jongler. Élever le bâtiment était une évidence, mais quelle sera l’élévation du niveau de la mer dans 50 ans ? Comment composer en même temps avec les besoins d’accessibilité d’une clientèle à mobilité réduite ?

L’élévation du bâtiment n’est qu’une des multiples caractéristiques qui le préparent au pire : les génératrices sont situées sur le toit, plutôt qu’au sous-sol, emplacement inondable où on les trouve habituellement, les fenêtres peuvent s’ouvrir et la végétalisation des toitures contribue à réduire les îlots de chaleur.

Les architectes ont tenté de penser à tout, sans pour autant faire exploser les coûts. En fait, moins de 1 % du budget total a été consacré aux mesures d’adaptation aux changements climatiques. Pour Robin Guenther, c’est une évidence : « Quand on y réfléchit à l’avance, comme nous l’avons fait, les coûts sont minimes, alors que réaménager un bâtiment déjà construit coûte extrêmement cher. D’où l’importance de parer dès la conception à la prochaine tempête du siècle. »

Il semble bien que l’hôpital Spaulding sera prêt à l’affronter.

Les jardins suspendus de Milan

Bosco verticale (forêt verticale), Milan (Italie), Stefano Boeri. Photo: Paolo Rosselli.

Le rêve de l’empereur Nabuchodonosor II serait-il devenu réalité ? Devant la menace des changements climatiques, l’idée de verdir en hauteur comme à Babylone n’a plus rien de fantaisiste, tel que le démontre le projet Bosco verticale de Milan.

Gabrielle Anctil

En construisant à Milan les deux tours d’habitation du projet Bosco verticale (forêt verticale), l’architecte italien Stefano Boeri ne voulait pas que leur architecture soit uniquement ornementale. « Les bâtiments sont volontairement plutôt sobres, explique le concepteur. Ce qui compte le plus, c’est l’intégration de la nature. »

Les tours de Bosco verticale sont, comme leur nom l’indique, couvertes de végétation. Mais Stefano Boeri a vu plus loin que les toits verts que l’on connaît déjà : sur les balcons des bâtiments poussent de vrais arbres. « En fait, chaque habitant en a deux, plus huit arbrisseaux et 20 plantes. » Beaucoup plus original qu’une cour de banlieue, et surtout, bien plus durable. « Les villes doivent être plus denses, rappelle l’architecte. Nous ne pouvons plus nous permettre de maintenir le rêve de la maison de banlieue. »

Pour Stefano Boeri, la nature a un rôle primordial à jouer dans la lutte contre la pollution des villes. « Les arbres permettent d’absorber la poussière ambiante et le CO2, de minimiser l’impact des îlots de chaleur urbains et de réduire la température à l’intérieur des logements pendant l’été, réduisant du même coup la consommation d’électricité », énumère l’architecte. Une attention toute particulière a d’ailleurs été accordée au choix des arbres afin de maximiser leurs bienfaits. Ainsi, du côté nord, on a sélectionné des essences à feuilles caduques pour laisser le soleil réchauffer les logements en hiver.

Toute originale qu’elle soit, la forêt verticale doit pouvoir être reproduite à moindre coût pour avoir un réel impact. « Il est tout à fait possible de copier-coller l’idée n’importe où dans le monde, à condition de sélectionner des arbres adaptés au climat », affirme Stefano Boeri. L’architecte s’est d’ailleurs vu confier la mission de concevoir une ville de 100 000 habitants en Chine, selon le modèle de ses tours milanaises.

Si l’idée prend racine, les enfants de demain pourront peut-être grimper aux arbres… sur leur balcon.

Flotter vers l’au-delà

Concept de mosquée flottante à Dubai (Émirats arabes unis), Koen Olthuis Waterstudio.NL. Illustration : Koen Olthuis – Waterstudio.NL et Dutch Docklands

Une mosquée flottante? L’idée peut sembler loufoque, voire sacrilège. Pourtant, ce type de construction est peut-être la solution idéale pour défier les inondations dans les villes de demain.

Gabrielle Anctil

La firme Waterstudio, de l’architecte néerlandais Koen Olthuis, ne construit que sur l’eau. Quand on lui demande pourquoi, le fondateur répond du tac au tac : « On est en sécurité sur l’eau. Plus besoin de s’inquiéter des inondations. » Pour étonnant qu’il soit, le concept n’a rien de nouveau. « Aux Pays-Bas, on construit sur l’eau depuis plus de 200 ans », affirme l’architecte.

Son expertise a mené Koen Olthuis à travailler à Dubai, aux Émirats arabes unis, où on lui a confié en 2007 le mandat de concevoir un lieu de prière inédit : une mosquée flottante. En plus d’avoir les deux pieds dans l’eau, le bâtiment utilise les flots comme système de climatisation. « En été, les températures montent jusqu’à 50 °C, mais l’eau reste toujours à environ 27 °C », explique l’architecte. L’eau est pompée à travers les murs et passe par le toit avant de retourner dans le golfe Persique, rafraîchissant l’air au passage.

Un bâtiment flottant ne pose-t-il pas des contraintes architecturales importantes ? « Pas du tout, affirme Koen Olthuis. Mise à part la fondation, qui doit s’adapter au type d’écosystème où on la placera, l’architecture est presque identique à celle d’un bâtiment traditionnel. » Le plus gros défi ? Changer la perception du public. À Dubai, l’idée d’une mosquée sur l’eau a causé des remous dans la communauté. « Il y avait des débats à la radio où on se demandait si la mosquée serait assez sacrée ! » se remémore l’architecte. La conclusion ? Oui, mais seulement si elle pointe toujours dans la direction de la Mecque.

Retardé par une économie vacillante, le projet ne verra peut-être jamais le jour. Mais si on en croit Koen Olthuis, les constructions flottantes sont la voie de l’avenir. « On peut construire presque n’importe quoi sur l’eau. Avec l’urbanisation accélérée et les coûts élevés des terrains dans les villes, l’idée de construire sur l’eau devient une évidence. » À quand un quartier flottant au Québec ?

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ALBENAA

By ALBENAA Magazine
volume 36
June.2016

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Has Floating Architecture’s Moment Finally Arrived?

By Rachel Keeton
Next City
October.01.2014

Resilient Cities

The Sea Tree, a floating natural habitat. (Photo by Waterstudio)

In a quiet, shady street in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, Koen Olthuis and the design team at Waterstudio are changing the world. From this deceptively nondescript headquarters, Waterstudio is designing the cities of the future. If Olthuis has his way, they will be safer, more flexible and more resilient than current cities. How will he do this? Olthuis is designing floating cities. As we sit down at the table, the busy office buzzing around us, my first question to Olthuis is direct: “How realistic are floating cities?” Olthuis grins and nods, he’s heard this question before.

Floating cities have captivated society’s imagination for centuries, from the development of Venice a millennium ago to Triton, designed for Tokyo Bay by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until the last decade or so that more fully realized, just-might-actually-happen sea-based urban endeavors have emerged, made more urgent by rising sea levels and rural-to-urban migration. In the last six months, Business Insider, Bloomberg and The Guardian have all run stories asking the same question: “Has the time come for floating cities?”

Olthuis dives right in: “It depends what you mean by ‘floating city.’ If you’re talking about a community of 100,000 in the middle of the sea, we’re probably about 50 years away from achieving that. If you want it to be completely self-supporting, it’s probably going to take another 20 years after that.” Bending over a roll of tracing paper, Olthuis quickly sketches a timeline of floating architecture. If we take it from the present moment, about midway on Olthuis’ sketch, hybrid cities are the next step in this evolution. Built on the edge of the existing city, these developments could easily connect to electrical and sanitation grids. “Technically, this stuff is easy to engineer: we’re already there,” says Olthuis. That makes them more straightforward to regulate and less risky for investors.

It’s the images of sparkling new cities lost at sea that have people raising skeptical eyebrows. “We’re working on a set of guidelines, a toolbox that will ultimately get us to the floating city you imagine. We’re working out these concepts that all give a glimpse of the future, but we have to find out what we need, how it works and what it adds to current urban development. We have to map out the steps to get us from today to the future and have to think about the entire process. And we need that, because if we don’t answer these questions, we get all these architects with beautiful renderings and fantastic ideas, but they don’t tell you the steps in-between and they don’t tell you why. And then your question is, but how realistic is it?”

Listening to Olthuis, it quickly becomes apparent that this scenario is actually incredibly realistic. With the technology and market demand in place, it’s political will and ownership issues that are holding development back. People have trouble imagining an urban future where city halls can be swapped for theaters on opening night, or entire Olympic villages can simply be towed around the world instead of rebuilt every four years. “Our cities today are too static. We make static cities for dynamic societies. We should be cities that can adapt to new demands and external influences. Water gives us three things: it adds more space (in old harbors, rivers, lakes), it’s safer (from storm conditions, rising sea levels) and it’s flexible. If you only construct the buildings you will use for 100 years statically, on land, and construct the buildings you will only use for 20 to 30 years flexibly, on water, then you’ve created a much more adaptable city that can respond to changing needs quickly and efficiently. If someone isn’t happy with their house anymore, they can ship it to someone who needs it in the Philippines.”

Governments are slowing starting to see the potential of this approach. If cities like New York or Tokyo build two to three percent of their development on the water, they can sell this to developers, tax the owners and create a more flexible city. Win-win. Governments are interested in this because it presents a new market for them. While most land is privately owned or already built up, by changing policies to make floating structures available the government expands its real estate. It’s a business model that is attractive because it solves multiple problems. Floating structures can reinvigorate former industrial areas like old harbors or riversides, they can adapt to extreme weather conditions better than traditional structures and they create a profit from space that is currently unmarketable.

Still, the idea of bobbing around permanently makes some people understandably squeamish. If one floating house goes up and down on waves, it may tilt: one half sits on the crest of a wave and the other end is stuck in the trough. This doesn’t happen when you start to build big enough to have a project that is always supported by multiple waves. On the water, the bigger the project, the more stable is it. In fact, floating cities are actually something that works better all around on a larger scale. If Olthuis is designing a watervilla for a single family, he has to calculate all kinds of factors to design a single, site-specific home. This ends up costing a lot more than a traditional house. If he’s designing a community of 10,000 water villas, the price is the same as a comparable urban development.

Moving functional amenities like prisons, stadiums and airports onto the water is already becoming more common as cities try to create more elbowroom for residents. Alvaro Siza’s recently completed chemical plant in Huai’An City, China, was built on the water, and BREAD Studio recently designed a floating cemetery to be rafted off the coast of Hong Kong – a city long on elderly citizens but short on space. Today there’s a floating skate park on Lake Tahoe and floating freshwater pools in the River Thames. There’s even a floating cinema in London by UP Projects, echoing Aldo Rossi’s iconic Il Teatro del Mundo from 1979.

Less whimsical but more crucial are floating developments for informal settlements located on waterfronts or in delta regions that are most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Kunlé Adeyemi’s floating school in Makoko, a picturesque shantytown in Lagos, Nigeria, will provide classroom space for 100 students. The problem with one-off projects like NLE’s floating school, according to Olthuis, is that the Lagos government has been against it from the beginning (it’s been declared illegal), and it’s not even being used because of this controversy. “If you want to really make a difference, it can’t be just one thing. It has to be a system with a sound business model,” says Olthuis.

“I think the current generation of architects really wants to help, they want to make a difference. If you tell the story of one billion people living in slums in places like Thailand, India, Bangladesh — where water is threatening those people and no one is helping them because anything that gets built can be wiped out by the next tsunami — we think, well we have to help those people. The City Apps project — retrofitted shipping containers floating on trash — is a system where we bring in floating schools, sanitation, electricity, water treatment facilities, bakeries, internet cafes, or whatever is most needed. We can connect these floating functions to the slums or disaster sites and they will slowly help upgrade these areas.

We’re investing in this ourselves, by funding the first prototype that will be deployed to Manila. We’ve started a foundation, working with Cordaid, where we lease the City Apps directly. It costs us about €50,000 to design and build a City App in a recycled shipping container, then it gets deployed to wherever it’s needed and there they construct a floating platform out of old plastic bottles and other rubbish. Ultimately, it should be a business model that provides an entrepreneurial opportunity for residents of these areas. It’s cheap — they just pay a small monthly fee — it’s safe, since it goes up and down with the water, and it provides a solution to real problems. If you don’t need it anymore, you just send it back to us and we lease it out to someone else. Next year we’ll have ten, the year after, a hundred, and it will grow to a few thousand containers around the world. Of course, it’s just a small help to these millions of people, but we hope it will act as a model and show that we can shift from giving aid to providing an opportunity for employment.”

On the other end of the inclusiveness spectrum, there are politically motivated projects like the Seasteading Institute’s Floating City. Promoted with viral videos and backed by private donors and crowd funding, these mobile communities are envisioned as new experiments in governance, giving each community total political autonomy over itself. After attending the third Seasteading Institute conference in 2012, Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones summarized the Institute as “a hacker’s approach to government with a Waterworld-esque conception of Manifest Destiny. More than a mere repository for political dreamers, it brings together engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs of the sort one often finds in the Bay Area: techtopians who might be brilliant or delusional — or both.”

Olthuis accepts that different floating communities may have different goals. “I think we’ve only seen about 10 percent of the ideas that are actually possible in terms of floating architecture. In the next century, we’ll have thousands and thousands of new architects who can think about these possibilities.” Waterstudio calls their floating designs “scarless,” meaning they can be repositioned without leaving any trace of their presence. But the next step is to build designs like the Sea Tree, a floating natural habitat that would give small fish a sanctuary, increase the oxygenation of water, and potentially collect trash as it drifted about.

Olthuis is adamant that we have to embrace the water rather than run from it — we don’t have any other options. “Today, the momentum is there because we see the effects of climate change and we can’t be sure about our safety. We see millions of people moving to the cities and we don’t know where they will live. These issues are finally making people think twice about floating architecture. If we can convince them that it’s also financially profitable and help governments change building regulations, we’ll have a future where it’s normal to see cities that are 95 percent built on land and five percent built on water — just enough to give them the flexibility they need for an uncertain future.” It’s a revolutionary way of thinking about the city: puzzle pieces that can be reconfigured according to changing needs and desires. Olthuis’ concern with marketability and political interest makes his story much more convincing than the glossy renderings popping up on design websites. “Many architects are using technical solutions to approach this problem and just showing us the images without any information. I think a floating city is only something that works when it makes sense economically, socially, spatially — and should also look nice. It should be a normal development that is open to everyone, rather than an alien form for an elite few.” His belief in the advantages of these projects is clear, and the built examples in the Maldives, China and the Netherlands are proof of their viability. Just as it was for Buckminster Fuller 50 years ago, the floating city remains an exciting and mysterious model of urban development. Only now, it’s closer than ever. And Koen Olthuis can tell you exactly how to build it.

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Floating Paradise

By Green Building & sustainable Strategies
Spring 2016

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Ciudades Anfibias

By Beatriz Portinari
CLUB + RENFE

Los arquitectos del futuro proponen una Atlántida biososteniblecomo respuesta al cambio climático y la utopía de una colonización oceánica.

“El mar no pErtEnEcE a los déspotas. En su superficie, aún pueden ejercer sus inicuos derechos, pelearse, devorarse y transportar todos los horrores terrestres, pero a treinta pies de profundidad, su poder
cesa. ¡Ah, señor, viva usted en el seno de los mares! ¡Solo ahí existe la independencia! ¡Ahí no reconozco señor alguno! ¡Allí soy libre!”. Con estas palabras, Julio Verne convirtió al capitán Nemo y su Nautilus en los pioneros de la llamada “colonización oceánica”, en 1870. Casi 200 años después de 20.000 leguas de viaje submarino, ingenieros y arquitectos ofrecen propuestas viables que van desde hoteles flotantes o flotels a cruceros-residencia para millonarios como The World y finalmente la utopía social y política de las naciones semi-sumergibles que propone el Seasteading Institute.
Pero, ¿por qué querría el hombre vivir en futuristas ciudades acuáticas?
Quizá por placer, por evadir impuestos en aguas internacionales o por pura necesidad medioambiental. Según los expertos en cambio climático y el Informe España: hacia un clima extremo, publicado por Greenpeace en 2014, se espera que a finales del siglo XXI la subida del nivel del mar por el deshielo del Ártico provoque una catástrofe climática y humanitaria que afectará al uno por ciento del territorio de Egipto, el 7% de Países Bajos, el 17% de Bangladesh y hasta el 80% de las Maldivas. En España, las mediciones indican que “durante la segunda mitad del siglo XXI, hasta 202 hectáreas de terreno se encontrarán en riesgo de inundación en la costa vasca. De esta extensión, la mitad corresponde a terrenos urbanizados, tanto zonas industriales como residenciales”. El peligro es real. Las estimaciones más pesimistas dicen que en 2030 habrá 50 millones de refugiados climáticos en el planeta, que ascenderían a 200 millones en el año 2050. ¿Qué hacer con esta población sin tierra? Más allá de previsiones, la evidencia está en el archipiélago de Kiribati, al noreste de Australia, donde 100.000 habitantes buscan territorio para trasladar todo un país porque el suyo ha comenzado a desaparecer bajo el mar. El gobierno de Kiribati ha comprado terreno en las islas Fiji para instalar a su población e incluso se ha planteado los diseños anfibios de uno de los arquitectos más preocupados por el medio ambiente, Vincent Callebaut, autor de los prototipos acuáticos Lilypad, Physalia y el más reciente Aequorea.

‘aRQuibiÓTica’ conTRa El cambio climáTico
“La anticipación urbana es fundamental para crear la ciudad del mañana, que considero imprescindible en la transición energética. Lo que llamo ‘arquibiótica’ es la solución
biotecnológica de la arquitectura a la crisis ambiental que sufrimos. Me inspiro en el biomorfismo, el biomimetismo y
la biónica, donde la ingeniería puede repetir esquemas de la naturaleza y aprovechar las nuevas tecnologías de comunicación”, explica Callebaut, a quien el Ayuntamiento de París
acaba de encargar el rediseño de la ciudad. De momento, sus audaces prototipos todavía no han encontrado océano donde iniciar la revolución verde.
Quien sí ha comenzado la construcción real de un atolón artificial para salvar a su población del mar es el Gobierno de las islas Maldivas, que ha firmado una alianza comercial con la empresa holandesa Dutch Docklands, experta en ganar terreno al agua. Si el entorno paradisíaco de las Maldivas va a desaparecer bajo el mar, nada mejor que empezar a construir una réplica flotante para mantener el turismo. Para ello se ha encargado el proyecto The 5 Lagoons al estudio de arquitectura Waterstudio, que dirige Koen Olthius, considerado “uno de los 100 eco-arquitectos que cambiarán el mundo” y que apuesta por el paso de las ciudades verdes a las ciudades azules sobre el agua. “No debemos tener miedo al posible aumento del nivel del mar, sino verlo como una oportunidad para mejorar nuestras ciudades. Si la costa española se puede ver afectada, debería empezar hoy mismo a considerar soluciones. Estas plataformas flotantes deberían ser eco-sostenibles, más duraderas y flexibles”, cuenta Olthius. El arquitecto va más allá e imagina “bellos parques en el agua, dinámicos, capaces de cambiar de forma y función en cada estación; el turismo ha sido siempre muy importante en la economía española y creo que estas extensiones flotantes podrían atraer más turistas.
Podría aportar al mismo tiempo seguridad y prosperidad a la costa. La tecnología está disponible, sólo sería necesario que fuera económicamente viable”.
El Seasteading Institute, creado en 2008 con importantes inversores como Peter Thiel, fundador de PayPal, va más allá y propone ciudades-estado independientes en aguas internacionales. Sin embargo, su utópico proyecto Floating City aún no ha visto la luz. “Técnicamente las ciudades anfibias son viables, pero deberían responder a una necesidad económica, legal y política real porque de lo contrario el proyecto no es rentable. Si tienes una plataforma que no pertenece a ningún país, no puedes defenderte de ataques piratas, por ejemplo. Para el problema del cambio climático existen soluciones más baratas como se ha visto con el relleno de tierra que está haciendo Singapur en su costa”, advierte el Ingeniero Naval y Oceánico, Miguel Lamas, experto en plataformas flotantes y antiguo colaborador del Seasteading Institute. En su tesis Establecimiento de comunidades autónomas en alta mar: opciones presentes y evolución futura hace un análisis realista de los posibles escenarios. Aunque estas comunidades en alta mar serían beneficiosas porque fomentarían el uso de las energías renovables de origen marino y la protección del hábitat oceánico, hoy por hoy no existe economía ni sociedad que respalde a corto plazo un costoso proyecto como las Ciudades Flotantes autónomas. Parece que la utopía de la colonización oceánica tendrá que esperar.

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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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Koen Olthuis one of fifty innovators of the 21th century

Koen Olthuis selected as one of the Fifty Under Fifty innovators of our time. After a world-wide search of 50 top architecture and design firms by the editors, lead author Beverly Russell along with Eva Maddox and Farooq Ameen help bring together a unique body of work; all partners in these firms will be 50 years old or under at the time of publication, and represent a forward-thinking generation of creative people, aware of global issues that urgently need solutions through imaginative design.

A distinguished five-person jury presided over the final selection: Stanley Tigerman, founding partner, Tigerman McCurry, Chicago; Ralph Johnson, design principal, Perkins+Will, Chicago; Jeanne Gang, founder Gang Studio, Chicago; Marion Weiss, founding partner, WEISS/MANFREDI, New York; and Qingyun Ma, Dean of Architecture, University of Southern California, and founder MADA s.p.a.m., Shanghai and Beijing.

The innovators featured in this impressive volume share with us, and the world, their desires for exponential learning; designs are illuminated with full-color photography and detailed illustrations, helping to showcase the innovators’ individual curiosities, imaginations, and talents. This material shows how they bridge disciplines, respect cultural norms, respond to human needs regardless of costs, and how they adopt team transparency in their passion to create and solve problems with a clear mission.

This highly anticipated book showcases honorees located across many different countries, including Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. Significantly, a quarter of these innovators are women, representing the elevated leadership of women in architecture and design.ﾠ

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Nederlandse golfbreker wekt energie op

By Michiel de Vries
RTL Nieuws
December.23.2015

Een Nederlands architectenbureau heeft een ontwerp gemaakt voor een golfbreker aan de oostkust van de Verenigde Staten. Bijzonder: het bouwwerk wekt ook energie op.

De drijvende golfbreker bestaat uit een reeks cilinders van bijna een meter in doorsnee. De elektriciteit wordt opgewekt doordat deze cilinders meedraaien met de stroming en de golven. Het bouwwerk wordt ‘the Parthenon project’ genoemd, omdat de pijpen erg lijken op de zuilen van het Parthenon in Griekenland.

Het ontwerp van de golfbreker komt van de Waterstudio in Rijswijk, een architectenbureau dat zich al jaren specialiseert in drijvende structuren om zo creatief om te gaan met problemen rond de stijgende zeespiegel en overstromingen. Ze maken van alles: van watervilla’s tot drijvende cruiseterminals.

Orkaan Sandy
Het bouwwerk maakt onderdeel uit van een groter project voor het veilig maken van New York en omliggende stedelijke gebieden. Aanleiding is orkaan Sandy, die in 2012 voor tientallen miljarden schade veroorzaakte aan de oostkust van de Verenigde Staten. Veel Nederlandse bedrijven en kennis wordt hier nu ingezet om de kust te verstevigen. Nederlandse ingenieursbedrijven, zoals Royal Haskoning en Arcadis, hopen een goede boterham te kunnen verdienen aan de infrastructuurplannen, schreef RTL Nieuws-correspondent Erik Mouthaan al eerder.

“Het momentum voor dit soort innovaties is absoluut nu daar aanwezig”, zegt ook Koen Olthuis van Waterstudio tegen RTLZ Toekomstmakers.

Het bureau paste het concept van the Parthenon project toe bij een haven op de Hudson-rivier bij New York (zie inzet hierboven). De golven zijn daar zó hevig dat een sterke maar flexibele zeewering nodig is om de boten te beschermen. De cilinders van het Parthenon project zijn flexibel: ze zijn met water gevuld en draaien langzaam, de een met de klok mee en de andere tegen de klok in. De energie wordt vastgelegd in een betonnen bak in het drijvende platform.

Olthuis laat aan RTL Z Toekomstmakers weten in gesprek te zijn met de Amerikaanse staat New Jersey en een havenontwikkelaar. Het ontwerp gaat hierna de ‘detailed engineering-fase’ in. De verwachting is dat een gedeelte van het prototype in het derde kwartaal van 2016 getest kan worden. “Als alles volgens plan gaat en de vergunningen er op tijd zijn, dan willen we in 2017 de golfbreker actief hebben.”

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Waterstudio’s floating sea wall harvests blue energy from crashing water

By Tafline Laylin
Inhabitat
December.2015

Certain world leaders might be dragging their feet on addressing climate change, but in the meantime, Koen Olthuis and the rest of the Waterstudio crew are working on solutions that we can use today. The Blue energy floating sea wall is a floating breakwater that doubles as an energy generator. Called The Parthenon, the floating breakwater not only stems the crash of water pushing into a harbor, but harvests the tremendous energy a wall of water like that can generate.

Waterstudio used the Hudson River to illustrate their new design’s function. “In a harbour on the Hudson river in New York the wave conditions are so strong that a sea wall must protect its boats. The strong current in the river is constantly attacking it and water is pushing itself against and through the fixed wall, which results in more corrosion of the sea wall every year.”

The floating sea wall acts as a permeable breakwater that converts the wave power into electrical energy while reducing the waves’ impact on the harbor at the same time. “The floating breakwater lives with the force of the river instead of fighting it,” they told Inhabitat in an email.

The columns of the sea wall are comprised of 3-foot cylinders that rotate – both clockwise and counter clockwise – at low speed. The energy created by this rotation is then captured in a concrete box inside the floating platform. The cylinders are filled with water to give the structure flexibility without affecting in any way the efficacy of the wall in reducing the wave’s impact on the harbor. The whole thing is then anchored to the riverbed, and the top can double as an urban green space or boulevard.

“The Parthenon blue energy sea wall resembles the column structure of the famous ancient temple in Greece,” according to Waterstudio, “but divers see it as a part of the sunken city of Atlantis.”

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The Floating Dutchman

By Kerstin Schweighöfer
FUTURE PERFECT
December 2015

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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