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A Dutch Architect’s vision of cities that float on water

By Kyle Chayka
The New yorker
2024.March.25

In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age
painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the
construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide
brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface.
Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots
have yet to be developed.

For the Dutch architect Koen Olthuis, the painting serves as a reminder that much of his country has
been built on top of the water. The Netherlands (whose name means “low countries”) lies in a delta
where three major rivers—the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt—meet the open expanse of the
North Sea. More than a quarter of the country sits below sea level. Over hundreds of years, the Dutch
have struggled to manage their sodden patchwork of land. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the
country’s windmills were used to pump water out of the ground using the hydraulic mechanism
known as Archimedes’ screw. Parcels of land were buffered with raised walls and continuously
drained, creating areas, which the Dutch call “polders,” that were dry enough to accommodate
farming or development. The grand town houses along Amsterdam’s canals, as emblematic of the city
as Haussmann’s architecture is of Paris, were constructed on thousands of wooden stilts driven into
unstable mud. As Olthuis told me recently, “The Netherlands is a complete fake, artificial machine.”
The threat of water overtaking the land is so endemic to the Dutch national psyche that it has inspired
a mythological predator, the Waterwolf. In a 1641 poem that coined the name, the Dutch poet and
playwright Joost van den Vondel exhorted the “mill wings” of the wind pumps to “shut down this
animal.”

Olthuis has spent more than two decades seeking ways to coexist with the wolf. His architectural firm,
Waterstudio, specializes in homes that float, but its constructions have little in common with the
wooden houseboats that have long lined Dutch canals. Traditional houseboats were often converted
freight ships; narrow, low-slung, and lacking proper plumbing, they earned a reputation in the postwar
period as bohemian, sometimes seedy dwellings. (Utrecht’s onetime red-light district was a row of
forty-three houseboat brothels.) Waterstudio’s signature projects, which Olthuis prefers to call “water
houses,” look more like modern condominiums, with glassy façades, full-height ceilings, and multiple
stories. In the past decade, as severe weather brought on by climate change has caused catastrophic
flooding everywhere from Tamil Nadu to New England, demand for Waterstudio’s architecture has
grown. The firm is currently working on floating pod hotels in Panama and Thailand; six-story
floating apartment buildings in Scandinavia; a floating forest in the Persian Gulf, as part of a strategy
to combat heat and humidity; and, in its most ambitious undertaking to date, a floating “city” in the
Maldives.


Waterstudio projects such as a two-story, two-thousand-square-foot floating villa in the Dutch city of Leiden amount to what Olthuis calls “innovation at
the cost of the rich.”Photograph by Giulio Di Sturco for The New Yorker

One evening in January, I met Olthuis for dinner at Sea Palace, a Chinese restaurant in a three-story
pagoda built on a boat hull in the harbor near the center of Amsterdam. Created based on a similar
structure in Hong Kong, it has seating for some nine hundred people and bills itself as the largest
floating restaurant in Europe. On its opening night, in 1984, the boat began to sink, and more than a
hundred diners had to evacuate; the builders’ calculations hadn’t accounted for the fact that Hong
Kongers weigh less on average than the Dutch. In the end, the surplus crowd was served dinner al
fresco on the shore, and, the story goes, a Dutch tradition of Chinese takeout was born.

Olthuis is fifty-two years old and gangly, with a stubbled chin and graying hair swept back in the
shaggy style typical of Dutch men. He dresses in all black year-round, even, to his wife’s chagrin,
packing black trousers for summer vacation. But his vibe is less severe aesthete than restless inventor.
He drives a plug-in hybrid car that he never bothers to charge, eats instant ramen every morning for
breakfast, and had an entire floor of the home he designed for his family, in Delft, carpeted in
AstroTurf, so that his three sons can play soccer indoors. During our dinner, he drank two Coke
Zeros, which augmented his already considerable aura of activity and churning thought. Midway
through the meal, he picked up his chopsticks and held one upright in each fist, to illustrate the poles
that tether many of Waterstudio’s buildings to the beds of the bodies of water they float on.

He put down one chopstick and picked up a bowl of kung-pao chicken, which represented the
concrete foundations that, somewhat counterintuitively, allow many of his houses to float. “Concrete
weighs 2.4 times more than water, so if you make a block of concrete it will immediately sink,” he
explained in lightly accented English. “But if you spread it out, if you make a box filled with air, then
it starts to float.” The poles are anchored sixteen feet into the water bed and extend several feet above
the surface; the floating concrete foundation is fastened to the poles with rings. Olthuis slid the bowl
slowly up and down the length of the chopstick to demonstrate how the foundation can rise and fall
along the poles with the fluctuations of the water. Whereas Sea Palace is essentially a glorified barge,
resting atop the water on pontoons, Waterstudio’s concrete bases give its projects a stability
approximating that of land-bound construction, at least when the waters beneath are still. “You can’t
compare them,” Olthuis said of his buildings versus the one we were sitting in.

He peered through the restaurant’s windows at the bustling commercial strip onshore. “This area
would be fantastic to place maybe a series of floating apartment buildings and affordable housing for
students,” he said.

The Dutch government’s approach to water management is primarily defensive. New pumping
stations are being built to keep pace with the higher volumes of water brought on by climate change.
A program to raise seawalls has been funded through 2050. But Harold van Waveren, the top expert
on flood-risk management at Rijkswaterstaat, the agency that oversees the country’s larger canals,
dams, and seawalls, told me that the threats posed by water have become increasingly unpredictable
as the sea level rises and storm surges grow more extreme. “We just finished a study that says at least
three metres, even five metres, shouldn’t be a problem in our country,” he said, referring to projected
surges. “On the other hand, will it stop at three metres? You never know.”

Olthuis believes that the Netherlands should give certain flood-prone parts of the land back to the
water—a managed surrender to the elements rather than a Sisyphean battle against them. He held up
the dish of chicken, now representing one of the country’s polders. The polders, numbering more than
three thousand, are like a series of bowls, he said. For centuries, the Dutch have made their land
habitable by laboriously keeping the bowls dry. But habitability does not have to depend on dryness,
Olthuis argues; on the contrary, building on water can be safer and sturdier than building on reclaimed
ground. “I think some bowls should be full,” he said, suggesting that flooding the land would amount
to little more than a natural evolution of a man-made system, not unlike the way skyscrapers
transformed cities a century ago. “It’s just an update to the machine.”

Living on the water is an old form of ingenuity, one that has often been driven by necessity. Half a
millennium ago, in what is now Peru, the indigenous Uros people used thatches of reeds to build
floating islets in Lake Titicaca, likely as a safe haven from Incan encroachment. Around thirteen
hundred people live on the islands to this day. Tonlé Sap, a lake in Cambodia, is home to thousands of
people from the country’s persecuted Vietnamese minority, who are forbidden to own property on
land. Their fishing villages, adapted to the lake’s dramatic seasonal ebbs and flows, include floating
barns, floating karaoke bars, and floating medical clinics. Olthuis has long been interested in what he
calls “wet slums,” urban waterfront areas where rudimentary wooden dwellings are often built on
stilts, as in the sprawling neighborhood of Makoko, in Lagos. “What you see is poor people adapting
to the situation,” he told me. “If they can’t find land, then they find a way to build on water. Those
people are innovators.”


Olthuis says that the Dutch approach to water management is “stuck in engineering solutions that we
already used for the last fifty years.”
Photograph by
Giulio Di Sturco for The New Yorker

Olthuis likes to say that Waterstudio creates “products, not projects.” The firm’s goal is not to build
dazzlingly unique structures but, instead, to standardize and modernize floating construction with
designs that can be replicated en masse. One of Olthuis’s favorite projects to date was also the least
expensive: a prototype of a floating home made from “bamboo and cow shit” in a flood-prone area in
Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. The building had steel frames for durability, a layout that
accommodated multiple families, and an onboard stable to house farm animals in times of flooding.
Such simple structures are part of Olthuis’s concept of City Apps—“on-demand, instant solutions”
that can float into neighborhoods to add resources such as classrooms, medical clinics, and energy
facilities. He envisions persuading cities around the world to install hundreds of thousands of floating
affordable-housing units to help alleviate overcrowding and gentrification. “It’s a lifetime of trying to
connect the dots toward that future,” he said.

So far, though, most Waterstudio buildings are smaller-scale luxury products, amounting to what
Olthuis called “innovation at the cost of the rich.” One morning, I visited a floating home that
Waterstudio built on the Rhine near the city of Leiden, about twenty miles from Amsterdam. Behind a
tall, vine-covered fence was a garden with a brick pathway leading to a two-story,
two-thousandsquare-foot home with floor-to-ceiling windows and a long balcony. One of more than two hundred
floating houses that Waterstudio has completed throughout the Netherlands, it was commissioned, in
2021, by Erick van Mastrigt, a seventy-one-year-old retired Dutch financial executive, as a home for
him and his wife.

Van Mastrigt met me at the front door, dressed in a leisurely ensemble of a quarter-zip sweater and
espadrilles. “If you asked me ten years ago, ‘Me on a houseboat?’ No, I don’t think so. I never had a
plan like that,” he said. Van Mastrigt and his wife had previously lived across the street, in a
traditional home with a Dutch gabled roof, a filigreed façade, and a thousand-square-foot garden. In
2016, they bought a houseboat on the river for their adult son to stay in when he was visiting. But then
the son moved to Thailand. Tired of maintaining their large house and its landscaping, the couple
decided to downsize. The old houseboat was too small, but its site presented a possibility. They found
Waterstudio online; the house cost about 1.5 million euros to complete, a figure that Olthuis estimates
is ten or fifteen per cent higher than the cost of building a similar structure on land. The couple moved
in last year and recently sold their previous home.

In the house’s vestibule, van Mastrigt flipped a switch to open a hatch in the floor, revealing a lowceilinged
storage area, cluttered with luggage, built into the hollow of the concrete foundation. On the
main floor, an open kitchen abutted a double-height dining room. Along one side of the building was
a space, like an aquatic driveway, which in warm months houses the couple’s motorboat. I looked up
and noticed, above the dining table, a crystal chandelier mounted on a long, thick metal pillar, made
slightly less obtrusive with a coat of the same dusky-pink paint that covered the ceiling. If the
chandelier dangled only by a chain, van Mastrigt explained, it would swing with the slightest
movement of the water.

The chandelier was just one example of a conspicuous incongruity between the building’s high-tech
functionalism and the couple’s taste in décor. Down a hallway was a living room furnished with
leather armchairs and paintings of traditional Dutch interiors in gilded frames. “Many of the things we
still have here were from the old house,” Mastrigt explained. (They even keep a photo of the house on
the bedroom wall.) A tiny elevator connected to the second floor. From the upstairs balcony, the view
across the river was drably industrial: a metal-sided boat-rental warehouse, stacks of multicolored
shipping pallets, an auto-repair shop. Next door was an old, uninhabited houseboat. Like any
optimistic gentrifier, van Mastrigt chose to see the merits of his undeveloped surroundings. “You
don’t have direct neighbors,” he said. “You can make a lot of noise.”

Olthuis’s career is a union of his matrilineal and patrilineal family trades. In Dutch, Olthuis means
“old house”; on his father’s side, architecture and engineering have been practiced for five
generations. In The Hague, tile mosaics on the façades of several Art Nouveau buildings bear the
name of the architect who designed them: Jan Olthuis, Koen’s great-great-grandfather. On his
mother’s side, the family name is Boot, Dutch for “boat.” Olthuis’s maternal grandfather, Jacobus,
was the third in a line of Boots to run a shipyard in the village of Woubrugge. A tinkering streak runs
in the family: in the nineteen-fifties, Jacobus, who also had a pilot’s license, added ice runners and an
airplane wing to a boat and “sailed” the contraption over frozen ponds. I asked Olthuis how his
parents met, and he seemed surprised to recall that even this detail of his personal history had an
element of aquatic destiny: it was on a cruise around Italy.

Still, Olthuis’s path to building on water was fairly circuitous. The Netherlands is known for industrial
design, and Olthuis’s home town, Son, lies outside Eindhoven, the industry’s hub. Olthuis’s father
worked for Philips, the electronics company, in television engineering, at the time when black-andwhite
sets were being replaced by color ones. Olthuis recalls a period when the family would receive
a new experimental TV model every month, including one with a teletext printer that could spit out
sports scores and other onscreen information on a receipt-like scroll. As a child, during stays with his
grandparents, Olthuis would spend hours in Jacobus’s home workshop, building model boats, cars,
and helicopters. When he was thirteen, he began helping a friend who repaired motorbikes, which
they rode up and down country roads before they were old enough to legally drive. He worked for a
time at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Eindhoven, washing dishes and parking cars, and considered a
career in hospitality. But, when his girlfriend at the time decided to study architecture at the Delft
University of Technology, he followed her there and enrolled in the same program.

Olthuis’s student days, in the early nineties, coincided with the rise of “starchitects,” global buildercelebrities
who imprinted their projects with dramatic aesthetic signatures. Rem Koolhaas, a fellowDutchman who
founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, had become known for his conceptual rigor and his
audaciously cantilevered designs, including the wave-shaped Nexus World Housing, in Fukuoka,
and the Maison à Bordeaux, a private residence in France equipped with a giant elevator platform to carry
its wheelchair-bound owner between floors. Olthuis told me that he found
the starchitectural approach unappealingly ego-driven. “They’re more focussed on building a statue
for themselves than for society,” he said. During a university conference, though, he found himself
serving as a chauffeur for the famous Polish American architect Daniel Libeskind, and the two formed
a connection. Libeskind made Olthuis a sketch that he’s kept to this day, of a windmill in a landscape
that they’d driven through. (A fan of numerology, Libeskind also calculated that Olthuis’s career
would peak in 2031. “I’ve still got some time left,” Olthuis joked to me.) Olthuis admired Libeskind’s
spirit of experimentation, and the sense of social meaning with which he imbued projects such as the
Jewish Museum in Berlin. “He taught me that architecture could be about more than just the
buildings,” Olthuis said.


Waterstudio renderings like this one, of a floating “city” in the Maldives, are created using tools including Photoshop and the A.I. program Midjourney.Art
work courtesy Waterstudio / Dutch Docklands


A rendering of a floating forest in the Persian Gulf, devised as part of a strategy to combat heat and humidity. When building projects on the water,
Olthuis says, “you have to be very, very patient.”Art work courtesy Waterstudio

After graduating, Olthuis got a job at a large architecture firm run by one of his former professors. For
his first project, a traffic-control center in Wolfheze, he had an initial flirtation with architecture on
the water, designing a structure that would be raised up on a plinth above a shallow artificial pond.
But he found the firm’s corporate culture stultifying. “There was not that much spirit among young
architects that you could change the world,” he said. An engineering student from the Delft University
of Technology, Rolf Peters, was working for a company that was entering a competition to design a
master plan for IJburg, a new Amsterdam neighborhood built on artificial islands rising out of IJmeer
lake. Olthuis joined the team, and, though their entry didn’t win, he and Peters decided to work
together again to devise housing for the neighborhood.

The winning plan designated plots for houseboats but had no specifications about what kinds of
structures would fill them. In the Netherlands, a houseboat is sold along with the rights to its site on
the water, just as a traditional house is legally attached to the plot of land it sits upon. For decades,
houseboats have lined Amsterdam’s downtown canals. “When you walk through them, your head
touches the ceiling, it’s damp, it’s low, it’s unstable,” Olthuis said. “But they were on the best
locations, so we thought—maybe it was youthful enthusiasm—we can do better.” They also saw a
business opportunity. On land, many young architects were competing to build in limited space. On
the water, Olthuis said, they would be “the king with one eye in the land of the blind.” Waterstudio
launched out of Peters’s home, in Haarlem, in 2003.

The firm’s first breakthrough came the following year, with the design of a glass-walled houseboat for
a wealthy family in the tulip trade. Called the Watervilla Aalsmeer, the home would be anchored on a
lake near the warehouses where flower auctions are held. According to building regulations at the
time, the size of the new structure had to match that of the traditional one-story houseboat it was
replacing. But Olthuis and Peters discovered that there were no restrictions on building beneath the
water. Their design had a footprint of more than two thousand square feet and incorporated flashy
features such as wardrobes that lowered into the concrete foundation at the touch of a button, like
weapon caches in a supervillain’s lair, and a windowless underwater home theatre with seating for
twenty. The building became a local media sensation. “We had six or seven camera crews in one
house,” Olthuis recalled. One television segment featured Olthuis, then clean-shaven and in his early
thirties, perching on a plush white sofa in the living room. He recalls telling people at the time, in
retrospect too bullishly, “In 2010, we will see floating cities all over the world.”

For the homes in IJburg, the city of Amsterdam decided that developers should follow housing codes
rather than shipbuilding ones. Floating buildings would be required to have proper insulation and
sewage systems that connected to the city’s infrastructure; they would also be allowed to rise two
stories above the water. Prospective residents could enter a lottery to buy water plots in the
neighborhood. In 2008, Waterstudio became the first firm to place a floating home in IJburg. The
structure, which is still docked in its original location, has three stories, with bedrooms built into the
foundation. When it was first craned into the water, it sank twenty-five centimetres deeper than
regulations allowed. (The homeowner later won a lawsuit against one of the contractors for making
the structure heavier than it was designed to be.) The team solved the problem by creating inflatable
jetties, filled with air and water, that formed a walkway around the building and lifted it back up.
Olthuis told me, “From then on, we could use these systems in all our projects.”

Waterstudio’s IJburg home provided the template for a new generation of water houses in the
Netherlands. Today, there are more than twenty floating neighborhoods throughout the country. The
homes in IJburg are arranged in a grid resembling miniature city blocks, with narrow docks in lieu of
sidewalks. At night, the houses glow like lanterns against the dark water. Buying into the
neighborhood has proved a worthy investment: the houses were built for around three hundred
thousand euros apiece and now sell for several times that. During my stay in Amsterdam, I rented a
room in a B. and B. in IJburg called La Corte Sconta, run by a pair of siblings from another city of
water, Venice. The rental bedrooms are on the bottom of three levels, below an open-plan kitchen and
a cozy plant-filled common area with wide sliding windows that look onto the water. When I
descended the stairs and entered my room, at one end of a short hallway, I noticed that the windows
were small and high on the wall, like they would be in an English basement. Peering out, I saw that
the surface of the lake rose right up to the bottom of the window, which meant that the floor I was
standing on was some six feet underwater. One of the siblings, Auro Cavalcante, who lives on the top
floor, told me that he only feels the building moving when there’s a storm. The weather that night was
clear, but I felt a slight wobbliness, or perhaps merely a psychosomatic case of sea legs, as I
contemplated the lake surrounding me, pushing in from all sides.

Today, Waterstudio’s headquarters are situated in a former grocery store on a quiet residential street
in Rijswijk, a small suburb halfway between The Hague and Delft. Olthuis lives ten minutes away, in
a new neighborhood built over a train hub in Delft’s downtown. Somewhat contrary to his ideal of
modest water-bound designs, he told me that he would move his family to a floating home only if he
could acquire a plot of water large enough to accommodate a yard. (When I asked his wife, Charlotte,
a chef, if she would be amenable to water living, she said, “I would like that, but maybe only for
summer holidays.”) The firm’s office space, easily visible through its large storefront windows, is
small and open, with rows of white tables where employees work. When I arrived one weekday
morning, Olthuis was in the middle of his ramen breakfast. He saw me coming and greeted me at the
door. “The street and the building are almost one,” he said.

Inside, a row of metal shelves running the length of the space was stacked with 3-D-printed models of
projects ranging from the already built to the wholly theoretical: a floating hotel with a glass roof, to
allow viewings of the northern lights; a spindly tower resembling a vertiginous stack of plates, meant
as an artificial water-based habitat for plants and animals; a “seapod” mounted, like a lollipop, on a
single pole sticking out of the water, with a home inside. Olthuis encourages an improvisatory
approach to designs and materials. He had recently discovered that a recycling company was being
paid to dispose of the worn-out blades of wind turbines, which are often buried in landfills. He and a
Korean client were discussing the possibility of reusing the hollow fibreglass pieces as foundations
for floating walkways, or, perhaps, as single hotel rooms, with windows cut into the sides. The blades
would offer “architecture that we never could have made if we had to pay for it,” Olthuis said. Such
resourcefulness extends to the use of new technologies. At one desk, Anna Vendemia, an Italian who
has worked at Waterstudio since 2018, was sitting in front of a pair of monitors and using the
artificial-intelligence tool Midjourney to generate renderings of a clamshell-shaped floating hotel
suite, with curving glass windows and an onboard swimming pool, for a client in Dubai.

One row over, Sridhar Subramani, who joined the firm from Mumbai seven years ago, was working
on a study commissioned by the city of Rotterdam. Home to the largest port in Europe, Rotterdam is
situated on the Nieuwe Waterweg, a broad canal that forms the artificial mouth of the Rhone, flowing
out to the North Sea. This position makes Rotterdam particularly vulnerable to flooding, and the local
government has invested heavily in adaptive design. In 2019, a floating solar-powered dairy farm with
a cheese-making facility on its bottom level opened in the city. The study conducted by Waterstudio
was meant to show how a theoretical fleet of mobile floating structures could change locations
throughout the day to accommodate city dwellers’ routines. In one concept, the platforms represented
restaurants that could float to downtown office buildings during lunchtime and then move to
residential neighborhoods in the evening. On Subramani’s computer screen, tiny building icons
migrated around the Nieuwe Maas river in downtown Rotterdam like a swarm of worker bees.

Subramani has an architecture degree but describes himself as an “urban technologist and researcher.”
Olthuis later told me, “Sridhar is more crazy than I am.” When Olthuis interviewed him for a job and
asked why he wanted to make floating buildings, Subramani answered that his real goal was to make
cities that float in the air, with the help of helium balloons. Rolf Peters, Waterstudio’s co-founder, left
in 2010 to pursue independent projects. For the past decade, Olthuis’s partner at the firm has been
Ankie Stam, a forty-four-year-old architect who handles the administrative and marketing sides of the
business. “We always attract people who are different than the regular architecture students,” Stam
told me as she assembled a plate of dark bread, Nutella, and sliced Gouda. “We don’t want to make
just one very nice, beautiful building.”

Scattered around the office, like loose Lego bricks, were tiny 3-D-printed models of houses from the
Maldives Floating City. On a tabletop, Olthuis unrolled an enormous sheet of glossy printer paper. It
was an aerial rendering of the finished project: a tessellated network of water-bound platforms, like a
man-made spiderweb, featuring rows of pastel-colored town houses. Estimated to cost a billion
dollars, the development will be situated a fifteen-minute boat ride from the overcrowded capital of
Malé. The complex will provide as many as thirteen thousand units of housing, which will rest in a
shallow lagoon ringed by reinforced sandbars and coral reefs designed to break waves.

For the Maldives, an archipelagic country in the Indian Ocean, climate change already poses an
existential threat. According to geological surveys, eighty per cent of the country could be
uninhabitable by 2050. The idea for the floating city originated after the Maldivian President,
Mohamed Nasheed, held a stunt cabinet meeting underwater, in scuba gear, in 2009, to promote
awareness of the potential effects of climate change on the country. The Dutch consulate in the
Maldives, drawing on the Netherlands’ international reputation in water-management technology,
connected Nasheed to Waterstudio. “In the Maldives, we cannot stop the waves, but we can rise with
them,” Nasheed has said of the project. But he left office in 2012, and since then Waterstudio has had
to navigate four different Maldivian administrations, persuading each of the project’s importance in
turn. “It’s a kind of education,” Olthuis said. “You have to start from zero.”

A first batch of four houses for the city was recently towed out into the ocean, and Olthuis estimated
that construction would be completed by 2028. “It could be faster,” he said, adding that, because the
homes are modular, multiple factories can be involved in manufacturing them at once. But previous
projects have been delayed by zoning trouble, waffling developers, and poor local infrastructure. In
2016, the Times reported that ambitious Waterstudio projects in New Jersey and Dubai were
scheduled to roll out their first units within a year. Eight years later, Olthuis described both as still
awaiting construction. Waterstudio has produced fifteen design iterations for the New Jersey project.
“This business is different than building on land,” he said. “You have to be very, very patient.”

Other firms have followed Waterstudio into floating real estate. The bulk of the Maldives project is
being funded by Dutch Docklands, a commercial developer focussed on floating construction, which
will supplement the affordable housing with its own luxury floating hotels and homes. (Olthuis is a
minor stakeholder in the firm.) In 2021, Oceanix, a New York-based company, and BIG, a firm owned
by the Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels, announced plans to build a floating development off the coast
of Busan, South Korea. Oceanix touted the project as “trailblazing a new industry,” and trade blogs
reported an estimated completion date of 2025, but as of now construction has yet to begin.
(Oceanix’s co-founder and C.E.O., Itai Madamombe, said that it would likely start by the end of this
year.)

Olthuis told me that, as competition from other, bigger firms has grown, Waterstudio has had to
engage in a “little bit of a fight” for new jobs. “Our advantage is that we have twenty years of
experience,” he said, “so we know a bit more the tricks and the problems, and that will keep us ahead
of other people for the next three to five years.” Any attention brought to floating architecture is a
good thing, in his opinion, so long as firms can deliver on their splashy promises. “There are not that
many projects, and each of these projects has to succeed,” he said.

The most devastating natural catastrophe in modern Dutch history was the North Sea flood of 1953.
Known as the Watersnoodramp, it resulted from an intense windstorm over the ocean meeting high
spring tides. Residents in the north of the country were awoken in the middle of the night, on
February 1st, by an initial deluge that inundated densely settled islands and filled carefully maintained
polders. Railways flooded and telephone poles were destroyed, cutting off communication to the
region. An official alert did not reach residents until 8 A.M., by which time many were stranded in
their attics or on their roofs. “It was as if we were spectators as the world ended,” one witness in the
village of Kruiningen recalled. The next day, at 4 P.M., another wave of water came, even higher than
the first, and destroyed many of the structures that still stood. Some survivors waited days for large
ships to reach the area. In all, nearly two thousand people died.

The disaster forced the Dutch government to confront the inadequacy of its aging dike system. Just
weeks after the flood, a committee was formed to develop a national water-defense plan, which
became known as the Delta Works, involving more than twenty thousand kilometres of new seawalls,
dikes, and dams. Its crowning element, completed in 1998, was the Maeslantkering, a hulking steel
storm-surge barrier separating the Nieuwe Waterweg canal from the North Sea.

One afternoon, Olthuis drove me through the countryside to the Maeslantkering. Outside Dutch city
centers, the artificiality of the landscape becomes harder to ignore. The roads were the highest point in
the topography; from the car’s passenger window, I could see down into farm fields below, which
were dotted with pools of water from recent storms. Small canals traversed the uneven ground in
straight lines. The land rose as we moved toward the coast—the lip on a giant bowl of kung-pao
chicken—which created the strange sensation of looking upward to see the surface of the sea. Many
of the canals running through the farmland were fortified with low hillocks covered in grass. “It takes
almost nothing to break these,” Olthuis said of the barriers. “Don’t talk to terrorists, because if you
want to screw up this country you only have to break a few dikes and then the whole system breaks.
From here on half of Amsterdam will flood.”

The Nieuwe Waterweg was crowded with industrial ships and oil rigs heading out to sea. Wind
turbines lined both shores. Olthuis pulled into a parking lot that looked out onto the Maeslantkering,
which the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has called “one of modern Europe’s lesser-known
marvels.” Among the largest moving structures ever built, it is composed of two identical white steel
frames, each weighing close to seven thousand tons, situated on opposite banks of the canal. A
computer system tracks the levels of the Nieuwe Waterweg; if the water rises too high, the system
activates and the two frames rotate from either bank, ferrying sections of curved steel wall that meet
in the middle and seal the canal from the surging sea.

Olthuis and I walked up to a metal fence plastered with warning signs. The closest part of the steel
frames stood a dozen yards away. Their trussing often earns them comparisons to the Eiffel Tower—
they are only slightly shorter—but to me they looked more like a roller coaster turned on its side.
Standing dwarfed beside them, I felt a heady, slightly ominous thrill.

The Maeslantkering is designed to withstand the kinds of storms that are projected to happen only
once every ten thousand years. So far, outside of test runs, it has been activated on just one occasion,
in December of last year, during Storm Pia. But Harold van Waveren, the flood-risk-management
expert at Rijkswaterstaat, told me that, if severe storms grow more frequent and the Maeslantkering
stays closed for too long, the river water that would otherwise flow out to sea would have no outlet
and might flood the region regardless. “We need a whole spectrum of solutions, from very small scale
to large scale,” he said. The country has taken steps toward creating more capacity for water, as
Olthuis envisions. The so-called Room for the River project, completed between 2006 and 2021,
deepened and widened stretches of rivers at thirty locations and replaced some artificial banks with
sections of wetland landscape. Still, van Waveren seemed skeptical that floating architecture was the
future. “I’m not sure if it’s possible on a large scale,” he said.

Jeroen Aerts, the head of the department of Water and Climate Risk at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
and one of the country’s leading environmental researchers, was even more dubious. “Will there be
large floating cities? I don’t see this happening, to be honest,” he said. Living on water “is not in the
culture of Dutch people,” he continued. “On average, a Dutch person, you want to have a garden, you
want two floors.” Olthuis agrees, in a fashion. The biggest obstacles to large-scale waterborne
construction are not technological or financial, he said, but attitudinal. A NIMBYism can set in when
you ask Dutch people to imagine a wetter way of living. “They like it, but not in their back yard,”
Olthuis said. “If you ask them if their garden should be water, they say no.” He spoke with frustration
about the sluggishness of Dutch bureaucracy, and its reluctance to adjust its defensive posture toward
the Waterwolf. The country is “stuck in engineering solutions that we already used for the last fifty
years,” he said. New ones are urgently needed, “but the politicians are not ready.” We’d ascended a
hill to get a better view of the canal. Ships passed continuously through the open Maeslantkering. The
Netherlands’ familiarity with flooding has created paradoxical roadblocks to floating construction,
Olthuis said: “If your country is threatened by water, your legal framework doesn’t allow you to be
close to it.” Piecemeal ownership of floating structures is not allowed in the Netherlands, which
disincentivizes developers who might want to build and sell multiunit housing. Plus, the parcels of
Dutch water that are sold for houses remain limited in size, preventing the construction of taller
floating buildings, like the Waterstudio apartments in Scandinavia. “The city has to rezone this water
and then allow you to build plots of a hundred by a hundred feet,” he said. “We’ve drawn the plans
many times. We’re still waiting for the right city or town to approve.”

To see Waterstudio’s most ambitious completed project, I had to travel outside the Netherlands, to the
French city of Lyon. The Théâtre L’Île Ô floats in the Rhone off a paved waterside promenade near
the Gallieni bridge. (“Ô” is a homophone for eau, the French word for “water.”) On a winter
afternoon, multi-lane roads above the riverbanks roared with cars, but compared with the bustling
Dutch rivers the water on the Rhone was quiet. The theatre comprises six tilted polygons made of
white steel and cut through with irregularly shaped windows. Linked to the bank by three gangways,
it protrudes from the river like shards of an iceberg.

The building, which opened to the public in early 2023, is the second location of Patadôme, a local
organization that hosts performances for children. But Olthuis described the theatre, more loftily, as a
“global, mobile asset,” a piece of public infrastructure that, if no longer wanted in Lyon, can simply
be towed down the Rhone and docked in Avignon, perhaps, or in Marseille. Its current lease lasts
eighteen years, and its modular design makes it adaptable to different uses. David Lahille, Patadôme’s
director of business development, managed the construction project. “Today, it is a theatre,” he told
me. “Tomorrow, if we want to change it to a school, it’s easy.”

The idea for the new theatre emerged in 2018, when control over Lyon’s waterways was transferred to
the French federal government and the city launched an initiative to renew the waterfront. At the time,
Patadôme had been looking to build a new space, but construction of theatres on land remains strictly
regulated in France, owing to an old monarchic precedent dating to Louis XIV. A theatre on the water
would be exempt from that rule. “We thought about buying a ship and modifying the ship,” Lahille
said. They found Waterstudio, which suggested an ambitious new construction designed from scratch.


Among Waterstudio’s first projects was a home in Amsterdam’s IJburg, one of a number of floating neighborhoods that now exist in the
Netherlands.Photograph by Giulio Di Sturco for The New Yorker

An ebullient Frenchman with a background in engineering, Lahille recalled that, during the team’s
first meeting at Waterstudio’s office, Olthuis pulled out a box of wooden blocks, spilled them out onto
a table, and asked the clients to construct a model of the river landscape. Then he had them improvise
a shape for the theatre using the same blocks, which eventually inspired the whimsically geometric
design. “You become a child, trying to imagine,” Lahille said. Getting the project approved, though,
required bureaucratic wrangling at both the local and national level, and in the end hinged on the
enthusiasm of a single official, Jean-Bastien Gambonnet, who in 2021 was promoted to lead the local
River Navigation Unit within the French Ministry of Ecological Transition. Gambonnet hustled to get
approval from both Lyon and Paris. The process took about a year. “Here in France, usually, it’s more
than ten years,” Lahille said.

The theatre’s concrete foundation was poured five miles outside the city. The bridges over the Rhone
are unusually low, so the top floor of the building had to be constructed in situ. When the floating
platform was ready to be craned into the water, there was a question of whether the bank of the river
was strong enough to bear the weight—fifteen hundred tons in total—so the contractors rushed to
reinforce the bank in a matter of weeks, using twenty-metre-long steel piles. (Gambonnet told them
that he would smooth out the paperwork after the fact.) “I said to the port owner, ‘Now you have one
of the most powerful quays in France,’ ” Lahille said.

Walking into the theatre’s lobby, a visitor is surrounded from floor to ceiling by pale exposed beams
of cross-laminated timber, a lightweight engineered wood. When I toured the space, a children’s
production of “Animal Farm” was just letting out of the larger of two theatres, a cavernous auditorium
with two hundred and forty-four stadium seats. Long strips of bamboo created wavelike patterns on
the walls and ceiling, both for acoustics and to evoke the aquatic surroundings. Confetti dotted the
floor, and children milled about onstage, inspecting a wooden barn. The windowless space seemed far
too large to fit inside the building I’d entered, and in a sense it was: from the outside, a third of the
theatre’s height is hidden beneath the river. “Right now, you are under the water,” one of the
stagehands told me. He said that he could detect the building moving only when the occasional large
boat passed by at high speed.

When the theatre opened, some locals complained that its modern design clashed with the city’s
neoclassical stone architecture. “Very ugly,” one wrote in the comments section of a news article
about the project. “Pretentious, both in substance and in form,” another wrote. Jean-Philippe Amy, the
director of the Théâtre L’Île Ô, told me, “Lyon is a traditional city,” but added that the space has a
way of converting visitors, especially the young ones who make up Patadôme’s target audience.
Children can peek out the windows and see the current drifting by at eye level. On sunny days,
reflections of the river’s rippling surface dance on the building’s façade.

This past December, the French Alps experienced a week of heavy rains. The Rhone, which ferries
glacial meltwater down from the mountains, swelled with the excess precipitation. In the center of
Lyon, where the Rhone meets the Saone, the current strengthened. On the night of December 12th,
flooding was forecast, but the Théâtre L’Île Ô decided to forge ahead with a scheduled event hosted
by the city’s Irish consulate. The water arrived sooner and more forcefully than anticipated. To enter
the building, guests had to walk across a makeshift wooden bridge laid atop one of the gangways.
From the first-floor windows, they watched the Rhone rush by. “You could see these trees going very
fast on the flow,” Lahille recalled. He kept an eye on his phone, monitoring the river’s height, but as
the land began to flood the crowd in the theatre’s underwater auditorium remained completely dry.
When Lahille left, at 1 A.M., the water on the banks reached his knees. From land, the theatre looked
elevated, suspended on the swollen river. “The building survived, like a boat,” Lahille said. “It goes
up and down, and it’s not a problem. The only problem is leaving it.” ♦

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of, most recently,
“Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.”

click here for the pdf article of The Newyorker

Latin American Congress Of Steel Frame Sao Paulo Brazil

Last week, Waterstudio participated in the 6th Congress LATAM On Steel Frame and Constructive Systems in Brazil, where we focused on addressing challenges through floating architecture.

Koen Olthuis presented the path towards floating cities in his talk titled, from Myth to Marble, while our colleague Anna Vendemia discussed the role of floating architecture in addressing social and bioclimatic issues. She drew from our impactful initiatives, such as City Apps for Wet slums and the Bihar Fellowship Program.

Meeting Vasco Rodrigues, Deputy Consul General of the Netherlands in São Paulo, emphasized the importance of global collaboration for sustainable solutions.

We extend our sincere gratitude to the organizers in São Paulo, the speakers, and all the attendees for contributing to the success of this event. Waterstudio is deeply committed to shaping a sustainable future through innovative architecture, and we look forward to future opportunities to share our message on other influential platforms. Let’s work together to inspire change and create a greener, more sustainable world!

Drijvende woonwijken in ondergelopen polders, deze architect ziet het al voor zich

By Marc Doodeman
Cobouw
2023.October.02

 

Drijvende woonwijken in ondergelopen polders, deze architect ziet het al voor zich
Koen Olthuis. Foto: Suzanne van de Kerk

Op de Malediven werkt architect Koen Olthuis aan de bouw van een drijvende stad. In Nederland kan zoiets ook, denkt hij: in havens en polders.

En óf hij gedreven is. “Anders houd je het niet twintig jaar vol.” Architect Koen Olthuis zit in zijn kantoor in Rijswijk aan een kleurige glazen tafel voor een stapeltje lege A4’tjes en een pen, die hij tijdens het gesprek veelvuldig zal gebruiken om zijn woorden kracht bij te zetten. Hij doet al tien jaar niets anders dan drijvend bouwen, zegt hij. Al wil hij het zo eigenlijk niet noemen. “Het woord drijvend komt mijn strot uit.”

Hij wil dat woningen op water onderdeel worden van de normale stedenbouw. Net als hoogbouw ooit een keuze was om ruimte goed te gebruiken. Als je havens en polders gaat benutten als woonwijken, gebruik je de ruimte beter.

Olthuis wil af van de “freak architecture”. Van de “watervillaatjes met een bootje aan het water” voor de happy few. “Want dan blijft het altijd een nichemarkt.” Wonen op het water moet ook toegankelijk worden voor gewone mensen, vindt hij.

Duizenden polders

Aan de techniek ligt het niet. “In Nederland bouwen we meestal op palen of op staal. Kijk eens onder het Paleis op de Dam. Dertienduizend houten palen. Dertienduizend palen staan daar onder één gebouwtje! Dat slaat helemaal nergens op. Houten palen. Het hoogste bos van Nederland. Dat soort funderingen vinden wij fantastisch. Maar daarvan zeg je toch ook niet dat het om paalwoningen gaat?”

Wat hem betreft moeten polders in Nederland gebruikt worden om de woningnood aan te pakken. Laat maar onderlopen. Het land schreeuwt om locaties. Pak een deel van de Haarlemmermeerpolder. Of pak ergens een hele polder.

“We hebben 3.500 polders. Veenpolders. Droogmakerijen. Zeepolders. We halen het water eruit. Maar het is een kunstmatig systeem. Wij wonen met elkaar in een poldermachine. En die machine moet je onderhouden en droog houden. Anders kan je niet wonen en geen landbouw bedrijven. Maar er komt steeds meer regen en meer wateroverlast. Dus moet je harder pompen. Op lange termijn is dat systeem gewoon niet vol te houden.” Waarom al die polders droogmalen? Met verzilting langs de kust en CO2-uitstoot bij de veenpolders tot gevolg. Waar zijn we mee bezig, vraagt Olthuis zich af.

Klimaatverandering

Olthuis zet een kleine maquette op tafel van een drijvende wijk die op de Malediven gepland is. Daar wil de overheid vijftienduizend woningen op het water bouwen. De straten komen te staan op grote pontons en worden via knooppunten aan elkaar gekoppeld. Op een A4’tje tekent de architect een netwerk van lijntjes uit. Hij pakt zijn laptop erbij om nog een schets van bovenaf te laten zien. Het lijkt op een bloemkoolwijk, maar dan met water in plaats van tuinen.

De ontwikkeling van de drijvende stad op de Malediven zit sinds vorig jaar in een stroomversnelling. De plaatselijke minister van Milieu, Klimaatverandering en Technologie, Shauna Aminath, brak bij nieuwsmedium Bloomberg een lans voor de bouw van drijvende wijken. “Door de snelheid waarmee klimaatverandering toeneemt en de zeespiegel stijgt, moeten we op een hogere ondergrond gaan bouwen”, zei ze.

Olthuis vindt het “fantastisch” dat hij betrokken is bij het “opstarten van de nieuwe economie”. “Steun van de overheid is voor ons zó belangrijk”, zegt hij. Met “ons” doelt Olthuis op zijn architectenbureau Waterstudio.NL, ontwikkelaar Dutch Docklands Maldives én op de joint venture tussen de overheid en de Nederlandse onderneming: Dutch Docklands International. Bij het project zijn ook Nederlandse waterbouwers en een ingenieursbureau betrokken. Olthuis is de chief creative officer.

Het wordt een “miljardenproject”, volgens de architect. Critici vrezen dat de woningen door deze hoge kosten alleen te betalen zullen zijn door de rijken. Olthuis houdt de moed erin en denkt dat er in de drijvende stad straks ook plek is voor burgers met een meer bescheiden inkomen.

Onderwatertech

De drijvende stad komt in een lagune, waar de strandjes steeds verder zinken en het rif en het koraal heel dichtbij zijn. “Zo’n stad kan je niet bouwen in het midden van de oceaan, maar je kunt hem wel bouwen in de nabijheid van bestaande infrastructuur”, zegt Olthuis. Bijvoorbeeld dicht bij de hoofdstad Malé, die uit zijn jasje barst.

De woningen zijn fel gekleurd en krijgen onverharde (zand)straten, passend bij de lokale cultuur. “Maar onderwater is alles gewoon hightech”, verzekert Olthuis. Daar liggen het riool en alle leidingen.

De eerste drijvende woonwijk bestaat uit zeshonderd woningen (vier hoog met dakterras). De drijvende stad wordt over het water aangevoerd. Volgend voorjaar komen draagschepen met daarop straten: dat zijn stalen pontons van honderd bij dertig meter. De straten worden vastgemaakt aan palen, laat Olthuis zien met een paar pennenstreken op een A4’tje. “Het is eigenlijk een grote haven. Dat is niet wat mensen willen horen. Maar zo werkt zo’n stad wel.”

Vijftienduizend drijvende woningen moeten er op de Malediven komen. Illustratie: Waterstudio

Drijvende flexwoningen

De woningen en straten komen uit China, India en Sri Lanka, landen die ook bij het project betrokken zijn. De woningen die ze maken zijn volgens Olthuis twee keer zo goedkoop als in Nederland, omdat arbeid veel goedkoper is. De flexibele steden van Olthuis kunnen zich aanpassen aan het seizoen. Tennisbanen kunnen na de zomer afdrijven en vervangen worden door parken. “Seizoensgebonden architectuur”, noemt Olthuis dat.

In zekere zin lijkt het op de flexwoningen die de laatste jaren in Nederland aanslaan. Die zijn ook verplaatsbaar. Olthuis: “Dat soort woningen juichen we alleen maar toe.” Ook flexwoningen komen in principe op tijdelijke bestemmingen. En wat hem betreft mogen ze ook drijven.

Olthuis zou graag zien dat het Rijk lege delen van havens in Nederland aanwijst om met drijvende wijken te starten. In Amsterdam of Rotterdam. Op het IJmeer of op de plek waar ooit de Markerwaard zou komen. Maar de architect ziet dat niet snel gebeuren, vanwege de huidige bestemming van die gebieden en verwachte bezwaren van natuurbeschermingsorganisaties. De duizenden polders in Nederland zijn kansrijkere locaties. “We moeten als land kijken of het economisch beter is om een aantal van die polders onder water te zetten.”

Koen Olthuis. Foto: Suzanne van de Kerk

City-dokter

De woningnood vormt dé gelegenheid om aan de slag te gaan met drijvende wijken, vindt Olthuis. Anders blijft Nederland hangen in experimenten, zoals die met drijvende woningen bij IJburg in Amsterdam en een projectje in Rotterdam. In het buitenland wordt het concept serieuzer opgepakt, valt Olthuis op. Dat merkt hij alleen al aan de telefoontjes van buitenlandse media. “Vanmiddag word ik gebeld door The New York Times. Elke maand staat er wel een filmploeg hier.” Een week voor dit gesprek was Olthuis keynotespeaker op een congres over drijvend bouwen in Tokio.

Dat het concept van woningbouw op het water in Nederland tot nu toe niet echt aansloeg, frustreert hem. Het bewoog hem er jaren geleden toe aan de TU Delft te promoveren op het onderwerp. Om serieuzer genomen te worden in de stedenbouwwereld. Ook wilde hij de wereld van zijn moeder en vader bij elkaar brengen. “Aan mijn moeders kant zaten de scheepsbouwers. Aan vaders kant de art-nouveau-architecten.”

In plaats van architect zou hij zichzelf liever city-dokter willen noemen. Met water als medicijn. “Ik zie water als mogelijkheid om de stad te verbeteren.”

Tipping point

Inmiddels begint er beweging in te komen. “We gaan richting een tipping point waarin waterwonen, bouwen op natte ondergronden, als een volwaardig alternatief wordt gezien”, denkt Olthuis. Pensioenbeheerders meldden zich al met belangstelling. Ze willen verkennen of wonen op het water op grotere schaal een oplossing kan zijn. “De rol van architecten is om te laten zien dat je geld kan verdienen aan water. Dan volgen de ontwikkelaars wel”, is zijn overtuiging.

Nu Olthuis een doctorstitel heeft, lesgeeft aan de TU Delft en ziet hoe enthousiast studenten zijn over waterwonen, is zijn ambitie groter dan ooit. Hij hoopt dat hij uiteindelijk de stedenbouw kan verrijken.

Daar is dan wel steun van de overheid voor nodig. Die moet regels opstellen, vindt de architect. “Bijvoorbeeld: alles wat we gaan bouwen, moet verschoven kunnen worden. Zonder heel specifiek te zeggen dat het een waterwoning moet zijn. Dan gaat de industrie zoeken naar oplossingen en kunnen er mooie dingen gebeuren.”

Marc Doodeman

Marc Doodeman

Journalist

Marc Doodeman werkt sinds 2008 als redacteur voor Cobouw. Hij houdt de marktontwikkelingen in de bouw bij, kijkt hoe bouwbedrijven het doen en heeft speciale interesse voor de woning(bouw)markt. Fascinatie: op zoek naar het huis (en de huizenmaker) van de toekomst. Marc is te bereiken op: marcdoodeman@vmnmedia.nl.

 

 

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Worried About Living in a Flood Zone? Try a House That Floats.

By Ronda Kayson
The New York Times
2023.September.29

Eventually, coastal cities threatened with rising tides and bigger storms could use not just the waterfront, but also the water, as places to build housing.

A yacht shaped like a house in the water with the Miami skyline behind it.
As sea levels rise, developers are eyeing the water as the next frontier, potentially mooring yachts shaped like floating homes in Biscayne Bay in Miami, like in this photo.Credit…Arkup

As sea levels rise and storms worsen, threatening the planet’s fragile coastlines, some architects and developers are looking to the water not as a looming threat, but as a frontier for development.

“We want to change cities worldwide, we want to see how we can push the cities into the water,” said Koen Olthuis, a Dutch architect and the founder of Waterstudio, an architectural firm that specializes in floating buildings. “I hope that in 50 years time, we look back at our cities and say, ‘Well, floating structures, they are just part of this city recipe, they make sense, they add something to it, they bring us space, cheap houses, flexible cities.’”

About 3 billion people, roughly half of the world’s population, lives within 125 miles of a coastline, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Eventually, coastal cities could claim not just the waterfront, but also the water, building in their harbors, bays, canals and rivers.

It’s already happening in the Netherlands. With a third of its land below sea level, the country has floating officesa floating dairy farm and a floating pavilion. Floating buildings are often built atop concrete and foam pontoon foundations, allowing them to sit on the water, and rise and fall with currents.

Proponents of the design argue that these buildings protect the environment. While a 2022 study published in the Journal of Water & Climate Change found that floating structures can have a positive benefit, attracting birds to nest and providing habitat and food for sea life, the study also found that they can impact light, currents, wind patterns and water quality. .

A short ferry ride from central Amsterdam is Schoonschip, a community of 30 floating houses, half of them duplexes, on a canal in a former manufacturing neighborhood. The homes, made of wood, are built atop concrete bases and connected by a jetty.

The first residents arrived in 2019, more than a decade after the neighborhood was first conceived. Maarten Remmers, 43, a film producer, paid 450,000 euros for the three-story, three-bedroom home he lives in with his girlfriend and their two children. The house feels steadier than a boat, but sways with the currents. “If it storms, you really feel it, and you see the land dancing,” he said.

The community of more than 100 people feels like a village, with shared e-bikes and cars, and a floating garden. His children, ages 7 and 9, fish and swim in the canal. “You wake up with birds, and ducks next to your window, or swans,” he said.

While Mr. Remmers looks at his community as a sustainable one — the homes have heat pumps, green roofs and are solar powered — he does not see moving his family onto the water as a solution to rising sea levels, balking at the argument that floating cities are somehow a solution to climate change. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “If the whole city is flooded, then, OK, our house will float, but there’s no reason to keep living there anymore.”

A rendering of brightly colored apartment buildings floating on water.
The Maldives, a country vulnerable to rising seas, is building a floating neighborhood near its capital, with apartments, schools, shops and restaurants, as shown in this rendering.Credit…Dutch Docklands Maldives and Waterstudio

Yet, as sea levels rise, low-lying countries like the Maldives are grappling with an existential threat, and building on the water is a way to create land from the encroaching sea. The government, in partnership with the developer Dutch Docklands, is building an entire floating neighborhood in a lagoon 10 minutes by boat from Malé, the nation’s capital.

Next year, the first phase of the 5,000-modular unit development will open — apartments, schools, shops and restaurants built on a floating landscape of serpentine jetties fitted together like Lego pieces. “That is the future,” said Mr. Olthuis, the Dutch architect, who developed the master plan for the Maldives development.

But there are bureaucratic barriers. City building and zoning codes do not address floating houses and neighborhoods built on concrete and foam foundations. Even Amsterdam, a city of known for its houseboats, was not ready for a waterborne neighborhood like Schoonschip, and it took years to navigate the bureaucracy. “There were lots of times I was totally fed up with all the legislation,” Mr. Remmers, who was involved in the development of the community, said. “It took so long.”

Cities may not be prepared for floating neighborhoods, but they are familiar with yachts. So Nicolas Derouin and Arnaud Luguet, two French engineers, designed a yacht that looked like a condo, with a flat roof and open-concept floor plan. Lower the retractable hydraulic pilings down to the ocean floor, and the boat stabilizes. In a storm, the pilings and jack-up system can lift the boat out of the water, protecting it from a storm surge. In 2019, they built their first model — the Arkup 75 — selling it for over $4 million. (The owner is living on the 75-foot boat offshore from the mansion he is building in Miami, Mr. Derouin said.)

Now Arkup has a dozen orders placed for a smaller version, the Arkup 40, which sells for between $500,000 and $1.2 million, depending on configurations. The boats, with 660 square feet of indoor living space, and more than twice as much outdoor space, are being built in Indiana and will travel to Miami by truck.

Dock one outside a beach house and it acts as the ocean’s answer to a pool house. “It becomes an extension of their waterfront property, like a guesthouse or a family room,” Mr. Derouin said. Moor it far from shore and it is an isolated retreat. Lower the pilings and open the retractable decks of the Arkup 40 alongside another one, and you create a network of vessels far from land where you can walk from one boat to the other. “You create a floating villa,” Mr. Derouin said. “You can really create a floating community.”

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Introducing Urban Water Laboratory (UWL) by Waterstudio: 20 Years of Expertise in Urban Water Innovation

Explore our new website: https://urbanwaterlaboratory.nl/

UWL, the 𝗨𝗿𝗯𝗮𝗻 𝗪𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆, merges 20 years of hands-on experience in water-related architecture, urbanism and research by using data driven methods and algorithmic processes. We’re reshaping urban landscapes through water-centric designs and smart technologies, propelling sustainable urban development.

Join us in redefining urban living through water’s potential.

Floating Theater Lyon L’ile O wood construction award winner 2023

The floating theater in Lyon, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, which is a award winner of 2023, is a structure that combines different technologies and materials to create a captivating artistic space.

The building’s primary technologies include:

Concrete Shell: The hull of the theater is constructed using concrete, which provides stability and durability to the floating structure. The concrete shell was created by a specialist from the Netherlands at the port of Lyon, ensuring the expertise required for such construction.

CLT Wooden Superstructure: CLT (Cross-Laminated Timber) is used for the wooden superstructure of the theater. CLT is an innovative construction material made by layering and bonding timber boards together at right angles. This creates a strong and rigid structure that is also lightweight. The use of wood in the superstructure adds an organic and natural element to the theater’s design.

Waterproofing by Membrane: To protect the theater from water infiltration, a waterproof membrane is applied on five sides of the structure. This ensures that the theater remains watertight and can float safely on the water surface.

Sheet Steel Cladding: The outer cladding of the theater is made of sheet steel, which provides a protective and visually appealing layer. The steel cladding adds a modern and industrial touch to the overall design.

The choice of wood for the interior of the theater was driven by the artists’ desire for additional comfort and inspiration while expressing themselves. Wood is known for its organic character, warm color tones, unique shapes, and distinct scent. These qualities create a welcoming and immersive atmosphere for the artists and the audience, enhancing the overall experience within the wooden room.

By combining these technologies and materials, the floating theater in Lyon achieves a remarkable balance between functionality, aesthetics, and sustainability, creating a remarkable artistic space for performances and events.

Documentary about Floating Cities – Creative Ideas to Combat Climate Change

“Exploring the Future: The Rise of Floating Cities” is a documentary that delves into the emergence of floating cities as a response to rising sea levels caused by climate change. The film highlights the visionary efforts of different experts, including Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio, who is constructing a sustainable floating city in the Maldives, utilizing seawater for cooling purposes. While showcasing the potential of floating cities, the documentary also explores the challenges and complexities involved, such as engineering requirements, socio-economic considerations, and potential impacts on ecosystems. Through captivating visuals and expert analysis, the film provides viewers with a comprehensive understanding of this cutting-edge architectural movement and its potential to reshape urban living in the face of the climate crisis.

https://www.dw.com/en/floating-cities-creative-ideas-to-combat-climate-change/a-65804881

Planet E – Floating Cities

Sea levels are rising due to climate change. Many coastal cities are at growing risk of flooding. Architects are trying to react to this development with new ideas, such as floating cities. Architect Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio is constructing a floating city in the Maldives, sustainably cooled with sea water.

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