“Low-tech, low-maintenance,” says Olthuis. A skirt of nylon net prevents flood debris from becoming lodged beneath the house.
With a maximum anticipated flood level for the site of only 4 feet, the project’s engineers deemed it safe to tether the house with cables and surround it with a wooden deck, in preference to telescoping piles. When the waterway floods, which happens every 10 years or so, the house floats as the flood recedes, the house returns to its original position. Waterstudio’s 1,440-square-foot Villa De Hoef, for example, usually sits in a garden beside a waterway in the small Dutch town of De Hoef. As a flood-mitigation strategy, amphibious architecture works with natural cycles, instead of trying to resist them. Amphibious architecture retains a connection to the ground under ordinary circumstances and floats as high as needed when flooding occurs. (Typically, bedrooms are located on the partially submerged level, and the water reduces heating and cooling loads on the house.) As a refinement, automatic air-water balancing tanks help keep the house level when the residents invite more than a few friends to a party.Ī buoyant foundation can also be used to build amphibious architecture on flood-prone land. The hull is submerged the depth of half a story and secured to telescoping piles at diagonally opposite corners, allowing the house to rise and fall with the water but not wander about.
#Ark floating foundation free
Formed in a single pour to eliminate joints, and emphatically free of cracks, a prefabricated concrete tub-or hull-is designed to displace a volume of water with a weight equivalent to the weight of the house. Houseboats, for example, have been around for centuries, and the floating houses that make up a neighborhood in Ijburg, under development in Amsterdam’s Lake Ijssel, are “really just better houseboats,” says Olthuis, “built to the same standards as a house on land, using the same methods and materials.”įor all their similarities to houses on terra firma, however, the float houses Olthuis has designed for Ijburg differ in a crucial aspect: their buoyant “foundations,” or lower levels. Each of the projects considered here uses tried-and-true technology adapted from marine applications to achieve its unusual results, whether it’s a floating house, an island, a church, or a plaza. The technology of floating architecture isn’t new. “Floating developments can be part of the solution.” “Whether it’s New York or London, Bangkok or Dhaka, all these cities are growing, all these cities are next to the water, and all are threatened by the water,” says Koen Olthuis, founding principal of Netherlands-based Waterstudio. So what are the options for staying put and living with water rather than moving away from it? They range from keeping water out-with barriers, stilts, and raised ground planes-to letting water in, with ground floors designed for periodic inundation, to, ultimately, rising above it all, with floating architecture. The floating houses designed by Waterstudio, which make up a neighborhood on Amsterdam’s Lake Ijssel, have “foundations” formed in a single pour to eliminate joints.
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