Hokusai’s Great Wave. Photograph: British Museum
CONTENT/ Last summer, biblical floods in northern Europe washed away houses, undoing roads, revealing subterranean services. If our environment is unpredictable because of human or celestial activity is irrelevant: the reality is that water, while vital, is for architects a design constraint. Keeping water where it needs to be is one of our perennial challenges, regardless of what state it is in: solid, liquid or vapour.
AIM/ To interrogate the role of the architect in extreme situations and understand how potent our craft can be to assist people and communities.
This brief invites you to think about deluge, in other words the macro scale, the effect of unexpected behaviour of water levels on buildings. You are also encouraged to consider other states of water, if that is something that can be addressed by your design proposition.
METHOD/ A physical/digital model of prototypes / proposals / reactions
The site typologies you may want to consider are:
_terra firma [land] that can get flooded by abundant precipitation (eg overflowing lakes, rivers that burst their banks, coastal sites)
_edge [limen = threshold] liminality is a physical condition, as well as a psychological one
_island which can be natural or artificial
_open water
SCHEDULE/
- Consider as a group:
what_look at the 4 site typologies to decide which site condition to tackle. The decision should be justified by analysis of possibilities, literature, stories, anecdotal evidence, news, statistics etc
why_document the decision-making for your site typology (use sketches, film, models etc)
where_consider if the site is a real location, and identify it, or imaginary and explain graphically your choice - [fri 21/10/21 10.30+ CET] Present your investigations and ideas as first iterations of concept and strategies for your design:
_consider what architecture is suitable and why, based on research
_appraise technologies and systems - Develop:
_solutions and construct models, physical or digital for proposals – they can be stand alone, clusters, involve infrastructure strategies – all in response to: site, vernacular (if real site), projections of technologies (if prototype, not site specific)
_ the intervention which is the device/reaction - [fri 28/10/21 10.30+ CET] Present:
_final proposals.
EVALUATION/ You may consider:
_what the intervention is… a generic, multi-purpose building or with defined programme, permanent/temporary, independent/parasitic?
_what characteristics it needs to have to respond to conditions… permeable/non- permeable, amphibious, buoyant
_laws of physics… applied to materials and systems
_resilience… and anything else that floats your boat…
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY (UK)/
Doina Carter (docarter@lincoln.ac.uk)