NOBODY IS AN ISLAND
The low-lying coastal areas of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands are under increasing water pressure: storms are intensifying from the sea, while sea levels are gradually rising. By 2100, the sea is expected to rise by up to 100 cm. Many diked areas are already below sea level and, as young soils, are constantly sinking. In response, the governments of the coastal federal states are planning a massive upgrade of the continuous dyke line along the coast to a height of up to 9 metres. Walls are being built where the natural movements of the landscape conflict with our understanding of a static concept of safety. Paradoxically, the water, which travels several kilometres every day with the tides, has the potential to carry sediments inland: given a certain degree of enabled entropy, the soil would grow back.
As an embedding scenario, the project proposes to break up the linear paradigm of coastal protection via elongated walls of earth and imagines one community to launch a pilot project by reflood low-lying areas behind their dykes. In this re-wetted zone, the cultural technique of groyne construction is used for sediment accumulation. Though controlled flooding and specific timber geometries for accumulation, the low-lying grounds could grow upwards, simultaneously allowing the increasingly endangered ecosystem of the Wadden Sea would slowly migrate inland with the sea level. The strict separation between nature reserves and building zones is abandoned and a new relationship between these two entities is proposed. It is assumed that houses and land are inextricably linked and that, in a new understanding of vernacular building, they could both enable each other.
The desire of of habitation within the moving elements and the communal goal of protecting the coast are expressed in a collective architecture: The existing pile foundations, which equally function as coastal protection elements, are used as the foundation for pier holding a light timber building. Hovering over soft marsh and mudflat soil, its outside ground floor is flooded daily for six months in winter season. When the intensity of tourism and agricultural use decreases, it is washed through by seawater twice a day and accumulates particles. In summer, the ground floor below turns into a beach garden, welcoming living and leisure. The movement of the water, its daily rise and fall with the tide, as well as its summer surf and winter surges rhythmically shape the context of the building and the life within it. Over time, a small island forms underneath and around the house.
Risk analysis „Storm surge“,
Report on risk analysis in civil protection 2014
This paper describes the scenario of a storm surge occurring on average once every hundred years and a flood of the HQ Extreme category triggered by it on the German North Sea coast.
It presents the climate dyke as a strategy for separating the land from the sea as the only effective solution for averting danger.
Click on the picture for a look at the file.
THE CONTEMPORARY OF COSTAL PROTECTION
CLIMATE DYKE
FRIESEN
The Frisians are a population group native to the North Sea coast in the Netherlands and Germany. Traditionally, they were a seafaring trading people.
Their sea, the North Sea, was referred to as the mare frisicum until the late High Middle Ages; a Germanic tribe of Frisians has been documented since antiquity.
It is significant that the territory of this language and culture does not coincide with national borders, but rather follows the landscape of the North Sea coast.
There is a connection with the common task of coastal protection, which led to the organisation of self-governing dyke associations. And to collectively provided land management: each farmer was given his section of the dyke.
SEDIMENT ACUMMULATION
Most of the territory of the German and dutch coast is reclaimed land.
The technique includes100m grids of rows of pegs ("Lahnungen") which are rammed in this mud zone. On these geometries sediment deposited daily / at every tide, causing the soil to grow up several centimetres per year and thus slowly grow into salt marshes. These fields were constantly drained and eventually covered by plants, who strengthen the soil until enough land has accumulated and the foreland was diked.
Successively new rows of pegs were brought in front of them to repeat the process and continuously "dike out".
Stadelmann Robert, Meer-Deiche-Land, 1981, Wachholtz Verlag Neumünster
The imprint of the drainage canals' geometries in the landscape as well as historic dike lines which lie now inland bear witness to this century-long process. As a technique, Vorlandarbeit (Front-land-work) is not only indicative of human domination over nature, but at the same time of an intelligence that uses the natural flows and sediment transport processes of the landscape for itself via simple geometries.
Lined by a continuous dyke line with backward historic dykes that bear equal witness to years of this anthroposophical land growth.
SZENARIO
In the midst of the newly designated flood zone, a long structure sits on to of the timber pegs. In contrast to the classic vernacular single-family home practice, proposes a large communal form.
The parallel waves break on the punctual opening in the dyke as on a lens: Their energy decreases radially inland. The sediment suspended in the moving water thus also rains down at a calculable distance from the opening.
From May to September the dyke-gate remains closed and the structure which houses holiday apartments and permanent homes is inhabited. Stairs allow access directly from the ground to the first floor.
HOLIDAY HOUSING
The long jetties are each one address of the permanent housing on the first floor. In summer, it is not possible to pass on the pier on the first floor as the platform functions as expansion of the holiday apartment. In flood season all beach furniture is stowed this small upstairs compartment; the stair hatches are closed and the first floor in transformed into a continuous pier functioning as an access zone for the apartments above.
A floating pontoon bridge is the only connection to the dyke during high water, occurring twice a day.
GROUND-RELATION
In the midst of the newly designated flood zone, a long structure sits on to of the timber pegs. In contrast to the classic vernacular single-family home practice, proposes a large communal form.
The parallel waves break on the punctual opening in the dyke as on a lens: Their energy decreases radially inland. The sediment suspended in the moving water thus also rains down at a calculable distance from the opening.
From May to September the dyke-gate remains closed and the structure which houses holiday apartments and permanent homes is inhabited. Stairs allow access directly from the ground to the first floor.
MODELS AS TEST DEVICES
In hydraulic engineering and fluid dynamics, models still function as scientific experimental set-ups.
They are exceeding their status of representational objects and become devices of scientific knowledge.
Surprisingly, particle and fluid dynamics are still too complex or too costly to simulate digitally in their entirety. Reproducing a spatial disposition in the physical geometries is still the fastest way to gain knowledge and necessary to verify computer-based digital simulations with control values.
These models are hybrids between sculpture, machine, diorama, and architectural space, qualities that surpass the capacities of representational architectural models.
In order to verify assumptions about dynamics (sediment accumulation) and visualise the spatiality of tidal movements, the project includes several such structures.
MOVEMENTS
The wave simulator is a representation model of the environment of the building. It acts as an authoritative environment model for settlement and shows how accurately water penetrates the flood plain over the period of the flood.
A small motor creates parallel waves through rhythmic movements. These break similar to light waves on a lens at the dike opening and spread radially inland from there. The distribution of the wave energy is decisive for how and at what distance the sediment settles on the land surfaces.
The position of the building thus results from the optimal distance in relation to the sediment precipitation- In calmed water areas behind the building a small island is slowly accumulating.
The position of the building influences the landscape’s future topography, it accumulates its own ground.