The wettest ever December in the UK at the end of last year saw 16,000 properties hit by flooding, while more than 75,000 lost electricity. As Storms Desmond, Eva and Frank brought devastating floods to large parts of the UK, meteorologists recorded almost double the rain falling than average. According to the Met office, climate change has fundamentally changed the UK weather: “an extended period of extreme rainfall is now seven times more likely than in a world without human emissions or greenhouse gases.”
Around 5.2 million properties in England are at risk of flooding, and many more homes and businesses continue to be built on flood plains across the UK. While this might sound nonsensical, this is where our settlements have historically developed; along rivers and water courses where fresh water and food could be found, and natural transportation routes exploited. Flood plains continue to be attractive to developers as they tend to be flat, easy to build on, and close to established amenities and services. The desperate need for new homes in response to the UK’s acute housing crisis is also a major factor in forcing potentially unsuitable land into development.
Henley Island, Henley-on-Thames / Copyright Baca Homes
While there are talks of constructing bigger and better flood barriers to protect our housing stock, most of these new houses will be constructed in exactly the same way as the existing houses recently devastated by the December floods. With scientists uniformly agreeing that wet weather is likely to become much more prevalent, it is clear that the issue of flooding is not going away. We were reminded of this only last month as people in London waded through deep floodwaters to polling stations to vote in the EU referendum. That day, over one month’s worth of rain fell in less than 24 hours, flooding homes and causing severe travel delays. With increased flood risk and rising sea levels we need to learn how to live with water, not run from it.
In response to this problem, a number of architects are developing designs that can work with water, rather than against it. Rather than simply hoping a big wall will keep the water out, architects are designing building systems that embrace and respond actively to water level change. Instead of building fixed barriers, which divide landscapes and communities, that are unable to respond to unpredictable weather events, architects are looking towards integrated, flexible systems that can adapt to change.
The Chichester, Stratford / Copyright Baca Homes
People like living close to water when it is perceived as safe. How can the threat of rising water levels be turned into a benefit? In the UK, Baca Architects are trying to answer this question. Specialists in waterfront architecture, and flood-resilient design, Baca have been pursuing work and research in the emerging field of ‘aquatecture’ for over a decade. Their recent book, with the same title, is the first to outline new ways of ‘designing for water’, and illustrates methods of utilising water innovatively, efficiently and safely. In their own words: “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.”
In 2015, Baca Architects completed the UK’s first ‘Amphibious House’. Located on the banks of the River Thames in the Buckinghamshire town of Marlow, the flood-resistant Amphibious House is designed to float and rise with the water levels during times of flooding. Clad in zinc shingles, the unique family home, rests upon an excavated ‘wet dock’ that is separated from the house to allow the structure to float upwards, just like the hull of a ship. As floodwaters fill the fixed ‘dock’ beneath home, the water levels push the buoyant house upwards. To ensure that the home doesn’t float away, the structure is attached to four guideposts that extend upwards and allow for a 2.5-meter-high floodwater clearance.
Further along the river, in Henley-on-Thames, the architects have secured planning permission for a second ‘flood-embracing’ house. On Henley Island, Baca has designed a home in which the first floor is lifted above the 1 in 100 years flood level and is accessed directly by bridge from the mainland, allowing the inhabitants to reach the home during a flood. Fitted with high performance flood-proof doors and windows, the ground floor is designed to keep floods out for long periods of time.
This notion of the ‘flood-embracing’ house is not just limited to small-scale luxury homes, Baca Architects are working on projects with volume house builders to explore how this thinking can be implemented on a larger scale. For their entry to a competition in Paris they have developed plans to maximise the potential of a site at risk of flooding from the river Seine. Rather than proposing expensive defence systems, they welcome water onto the site, proposing a network of watercourses that weave through the high density urban development. Baca integrate water management strategies into the landscape, creating flooding parks and rain collecting squares. Importantly, these interventions not only manage the issue of flooding on the site, but also defer the problem further downstream, protecting the heart of the historic city. Another large-scale project by Baca, this time in the UK, proposes the world’s first floating leisure village. Planned at the Canting Basin, close to the Glasgow Science Centre at Pacific Quay. The floating plans create a new canal with a U-shaped floating street. The floating buildings would include a flexible mix of two and three storey glazed office buildings, studio flats and town houses with their own private moorings.
New designs are one thing, but Baca are also looking at how you upgrade existing buildings to reduce future flood damage. They are exploring a number of strategies that would be possible to implement with the government’s grants of up to £5,000 for people directly affected by floods. These measures range from water resistant finishes to raising plug sockets above flood levels, and installing drainage values and ventilation units to clear out water quickly.
There are now many examples of amphibious houses around the world including one in New Orleans by the architecture practice Morphosis, and a number of precedents in Holland. These projects show that responses to catastrophe do not need to be solely defensive but can accept change and respond to it in a positive way. Nature can be both a friend and a foe, an asset and a threat. We should look at flood management as an opportunity to create new architectural experiences and beautiful places that embrace change.
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