Physics 101
Thermal expansion: When water heats up, it expands!
It’s no breaking news that the rise of the global temperature is melting our glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, which in return is causing our ocean to warm up. By now we have all come to the realization that the rise of our sea levels will effect many coastal cities, particularly heavily populated cities in Asia and Africa. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development however estimated that the top 10 cities expected to be hit the hardest economically are located in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands.
Hitting home with some people, the study has caused architects in the Netherlands to put on their creative thinking caps and completely revise their philosophy on urban design. The rational seeming decision of building houses where flooding is less likely to occur is being replaced by the concept of building houses in areas where flooding is to be expected.

Waterstudio.NL is a dutch firm specialized in architecture and urbanism related to living, working and recreation on water. You see, they build houses with “floating foundations“, where flexible pipes keep the houses connected to sewer and electrical lines. From a technical and design point of view this is a great opportunity for innovation! On the downside, and I cannot help to be a little bit pessimistic about the simple fact that this is once again only a reaction, but sadly not a solution to our initial problem of global warming. Any thoughts?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Arts, Environment, Science and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.