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A Post-Diluvian Future Envisioned for Watery Bangkok

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A Post-Diluvian Future is among those being presented at an international symposium in Berlin in September 2011 titled Water – Curse or Blessing? at the International Forum for Contemporary Architecture.

S+PBA architects are located in Bangkok, a burgeoning mega-city they describe as riddled with ever-accumulating problems and challenges. Here’s a new one: sea level rise.

Three hundred years ago, when Bangkok was founded at sea level, a city at sea level made sense because of the ease of moving trade goods by boat on water, rather than by water buffalo on land. But Bangkok is now threatened with of rising seas.

The flood threat is worsened by the fact that as Bangkok develops, the weight of the skyrocketing infrastructure of the rapidly developing city further weighs on the fragile land, pushing the land down, even as sea levels rise.

The third problem has been the water pollution created by the multitude of shrimp farms in the waterways.

The integrated solution to the three issues of rising seas, sinking land, and increasing water pollution is envisioned by S+PBA as a new floating city that merely floats on the waterway, instead of weighing down a fragile marshland with ever heavier infrastructure – and one that is set within a mangrove plantation.

The mangrove plantations will purify the water, removing the pollution from the shrimp farms.

The planned waterway would be intensively planted with Mangrove trees, because Mangroves are uniquely adept at naturally detoxifying polluted water and at modifying storm surges, mitigating the effects of higher sea levels. They would also supply fresh oxygen and have a natural cooling effect.

In this futuristic vision, residents would live lightly on the water in a network of homes and walkways and roads that connect to the water transportation that the city has traditionally depended upon.

Via Arch Daily