A Floating Apartment Building

Posted by John Farrier in Architecture on July 31, 2009 at 6:12 pm


Dutch architect Koen Olthuis responded to the rising sea level by designing a floating apartment building:

The Dutch are uniquely accustomed to dealing with fluctuating water levels; much of the Netherlands is below sea level, and vast swaths of land, known as polders, are continually pumped free of the accumulating rainwater that threatens nearby homes and buildings. The Citadel will simply rise and fall with the changing water levels, making it impervious to flooding, tides, and sea waters inching upward as a result of global warming.

Built atop a floating heavy concrete foundation, The Citadel will house 60 luxury apartments, a parking garage, a floating roadway, and boat docks. Each apartment will naturally have waterfront views via a garden terrace, and greenhouses will be interspersed throughout. But the greenest feature of the Citadel is its cooling system: submerged pipes will pump water throughout the structure to cool it, reducing its energy use by 25 percent compared to a conventional building.

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COMMENT

5 comments to "A Floating Apartment Building"

  1. star4589
    July 31st, 2009 at 6:49 pm

    this raises a lot of questions:

    Where does the human waste go?
    What do they do if there's a storm w/rough waters?
    Floating roadway....seriously?
    What is the weight capacity?
    Are they allowed to fish off the balcony?

  2. Morgan
    July 31st, 2009 at 8:24 pm

    Regardless, that is freaking awesome!

  3. Misc.
    July 31st, 2009 at 11:15 pm

    1. Septic tank
    2. I'd assume they wouldn't dock it on open ocean
    3. Seriously
    4. Enough to support what they need, I guess
    5. Probably

  4. Foreigner1
    August 1st, 2009 at 11:09 am

    Nothing special- Amsterdam already has a whole burrough -Schinkel- that is made of floating houses with one or two stories and with balconies.
    And in and around most old Dutch cities you can find them in the canals and moats.
    The only difference is the size and modernity of this contraption.

    Some years ago in 2003 there were already experiments with a floating highway in the Mid-Dutch river-area Near Den Bosch. It worked fine and it is now part of the measures to keep the infrastructure of that region intact when there is flooding.

    The Citadel is a project that won't be built on open sea, but in a polder-area where in times of heavy rain, the water level can rise upto 2 meters with water from rivers coming from upstream. The Netherlands gets lots of rainwater from Germany and Switzerland and Belgium and France via rivers like Rhine, Maas and Waal. That water can be so much that it floods the lowlands downstream. And there such floating projects like Citadel could be just the thing to keep dry feet.

    To throw out a line to fish in most places is possible if you get a permit. In some places fishing is strictly forbidden, but that'll be something to see then and there.

  5. Gail Pink
    August 3rd, 2009 at 12:21 pm

    I would like to live there.


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