Building in a Flood-prone Region


This Friday’s Museum of Possibilities offers some unusual architectural designs for buildings located in flood-prone zones, such as low-lying areas along the Gulf Coast. Ideally, regions that are below sea level, prone to hurricanes and storm surges, or vulnerable to levee breaks should be left in a natural state and undeveloped. But that’s not about to happen!

If my designs are seen as over-the-top wacky, they are nonetheless call attention to a serious question of how to design buildings that survive serious flooding of the sort that occurred in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans in late 2005. In the future, home power will increasingly move away from an externally-sourced grid of pipes and wires, toward on-site-generated systems. At that time, some of my proposed buildings could remain partially underwater while still supplying residents with their own power. Sewage and water would need to be handled as for a large motor home. Until that day arrives, some of my concepts like Ring Toss Homes leave unaddressed the matter of utility services that are underwater during a flood.


(Image credit: FEMA)

Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.

Someone beat you to it, Stephen - the pylon-mounted apartment buildings in "The Jetsons" (and as I remember they could even vary the height of the building from the ground...)
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On a more serious note, these ideas you came up with are, for a change, actually viable. Being from New Orleans, everybody talks about houses like those that move with the water and such but this is the first time I've seen it put to paper.

Kudos to you, Mr. Steven for making a Museum of Possibilities installment that I don't loathe.
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I went to high school in Missouri with a girl whose family lived inside the levee - it flooded for weeks at a time every spring. They sank a telephone pole in to the ground and built their house on a river barge, with a large iron ring at one end (around the pole). When the river went up, the house went up. When the river went down, the house went down. The only issue they had was the propane company refused to put the first tank on the barge. After it floated off down the river, they saw the light, and put the second one where it belonged.
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Ha! My wife tells me my "Neatorama experience" is good for me because it is teaching me how to react evenly to praise and blame. Timmah even managed to praise (my current post) and condemn (all my prior 25 posts) in a single sentence!
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Thanks again Steve, for another set of ingenious ideas!

I think these are much more reasonable concepts than our ongoing and ever increasing obsession with building cities and towns in areas that are below sea-level.
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I love the organic shapes of these buildings. I realize that they are not meant as too serious, but I would like to see more of this style in real-life architecture.
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