Dutch architects going with the flow

With more than half the country below sea level, the Dutch have for centuries fought a very capricious enemy: water.

But amid concerns over global climate change, the Dutch are turning flood management on its head by thinking of water as a friend rather than a foe.

What happens here could affect the United States, still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Katrina, and other nations around the world that have sent teams here to tap into the famed Dutch expertise in flood management.

A leader in the movement here to embrace high water instead of just resisting it is architect Koen Olthuis, who considers floating buildings the wave of the future.

He foresees a world of not only floating houses, but also floating roads, hotels, offices, churches, restaurants, and conference centers. “I think there are great opportunities for this in America, where the timber used for many homes is good for the water,” Olthuis said. “Certainly we’ve gotten a lot of attention since Katrina.”

Olthuis, 35, has been focusing on floating architecture since founding his architectural firm Waterstudio four years ago.

The 19-person firm has already built 24 contemporary houses that float on a watertight foundation made of a foam core encased in concrete. They are made to last 100 years, he said.

His designs, which include villas with a garage and mooring for a boat, have drawn interest from around the world. He’s designing a floating hotel in Aruba, a floating mosque in Dubai, and a floating conference center in Budapest, Hungary.

Other architects, too, are starting to see water as a lure for development and are constructing clusters of houses built around lakes and ponds.

Part of the reason for this are new regulations requiring at least 12 percent of the space needed for any new building project in Holland be set aside for “open water areas.”

The government here has invested heavily in an intricate network of dikes, pumps and canals to protect a nation so vulnerable that even the runways of Schiphol Airport, which serves the capital of Amsterdam, lie 15 feet below sea level.

That’s been especially true since Holland experienced its own Katrina moment: a major storm with hurricane-like winds that breached the famous dikes and killed more than 1,800 people on Jan. 31, 1953.

After that flood, the government launched a $15 billion flood-control scheme dubbed the Delta Project under which dikes and pumps were rebuilt to a higher standard over the next 50 years.

The Netherlands has typically set aside more than $1.2 billion each year, about 1 percent of the national budget, to maintain dikes and pumps.

After Katrina walloped the U.S. Gulf Coast, American engineers, scientists, and politicians traveled to the Netherlands to see for themselves the system of barriers so strong it’s designed to withstand a 10,000-year storm.

But after so many years of digging and pumping, many here say they still felt vulnerable, especially given the expectations that the waters around them will rise faster than expected.

Sea levels in the Netherlands are projected to rise by as much as 43 inches in this century, while rainfall could increase by as much as 25 percent, said Rob van Dorland, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

Part of this is attributed to climate change resulting from global warming, and part to increased rainfall across Europe. Heavy rains in the 1990s caused major flooding of the Rhine and Meuse Rivers, which flow into the North Sea and make up the delta on which sits Rotterdam, Holland’s main harbor.

“We could continue to try to fortify the dikes, but there’s a limit to that, and you just can’t do it forever and ever,” van Dorland said. “Instead, you have to try to look at the water very differently if you are to really adapt to climate change concerns.”