To Defend, Retreat or Adapt? Design Responses to the Excess and Disappearance of Water

Actar, Energy and sustainability, Essay, Imminent Urban Commons, No Density, Senseable Technologies, Seth McDowell, Territory and mobility, Water Index

Architecture&climate, Built landscape, Calibrated ecologies, Change of Climate, Climate change, Controlling nature, Design-based research, Ecological footprint, Ecological urbanism, Environment, Essay, Future tendencies, Hypercontrolled environments, Imminent Commons, Landscape, Landscape Architecture, Non renewable resources, Research, Responsive Environment, Responsive technologies, Rethinking Urban Environments, Scarcity, Seoul Biennale 2017, Urban Paradigms, Water, Water harvests, Water infrastructure, Water recycling

Extract from "Water Index", ed. Seth McDowell. Published by Actar -- https://lccn.loc.gov/2016931357

Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Hell and the Flood”, a panel from the triptych Deliverance from the Deluge painted on the inside of an altarpiece, reveals an image of a post-apocalyptic landscape. The water has subsided, and rotting corpses of drowned sinners litter the land. This Old Testament narrative depicts water as a device for ethical cleansing. Yet, if the moral connotations are set aside, the Deluge in Genesis 8 is essentially a story of human’s technological adaptation to imposing natural phenomena. The ark, as a response for survival, has become the paradigm for humanity’s response to ecological disaster: construct a mechanism for deliverance. This paper is a catalog of mechanisms that enable the control of, escape from, and adaptation to water. Two hydrological crises are examined here, the rising and the disappearing of water, which present fundamental complications for humanity’s dependence on the natural resource. Each of these extreme conditions for water is evaluated relative to design strategies for defense, retreat, and adaptation.