Dutch Water Knowhow Is Respectable

Organikos

March 31

Waterstudio renderings like this one, of a floating "city" in the Maldives, are created using tools including Photoshop and the A.I. program Midjourney. Art work courtesy Waterstudio / Dutch Docklands

We respect the Dutch for their respect of nature, particularly their respect for the power of water and their longstanding determination to harmonize our life with it. This profile extends our respect:

A Dutch Architect's Vision of Cities That Float on Water

What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?

Koen Olthuis, the founder of the architectural firm Waterstudio, believes that floating buildings like the Théâtre L'Île Ô, in Lyon, will transform urban living like skyscrapers did a century ago. Photograph by Giulio Di Sturco for The New Yorker

In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, "View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht," which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam's main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht's banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water's surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child's smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.

For the Dutch architect Koen Olthuis, the painting serves as a reminder that much of his country has been built on top of the water. The Netherlands (whose name means "low countries") lies in a delta where three major rivers—the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt—meet the open expanse of the North Sea. More than a quarter of the country sits below sea level. Over hundreds of years, the Dutch have struggled to manage their sodden patchwork of land. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the country's windmills were used to pump water out of the ground using the hydraulic mechanism known as Archimedes' screw. Parcels of land were buffered with raised walls and continuously drained, creating areas, which the Dutch call "polders," that were dry enough to accommodate farming or development. The grand town houses along Amsterdam's canals, as emblematic of the city as Haussmann's architecture is of Paris, were constructed on thousands of wooden stilts driven into unstable mud. As Olthuis told me recently, "The Netherlands is a complete fake, artificial machine." The threat of water overtaking the land is so endemic to the Dutch national psyche that it has inspired a mythological predator, the Waterwolf. In a 1641 poem that coined the name, the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel exhorted the "mill wings" of the wind pumps to "shut down this animal."

Olthuis has spent more than two decades seeking ways to coexist with the wolf. His architectural firm, Waterstudio, specializes in homes that float, but its constructions have little in common with the wooden houseboats that have long lined Dutch canals. Traditional houseboats were often converted freight ships; narrow, low-slung, and lacking proper plumbing, they earned a reputation in the postwar period as bohemian, sometimes seedy dwellings. (Utrecht's onetime red-light district was a row of forty-three houseboat brothels.) Waterstudio's signature projects, which Olthuis prefers to call "water houses," look more like modern condominiums, with glassy façades, full-height ceilings, and multiple stories. In the past decade, as severe weather brought on by climate change has caused catastrophic flooding everywhere from Tamil Nadu to New England, demand for Waterstudio's architecture has grown. The firm is currently working on floating pod hotels in Panama and Thailand; six-story floating apartment buildings in Scandinavia; a floating forest in the Persian Gulf, as part of a strategy to combat heat and humidity; and, in its most ambitious undertaking to date, a floating "city" in the Maldives.