No Comments »

How to Lose the Battle Against Sea Level Rise… Gracefully

• Tweet

• Tweet

Artists and architects can help us see things differently. Perhaps they can even help us adjust to difficult new realities that are hard to accept.

Climate change is already taking out one of our oldest and most beloved cities of Europe, and other great cities like Hong Kong, London and New York will one day be in the same … um, boat.

Venice is sinking, and has been for some time. But what if – instead of fighting it – we were to accept that?

What if – instead of fighting to stay above water, we were to allow ourselves to carry on our lives comfortably – beneath sea level?

Turin-based architects BAM! the winners of the Venice City Vision competition envision a completely novel kind of capitulation to rising seas.

It might actually be very charming and relaxing to rest in these quiet spaces have carved out of the water.

“Simply, water is not just water, and the city has stopped fighting against it to make out a pocket handkerchief plot for itself on which to erect domes, turrets and charming chimneys as though jutting out always higher to escape from that which crowds its streets” say BAM! architects Alberto Bottero, Simona Della Rocca, and Valeria Bruni.

The idea would be to build multiples of these sunken “dishes” and position them along all the canals that make up the roadways of Venice.

Bury yourself deep enough in these floating “dish buildings” and it is possible to not even see the rising seas. It is a very novel approach to a civilizational problem we have to solve one way or another. BAM!’s prizewinning entry is one of the more novel.