The vertical studio project was very much in keeping with the Fourth Year Studio Project ‘On the Waterfront – bringing landscape into the City’ which was based along St John’s River in Waterford, a once vibrant hive of industry and now a largely forgotten backwater, polluted and hidden from view by high flood defences. The idea of the project was to ‘make room for the river’ by renaturing the rivers’ edge where possible, creating urban landscape, amenity and improving biodiversity. Architectural interventions were required to be flood resistant – either by floating or by being lifted above the water.
Thus, a trip to Amsterdam to become immersed in the possibilities of riverside urbanism and even building on the river was incorporated into the semester.
As part the semester work with landscape and rivers, contact was made with Patrick McCabe of REDscape, an Irish practitioner in the field of landscape design living and working in the Netherlands with projects there and in Ireland. Patrick McCabe met with the staff and students in Haarlem, during our trip, and explained his Aziëpark project there. While in Haarlem, a visit to the Architecture Centre there allowed us to see other landscape projects, an exhibition focussed on green roofs, as well as an exhibition exploring the uses of AI in various design projects.
Another important visit on the trip to Amsterdam was to Schoonship, a community-led settlement of houses floating on water. Here we were guided through the process of designing and building on water by a community committed to sustainability in every aspect of their living. In this project, the houses are all ‘self-build’ by the individual residents and yet a uniformity and coherence is created through careful managing of the overall plan layout, (by Space and Matter Architects), the material-use and scale of each structure. This was a lesson in community-led living as well as design. By contrast, the completely architect-designed floating housing on Ijburg Island provided further insight into water-edge living.
(Photo by Isabel Nabuurs, retrieved from e360.yale.edu December 2024)
