IKONOKLAST: HOMES DESIGNED TO FLOAT

Friday, September 09, 2011

HOMES DESIGNED TO FLOAT

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

From my flood-prone land comes goodwill and peace!

Going back to the topic of floods, the question arises thus: should people always run away from their homes ones the latter are engulfed by floodwaters? What long-term intervention remedies can be applied, aside from the already known remedy of installing colossal flood control facilities all over a big city?

The idea of Lift House has been generated by the perennial catastrophic floods in Asia notably Bangladesh. Made of light and indigenous materials, a lift house should be able to float as an amphibious object during floods.

Below is an update report about the Lift House Project, which amazes me. I’d say my own kudos to the designers of the amphibious house, with the added message to other countries to better emulate the Bangladesh example and build their equivalent floatable homes.

[Philippines, 08 September 2011]

Source: http://www.scidev.net/en/news/amphibious-houses-float-out-of-trouble-in-bangladesh.html

Amphibious houses float out of trouble in Bangladesh

Ben Good

27 July 2011

Houses that rise on floats could provide safer homes in areas prone to floods and tsunamis, according to a Bangladesh-born US architect.

Two such 'amphibious' house designs are being tested in Bangladesh, where proximity to the Ganges delta means that flooding is a frequent problem. When flash floods last occurred, in 2010, more than 10,000 people were made homeless.

"Flooding there doesn't allow people to maintain a safe lifestyle," said Prithula Prosun,a Bangladeshi-born lead architect of the Low Income Flood-proof Technology (LIFT) house project and a graduate architecture student at the University of Waterloo, Canada. "I wanted to give something back," she said, adding that her inspiration came from similar amphibious projects in New Orleans, United States.

The LIFT designs work by preventing lateral movement but allowing the house to move up and down on stilts. When floods occur, the house simply rises above the water. Both the house and the foundations need to be light and buoyant, and two foundation materials are being tested.

One is ferrocement, a lightweight local material made with cement, sand, water and wire or mesh — the other is made of plastic water bottles thrown away by local hotels.

"It takes 8,000 bottles for the foundations of a two storey home for one family," said Prosun. "The plastic will last longer than the rest of the building, so it is an extremely durable material for the buoyant foundation."

She added that the structure of the house is made mainly out of bamboo, which is widely available in Bangladesh, but still underused. And the house is environmentally friendly: it cannot be connected to conventional power, water and sewage systems, owing to its rise and fall, instead it is solar powered, has composting toilets, and collects and reuses rain water.

The houses were constructed at the Housing and Building Research Institute in Dhaka, with assistance from the housing and public works ministry of Bangladesh and the research team of the Centre for Urban Studies in Dhaka. So far, the designs have lifted up to three feet off the ground, but can be constructed to float higher according to flood levels.

Prosun said that at about US$5,000 — and scope for lowering the price — LIFT house is "an affordable project for low income communities".

Prosun added that the next steps would be to adapt the designs for diverse environments and to scale up production.

Srabanti Datta, marketing director of a construction company that is supporting the project in Bangladesh, said: "The community hopes that our government takes steps to grant land and arrange for building LIFT house neighbourhoods."

But Gareth Pender, head of the school of the built environment at Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom, cautioned that more research is needed. "You need to be careful that it works in areas of high flow velocity as well as high water height," he said.

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