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The city’s first four houses were recently towed into the sea, and Olthuis estimates construction will be completed by 2028. “It could be faster,” he said, adding that because the homes are modular, multiple factories can be involved in manufacturing them at once. But previous projects have been delayed by zoning issues, developer hesitancy and weak local infrastructure. 2016, era Ambitious Waterstudio projects in New Jersey and Dubai are reportedly planning to launch the first units within a year. Eight years later, Orsius said both buildings are still awaiting construction. Waterstudio produced fifteen design iterations for the New Jersey project. “This business is different from construction on land,” he said. “You have to be very, very patient.”
Other companies have followed Waterstudio into floating real estate. The Maldives scheme is largely funded by Dutch Docklands, a commercial developer specializing in floating buildings that will complement affordable housing with its own luxury floating hotels and residences. (Olthuis is a minority shareholder in the company.) In 2021, New York-based companies Oceanix and bigA company owned by Danish star architect Bjarke Ingels has announced plans to build a floating development off the coast of Busan, South Korea. Oceanix says the project “creates a new industry” and trade blogs report an expected completion date is 2025, but construction has not yet begun. (Oceanix co-founder and CEO Itai Madamombe said the project could begin by the end of the year.)
Olthuis told me that Waterstudio has had to “fight a little bit” for new jobs as competition from other, larger companies increases. “Our advantage is that we have twenty years of experience,” he said, “so we know more about the techniques and the problems, which will put us ahead of everyone else in the next three to five years.” In his view, as long as Any attention paid to floating buildings is a good thing if the company delivers on its compelling promises. “There are not many projects, but every project must be successful,” he said.
The most devastating natural disaster in modern Dutch history was the 1953 North Sea flood. The floods, known as Watersnoodramp, were caused by powerful storms meeting high tides on the ocean. In the middle of the night on February 1, residents in the north of the country were awakened by an initial flood that inundated the densely populated island and filled the carefully maintained polders. Railways were flooded and power poles were destroyed, disrupting communications in the area.The official alert did not reach residents until 8 p.m. A.medium size… By then, many people were trapped in attics or on rooftops. “It was as if we were spectators to the end of the world,” recalled one witness in the village of Kruningen.The next day, 4 p.m. phosphorus.medium size…, another wave of water came in, even higher than the first, destroying many buildings that were still standing. Some survivors waited for days for large ships to arrive in the area. In total, nearly two thousand people died.
The disaster forced the Dutch government to confront the shortcomings of its aging dike system. Weeks after the floods, a committee was formed to develop a national water defense plan, known as Project Delta, involving more than twenty thousand kilometers of new seawalls, levees and dams. Its most important part is the Maeslantkering, completed in 1998, a massive steel storm surge barrier separating the Nieuwe Waterweg canal from the North Sea.
One afternoon Oshos drove me across the countryside to Methranklin. Outside the Dutch city centre, the man-made landscape becomes harder to ignore. Roads are the highest points of terrain. From the car’s passenger window, I could see the farmland below, dotted with puddles from recent storms. Small canals cut straight through the uneven ground. As we moved toward the coast, the land rose—the edge of a large bowl of Kung Pao chicken—which created a strange sensation of looking upward toward the sea. Many of the canals that flow through farmland are fortified with low, grassy hills. “It takes almost nothing to break down these barriers,” Orsius said of these barriers. “Don’t talk to terrorists, because if you want to screw up this country, you just break a few dykes and the whole system collapses. From here, half of Amsterdam will be flooded.”
The new waterway is crowded with industrial ships and oil rigs heading out to sea. Wind turbines line the banks. Orsius pulled into a parking lot from which he could see the Maeslantkering, which architecture critic Michael Kimmelman called “one of the little-known wonders of modern Europe.” One of the largest mobile buildings ever built, it consists of two identical white steel frames, each weighing nearly seven thousand tons, located on either side of the canal. A computer system tracks the water level in the Nieuwe Waterweg; if the water level rises too high, the system kicks in and two frames rotate from either bank, delivering curved steel wall sections that meet in the middle and seal the canal from the rushing water.
Orseus and I walked to the metal fence covered with warning signs. The nearest section of steel frame was a dozen yards away. Their trusses often make them compared to the Eiffel Tower – they’re just slightly shorter – but to me they look more like a side-turning roller coaster. Standing next to them, I felt dwarfed and felt an intoxicating, slightly ominous sense of excitement.
Maeslantkering is designed to withstand storms that are expected to occur only once every 10,000 years. So far, aside from test runs, it has only been activated once, during Storm Pia last December. But Harold van Waveren, a flood risk management expert at Rijkswaterstaat, told me that if severe storms become more frequent and the Maeslantkering is closed for too long, water from the river that would otherwise flow into the sea will have nowhere to go, potentially causing flooding. Regardless, flood the area. “We need a whole range of solutions, from very small to large scale,” he said. As envisioned by Orsius, the country has taken steps to increase its water capacity. The so-called “River Spaces” project, completed between 2006 and 2021, deepened and widened rivers at 30 sites and replaced some artificial river banks with partial wetland landscapes. Still, van Veeren seems skeptical about the future of floating buildings. “I’m not sure if this can be done on a large scale,” he said.
Jeroen Aerts, head of the Department of Water and Climate Risk at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the country’s leading environmental researchers, is even more dubious. “Are there going to be big floating cities? I honestly don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. Living on water “is not in line with Dutch culture”, he continued. “On average, for a Dutchman, you want a garden, you want two floors.” Orsius agrees to a certain extent. He said the biggest obstacle to large-scale water construction is not technology or funding, but attitude. A NIMBYisms emerge when you ask the Dutch to imagine a wetter way of life. “They like it, but not in their backyard,” Orsius said. “If you ask them whether there should be water in their gardens, they will say no.” He spoke with frustration of the slowness of the Dutch bureaucracy and its reluctance to adjust its defensive posture against the Water Wolves. The country, he said, is “stuck in the engineering solutions we’ve been using for fifty years.” New ones are desperately needed, “but the politicians are not ready yet.” We climbed a hill to get a better view of the canal. Ships kept passing through the open Mesland Forest. The Netherlands’ familiarity with flooding creates contradictory obstacles for floating structures, Orsius said: “If your country is threatened by water, your legal framework does not allow you to get close to it.” The Netherlands does not allow the fragmentation of floating structures ownership, which disincentivizes developers who might want to build and sell multi-unit housing. Furthermore, the area of Dutch water blocks sold for housing remains limited, hampering the construction of taller floating buildings such as the Waterstudio Apartments in Scandinavia. “The city has to rezone the water and then allow you to build on a hundred-by-one-hundred-foot lot,” he said. “We’ve made plans multiple times. We’re still waiting for approval from the appropriate city or town.”
In order to see Waterstudio’s most ambitious completed project, I had to leave the Netherlands and travel to the French city of Lyon. The Island Theater (Théâtre L’Île Ô) floats on the Rhone, on a paved waterside promenade near the Gallieni Bridge. (“Ô” is a homophone Eau de Toilette, meaning “water” in French. ) On winter afternoons, cars whiz by on the multi-lane roads along the river banks, but compared to the bustling Dutch rivers, the waters of the Rhone are quiet. The theater consists of six tilted polygons made of white steel and penetrated by irregularly shaped windows. It is connected to the river bank through three gangways and juts out of the river like iceberg fragments.
Opening to the public in early 2023, the building is the second location for local children’s performance organization Patadôme. But Orsius described the theater more sublimely as a “global mobile asset,” a piece of public infrastructure that, if Lyon no longer needed it, could simply be towed up the Rhone, perhaps docking in Aveny Weng, or Marseille. The current lease is for eighteen years, and its modular design allows it to be adapted to different uses. David Lahille, Patadôme’s director of business development, is managing the construction project. “Today, it’s a theater,” he told me. “Tomorrow, if we want to change it to a school, that’s easy.”
The idea for a new theater emerged in 2018, when control of Lyon’s waterways was transferred to the French federal government and the city launched an initiative to renew its waterfront. At the time, the Patadom had been looking to build a new space, but theater construction on land remained strictly regulated in France due to ancient monarchical precedents from the time of Louis XIV. Water theaters will not be subject to this rule. “We considered buying a boat and renovating it,” Rahier said. They approached Waterstudio, who proposed designing an ambitious new building from scratch.
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