Bangkok’s Post Diluvian Future

Bangkok is the cultural, political and economic capitol of Thailand. This bustling metropolis, currently growing by 100,000 residents per year, also faces an uncertain future on a warming planet. The city itself is shrinking below sea level 4“ per year even as sea levels rise. The city’s current development path means building on any and every plot of land available, including the water-logged marshes and mangroves that exist throughout the city’s sprawling landscape. How should a city of over 9 million people cope with such challenges?

S+PBA, a Bangkok based Architecture firm founded in 2005 by Ponlawat Buasri and Songsuda Adhibai, created an architectural proposal to address Bangkok’s very watery future. Their design proposes embracing the city’s watery future.

….Bangkok is still laboring under a very ante-diluvian mindset where flooding is considered a crisis and not a constant. Bangkok has always been flooded and the latest apocalyptic predictions only suggest that flooding will return with increased consistency.

Once the city is submarine, can we even call this phenomenon flooding? Flooding implies a passing phase rather than a fixed environment, and yet, at the current juncture, water is much more predictable than land. In order to initiate a Post-Diluvian perspective that designs for water we must abandon the Metropolis in favor of the Wetropolis, and Architecture in favor of Aquatecture.

Towards a Post Diluvian Future will propose a Post-Diluvian prototype community that transforms principles from Thailand’s centuries old traditions of flood-conscious aquatecture into a contemporary, sustainable and visually stunning Wetropolis.

These kinds of large scale, fantastical developments certainly raises plenty of questions: how will people get to work? Is it economically feasible? How will the structures age? How will they be maintained? That said, Bangkok is not without precedence for daily living on water; see for example, the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market. People in the city already commute by water taxis. Can large-scale urban habitats on the water be that far off? While this proposal may be fanciful, the residents of Bangkok might be the kind of people who could make it work.

All images courtesy of S+PBA. See my previous post on Bangkok here.

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