It's a visual early warning system to the client to say 'look your first two terraces are inundated with water' and it's an intuitive way to say change is happening within the river, the first two flood cells are filled, your house should have started moving." "At the front of our site we've designed something which is called an intuitive landscape. On the riverside, the garden is terraced to act as an "early warning system" for rising waters – when the first two terraces fill with water the house should begin to rise. "When a flood event occurs, the river will rise gently and within the base of the wet dock the water will then start to rise." "In the same way you have Liverpool Docks or the Royal Docks, which were man-made enclosures for building ships, this is a lot smaller scale and in this circumstance its built inland and will contain the house," said Coutts. These could be extended in future to cope with rising water levels. The design was developed according to the Archimedes principle: "the house's mass and volume are less than the equivalent of water, and that's what creates buoyancy," explained Coutts.įour posts, nicknamed "dolphins" by the project's engineer, act as vertical guideposts to allow it to slide up and down when it needs to move. Clad in zinc shingles with glazed gables, this structure is independent of the house, which has a foundation of waterproofed concrete that wraps around the lower ground floor, acting like the hull of a ship. The lightweight timber-framed structure is fairly traditional in its form, but sits inside an excavated "wet dock" made from steel sheet piling with a mesh base to allow water to enter and escape naturally. Rather than having a house that's up in the air you get proper engagement with the garden." The garden design incorporates terraces that act as an "early warning system" for flooding "The benefit of an 'amphibious house' is that it looks in all intents and purposes like a normal house. "If we'd have gone for an elevated house the ground floor would have been so high, almost two metres off the ground, the house would have looked out of keeping with its neighbours," explained Coutts. "Rather than building flood defences, considers a different approach, to acknowledge man cannot beat nature and to actually make space for water," said Coutts. "Our work, until recently, was better known in Holland than here in the UK."īaca considered a number of different approaches to dealing with the unpredictable water levels on the site, including a fully floating structure – an option ruled out by officials from the government's Environment Agency – and raising the house on stilts. The original design for the Amphibious House
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