Nobody is an Island

For thousands of years, the German coastal lands have been tormented by the North Sea. During the past eight centuries, their residents have been building and maintaining dykes, to protect settlements and agriculture from the power of angry storm surges. But rising sea levels and the reality of climate change is rendering this infrastructure, which has grown far beyond a construction project and embedded itself at the heart into everyday life, excessive and futile.

The Thesis proposes a daring almost reckless alternative to the conventional raising of dikes, by instead breaking this very barrier at strategic points to initiate sediment soil growth along the European North Sea coast.

Within the scenario of semi-annual floods, a new spatial and programmatic paradigm is developed, layering marine ecology with agriculture and tourism. The architectural expression dwells upon a possible new vernacular that equally caters for and poetically frames this landscape en mouvement.

The method of building large scale landscape models is based around extensive research in scientific fields of marine ecology and hydrological engineering, alongside more sociological and anthropological fieldwork visiting the remote yet specific sites and speaking extensively to members of the community.