Sitting on the waterfront at the northern edge of Manhattan, a recently opened athletic facility for Columbia University is likely to flood in the future. Climate change is raising the risk of both extreme rainfall and storm surges. But instead of trying to keep the water out, the new building is designed to let it in.
The building, a tennis center with courts both inside and on the roof, has a first floor that’s elevated high enough to be out of the way of a so-called 100-year flood. “We didn’t want to site the building in a situation where it would be immediately threatened by flooding in the near term,” says Tyler Hinckley, a senior project manager at Perkins&Will, the architecture firm that designed the facility. But building it high enough to avoid a 500-year flood would be prohibitively expensive. And fully sealing off the first floor, with no windows, would ignore the location’s spectacular views.
“There are buildings around the country that have been built almost like a bathtub, with very few openings in the lower level,” says Stephen Sefton, a principal at Perkins&Will. “And where you did have openings, you would provide flood doors that would close to not let water in. Because we wanted to build this open and connected to the outside, we didn’t want to create a building like that. We wanted to create the inverse.”
In a major flood, a network of vents—small doors in the facade—open to let water flow into the first floor, from the lobby and locker room to the tennis courts, and then out of the building when the flood is over. Lockers are high on the walls and waterproof. Other mechanical equipment is also raised. When stormwater subsides, the tennis courts can be cleaned off and then immediately used again.
Allowing water to flow through also means that the building could use fewer materials. “Everything has to be more robust to keep the water out,” says Hinckley. “Whereas if we let the water in, then we don’t have to oversize the structure to withstand it.”
The concrete slab under the building could be 6 inches thick rather than 12 inches, for example—helping shrink the building’s carbon footprint, since making cement is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. And because elements like mechanical systems won’t have to be replaced after a flood, that also reduces the building’s environmental impact over its lifetime.
The design team studied scenarios for sea-level rise and storms up to the year 2100 to work on the plans. Current flood maps for New York City don’t require this type of resilient design. “Those flood maps are outdated—they’re looking backward, not looking forward 80 years,” says Hinkley.
This approach to resilience wouldn’t work for most other types of buildings; an apartment building can’t let water flow through the lobby. But others are also rethinking how cities interact with water. In Bangkok, for example, this park is designed to hold up to a million gallons of rainwater during a storm to help reduce flooding in the surrounding neighborhood. A park in Atlanta has a similar design. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, an underground parking garage and a sunken basketball court are also designed to fill up with water during storms.
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