2023-05-23 11:45:48
Splitting homes, renting out floors and care apartments for the elderly: we will definitely not solve the housing shortage with that, says Olthuis, who is also affiliated with TU Delft. He speaks of ‘pinpricks’, with which we will not reach the number of one hundred thousand homes per year. “It doesn’t make any difference. We have to cross that dike. We have to get out onto the water. We have to build there.”
We do it abroad
We also made such a switch a hundred years ago, he says. “The city was very flat. And then the elevator was invented and we moved to high-rise buildings. Then we got more dense in the city.” We should also look at the water in the same way – and that goes beyond building a houseboat. “We really need to move towards large, floating apartment complexes.”
And the funny thing is: we do it abroad. “Using Dutch techniques that have been around for a hundred years, we are now building 13,000 floating homes in the Maldives.” In our own country we see water more as an enemy than a friend, thinks Olthuis. The threshold will be lower, he says, if you can also temporarily place these types of water complexes. “I’m thinking of complexes that have been there for ten, fifteen years and are then moved to another part of the city or even another city.”
Look at cruise ships
Building can be done quite quickly, the architect expects. “Look at the cruise industry. It’s fantastic to see how they build a ship with 5,000 cabins in a year. With the same technique you could also make these kinds of floating apartment complexes.”
An additional advantage of this method of construction, he says: you avoid the nitrogen problem. “If you can do the construction somewhere else, and then drag the floating house or the floating apartment complex to the city, then you’ve solved that too.”
#architect #envision #enormous #apartment #complexes #water