 So I'm going to talk about amphibious construction and how we can use this for heritage sites. I'm at the University of Waterloo in the Department of Architecture, the School of Architecture there, an architect and an engineer, a modern archaeologist. And the Boyant Foundation project is the non-profit research association organization that I set up 12 years ago for an umbrella for my research team. So my interest in this started with Hurricane Katrina. I was one of three full-time faculty members at the LSU Hurricane Center. When Katrina happened I was there in the capacity of doing wind research, that's part of hurricanes, but Katrina was clearly a flood event and it changed my life and I left LSU to go to the University of Waterloo working on flood instead of wind. So many of you may never have heard of amphibious construction, so let me tell you what it is to get started. So we call it amphibious because it's an ordinary building, looks like an ordinary building until the flood comes. So when a flood comes it turns from a land creature into a sea creature and so when the flood is there it floats temporarily and has a vertical guidance system. There's something underneath the house to displace water and so the house goes up, sits on top of the water, comes back down when the water goes away and lands back in exactly the same place where it took off with the central devices to make sure that happens. They've been doing this in the Netherlands for about 20 years and in the backwoods in Louisiana I discovered from one of my students at LSU they've been doing it for more than 40 years and the people who've been doing that have been my teachers. What I really love about it is that it works with the water, doesn't fight the water, doesn't try to control it, lets the water do what the water wants to do and we are the ones who accommodate the water. So this is an example in the Netherlands and what we can see here is that the houses are in long rows and there's alternating roads of water or canals and land roads and when the level of the lake goes up the land roads are covered with water, they're not used anymore and people move around in boats on the canals. This is a more recent complex in Masbomol in the Netherlands and you can begin to see here how it works. These are hollow concrete boxes, the houses are sitting on top of those. Two houses to a platform, they share the platform, the concrete boxes underneath slab on grade here and then these are the vertical guidance posts one in the front and one in the back and the platform slides up and down on the posts. Here's an example, ordinary circumstances and in 2011 there was a major flood and the amphibious houses are doing their thing. This is a new amphibious house in the UK, on the River Thames, on the island on the River Thames, in Marlowe in Bacca Newshire and by Baca Architects. This is the concept, it's a basement within a basement, a double basement and the outer pit holds back the land and provides the basin for the water to flow into which then the house to elevate. Let's go to Louisiana and see what they've been doing there. And this is very very vernacular. So you can see here this is one of the houses, it's kind of a hybrid it was up on silt but the silt weren't very tall so a new owner came in and amphibiated it in addition to the silt. These are super cheap because the people do it themselves and it's not engineered some of them fail and most of them are really awful looking. So I like this picture, this pair because it shows exactly how it works. These are big blocks of EPS, styrofoam with the vertical guidance posts stuck in the ground and a sleeve that comes out from underneath the house and slides up and down. This is a recreational community and so they call these fishing camps and this is the electrical connection called these umbilical connections and in this context people use manual self-disconnect for the sewer. But we have technology that is a self-sealing breakaway for dealing with that that happens absolutely passively so nobody has to be there to tend to the situation. So here's another one of these little houses and you can see from the shed in the back that the water is up to about here and floating and that's more of the context. So in this community, old river landing some of the houses are on stilts and some of the houses are amphibiated amphibiation is the noun for making a house amphibious and I made the word up and now it's being used in the field but I don't want to do that. Okay so what happens though when your flood is deeper than you anticipated so the base flood elevation defined by the federal emergency management agency FEMA in the US defines base flood elevation is the height above the ground that the lowest part of the first floor structure is. So the lowest part of the first floor structure is about here and the base flood elevation in this area was three and a half meters and they had a five meter flood and so this is what happened here's another one. This was also 2011 the same year as the big flood in Oscomel and here is an amphibious house on the left and the neighbor on stilts with flood water in the house up to this level. It came back a couple of years later to look at this pair of houses again and what did I find? They had followed the example of their resilient neighbor and so I like this example it shows very dramatically that's the five meter flood there and this really is gone ugly but it works. Went up, stayed on top of the water, came back down and we can do something about the aesthetics so that's not a terrible impediment. So there are a lot there are dozens of these houses there some look like this, here's one that is floating and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Buddy Waylock's house. Most of the houses are occupied seasonally or on weekends for fishing trips but Buddy is one of the few full time residents and he built this house in 1982 I believe. He had been living in the vicinity for ten years before that and decided to build this house and live there permanently. This was 2011 and the house is floating and take a look at the camp next door because that's our meter stick. It tells us how high we're floating. So normally it's up that high and in the flood you can see now that the water is up to about here and Buddy's house just takes it in stride. This is to remind me to tell you that Buddy didn't want to block the beautiful view of the lake from the back side of the house so he put all four of his vertical guidance posts lined up on the land side so that they wouldn't block his view and that works just fine. He just needs to be able to slide up and down and not twist, not move side to side or front and back. And you'll see so this was flooding in last summer 2017 I went to visit Buddy and took these photographs of the context. With this background I formed the Boyan Foundation project and what is different about what I do than some of these other things? Well I work only on retrofit mostly because the reason I started this was out of a desire to address the issue of in established communities and indigenous people being told by FEMA that they had to move, that it was no longer safe for them to continue to live in their communities because of occasional flooding, rare but catastrophic flooding. If we could deal with the consequences of that then the people wouldn't have to move because the rest of the time it's really a lovely place to live and the people have for the Native Americans they've been there for hundreds of years the settlers have still been there for a couple of hundred years and generations and are very very very tied to the place. So I work on retrofit for the improved resilience of existing communities. So what do we do I basically follow the example of an old river landing, add buoyancy blocks, vertical guidance posts and then a structural subterrain to tie everything together and so these are not a one-size-fits-all solution. They're particular types of houses that it's appropriate for and others that it's not so it has many advantages I'm not going to go through this but they're pretty obvious. It's good for the elderly and disabled because you don't have to go up and down all those steps. It takes soil subsidence and rising sea level in stride because it can just keep going up and if you need to extend the poles that's not a difficult thing to do whereas extending your spills is really an issue and it's really inexpensive. It's easy to do people do it themselves so okay so at LSU before I went to Waterloo I built a prototype with my students and we tested it and tilted it with sandbags to demonstrate the buoyant stability and it worked beautifully and then FEMA found out about it and wrote LSU a letter and LSU tore it down and I was on my way to Waterloo anyway but I continued to work with the principals and applied them to a house in New Orleans and this is not a photograph this is a lovely render that my architecture students do they're very good at this kind of thing so here's an animation that shows the assembly process so I typically developed this for the Louisiana shotgun house which is this long skinny sort of railroad car type of house so we jack it up a little bit put the structural subframe underneath it at the buoyancy blocks the screen around it is to keep waterborne debris from settling underneath and for the aesthetic issues it has a telescopic vertical guidance post so it's a sleeve within a sleeve like the old fashioned car antenna and as the house goes up it pulls the oops where did I do let's take it to the next slide here so that's just a labeling of the parts so the conclusion why fight with the flood water when you can simply float on it Louisiana is in a lot of difficulty the red shows the expected land loss over the next 50 years Louisiana currently loses land at the rate of a football field of area every 45 minutes so it's a bad situation so I looked at one of the houses in New Orleans New Orleans is here Baton Rouge is over here somewhere and so looking at Leeville which used to be have quite a bit of land around it and now it looks like this so the dark is the water and what's gray is what's left of the land and so this is a little house and we looked at the house and figured out a system for amphibiating the house very simple and that's the exploded axon method drawing on the right looking at Princeville in North Carolina hit very badly by Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and then in 2016 hit again very badly by Hurricane Matthew and Princeville is a critically important cultural heritage site because it was the very first town incorporated by freed slaves after the emancipation after the Civil War and so after the second flood after Matthew FEMA solution is to move the community well people don't we know what happens when that happens so this was Hurricane Floyd that's Floyd and this is the building that I'm most interested in amphibiating in Princeville it's the primitive Baptist church built in 1896 and so that's my photograph this is the interior after being gutted and here's an animation that shows what would happen if it were not amphibiated damage up to that level and then what do we need to do well the crawl space under this isn't enough so we need to raise the wall a little bit and then drop in the buoyancy elements those are prefabricated dock floats put in the vertical guidance posts inside in the corners and the framing and put everything back together now add water and there's no problems I'm going to skip this this is the heritage museum it used to be a school another building that I would be interested in amphibiating in Princeville but so this is the one that has the vertical guidance posts in the back the software that nobody sees borrowing from Buddy Blalock solution the Farmsworth house in Plano Illinois a monument of modern architecture from the early 50s the architect in a flood plain this was happening too frequently and the floods were getting higher and so they've been having a lot of difficulty and so we came up with a scheme for amphibiating the Farmsworth house the key element of the Farmsworth is that it's already raised above the ground you can see through underneath so you have to maintain that clear space underneath so we're putting the buoyancy elements in a pit underneath that's hidden by a ground like surface and we bring the house back down and add water bring it back down and this is the first example where I told my students when it comes down that entrance platform is not pristine white it's mud there's mud everywhere so we have to go back and model the mud in these so Vietnam is where I'm working on a project now and this certainly is not heritage structure this is entirely vernacular but it's really interesting so this is what the houses typically look like so I've got a grant to activate the houses of rice farmers in the Vekong Delta so that's what I'm working on and this is what the houses typically look like the front is on the edge of the road the roads are the dikes along the canals and then the back of the house is on stilts and this is a typical house this is the one that we built in the rice field so that it would be low down so that we knew that it would flood so that we'd be able to get data because most of the houses are elevated enough that they flood occasionally but we need to have proof of concept so we're floating it with recycled jugs and this is completed with sleeves made out of rope three doors down now is the owner of the first house this is his younger brother Black and Black asked us if we would move this house into the edge of the rice field and activate it because they're going to improve the road and make all the houses move off the road so we agreed to do that that's Lax House completed and lo and behold two and a half weeks ago the flooding came early and I started getting these photographs from my Vietnamese partners and these houses are floating now that's Lax House and that's a house nearby that's not affiliated so this is what's happening in Vietnam now and this is a project in Canada a pavilion as proof of concept and demonstration for First Nations to see if they think this idea could possibly be appropriate for their communities and so we built this superstructure in the courtyard behind the school of architecture in April modular pieces we take it apart and we'll move that to the main campus to a pond on the Waterloo campus and we're set to build and do that installation in the beginning of October in three weeks and this is the last project I'm showing it's brand new I was just approached about this a week and a half ago and it's the Washington Canoe Club anybody who is familiar with Washington DC this is on the Potomac River it's an iconic building it's very large but it is doable I believe I've been assessing it so here's the site plan this is Washington DC right here on the Potomac River there and in an early site plan there it is with the canal behind the Potomac River there so good access to the river for canoes a floor plan and this is what's important going underneath and seeing that the original structure is intact and it's been short up with steel rail that is conducive to this sort of retrofit in all its glory I want to tell you that we had two international conferences on amphibious architecture design and engineering the first one was in Bangkok in 2015 the second one I hosted at the University of Waterloo last summer and the third one will be next summer at the BRE Building Research Establishment in Watford which is just outside of London and again it will be at the end of June in 2019 and we're going to hold IP 2021 in Vietnam and these are my sponsors and thank you very much