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Architecture of Sedimentation: Water Cities and Living Ground

Part 2 Project 2024
Dian Cong Liu
National University of Singapore | Singapore
Sedimentation is a natural process of ground formation where organic matter and minerals deposit along eroded riverbanks and coastlines. Water-based settlements continually rely on sedimentation processes to replenish their grounds of inhabitation. In the Modernization of cities, the relation of water to the city has become perceived as backward: this has to do with an eroded understanding of rivers and seas, which our land-centric cities have stopped relying on for their growth. However, today’s river and coastal cities must learn to better relate to their watery environments. It is timely and useful to rethink city-formation as sedimentary 'holoarchic' systems of water-bodies (ourselves included as water-filled bodily units) building up into new water-urbanisms, and finally into the water-worlds of this planet.

The originality of my thesis is in questioning how natural forms of sedimentation might be reinterpreted as an architectural process for building up the city, accumulating from small fragmentary units (by piecing together the remains of past watery ways of living) into larger complex systems (of future water cities). This project has significance in restoring architecture’s relations to ground, water, and the invisible hand of time.

These are urgent matters to care about, amidst the global environmental crisis, and the resultant changes in sea levels—putting the revival of each and every individuals’ relations to water at the core of planetary transformations.


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2024
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