2.1.3 Flood resilient amphibious house

2.1.3 Flood resilient amphibious house

Amphibious house is a building that rest on the ground but whenever a flood occurs, the entire building rise up in its dock, where it floats, buoyed by the flood water. The buoyancy system beneath the house displaces water to provide flotation as needed, and a vertical guidance system allows the rising and falling house to return exactly the same place upon descent. It works based on Archimedes principle: The mass and the volume of the house is less than that of water, and what determined its buoyancy.

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Figure 8: Amphibious house working; Source: The Hindustan Times, Cherry Maslen, October 19, 2014

The house itself sits in the ground and the floating base is almost invisible from the outside. Amphibious designs can vary to suit the location and owners’ preferences. The amphibious design allowed the floor level to be set less than 1m above the ground level instead of 2m, had the house been static. This enabled a 225sqm 3-bed dwelling to be constructed over three floors in place of the existing 1-storey 90sqm house without significantly increasing the ridge height, and therefore achieved full planning.7

These types of foundations are a proven, low-cost, low-impact flood protection strategy that gives vulnerable regions to enhance the flood resilience and improve its ability to recover from disaster. It is a sustainable flood mitigation strategy that allows an ordinary structure to float on the surface of rising flood water than succumb to inundation.

6 T S Adithya and K K Manoj 2021 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 1114 012037 7 Formosa, 2014, The Amphibious House, Baca Architects