by Allison Anderson

Created on: March 28, 2010   Last Updated: March 29, 2010

Choreographing Water in the Built Environment

Water, simple and necessary, threatens vulnerable citizens throughout the world.  The need for safe drinking water is severe.  There are two obstacles to providing clean water: the “inadequacy” of local supplies, and the presence of contaminants.  How can better design of communities and buildings provide solutions to this growing problem?

There are often seasonal differentials in water supplies, when excess precedes drought.  The ability to find and store water was essential to human development, with the discovery of how to find and protect water sources, and how to keep water in every size of vessel from a clay pot to a reservoir. 

Human life requires a minimum of 1 liter of drinking water per person, per day.  We use much more: the average citizen in the U.S. uses 575 liters/day, a citizen of India uses 135 liters.

Public water distribution systems allow many the luxury of forgetting the drudgery of collecting, transporting and storing water.  In places without reliable infrastructure, collecting water requires significant time and energy that could be spent by children studying at school, or by women at work. 

Extending infrastructure to serve all people comes at a high cost.  In urban areas with high densities, this cost is borne by the great number of people.  Rome constructed nine aqueducts by the year 52 to provide water for a population of nearly one million. 

Roman engineering not only provided the distribution system but built storage to guard against evaporation, interruption, and defilement.  The basilica cistern in Istanbul is a wonder of architecture with carved capitals and vaulted ceilings, constructed to house only water.

Massive engineering projects of the last 100 years include hydroelectric dams and channelized water, resulting in long-term environmental degradation.  These community-scale “solutions” harmed natural cycles, but direct new efforts to site-scale, self-sufficient alternatives that capitalize on existing technologies and products.

Streets and buildings may become the new aquifers to collect and store water.  In urban areas, green spaces may be “manufactured” by reclaiming and transforming brownfields and impervious edges along streets. 

Green boulevards enhance the aesthetic quality, and also collect, filter and store stormwater in swales, restoring water to the aquifer

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