Inhabiting Wetness

Abstract

This thesis explores the condition where water meets urban edge in Asunción, Paraguay, proposing an architectural response that considers water not as a challenging force, but rather as a powerful asset for the maintenance of ecosystems and health of the city. It makes a case to consider the humedales (wetlands) as an important constituent in imagining the future of Asunción because of its overlooked benefits including carbon-sequestration, cultivation of biodiversity, protection again erosion and the cleaning of water.

Recent development at the water’s edge in Asunción has caused the destruction of wetlands for the construction of highway and other public and private developments. This is the approach of the binary: the separation of wet and the dry. What might it mean instead to inhabit a gradient of wetness by exploring other possibilities for resilient living at the edge?

Sited in the Bañado Sur, this project considers these questions in a zone of informal housing that experiences hazardous flooding from heavy rain and river surges. These inundations often lead to the disruption of life, loss of work and the evacuation of inhabitants. How could designing with buoyancy provide for housing, working, common use and storage spaces for use in both wet, dry, and in between conditions?

The proposed vivienda complex explores how an amphibious architecture might expand, contract and adapt to changing water levels while still supporting basic functions. At the same time, the house itself becomes a vessel to capture, hold and distribute rainwater.

The representation becomes an opportunity to reconsider how to describe and engage with water differently. Through a series of watercolor and video experiments, water itself becomes the medium for drawing and making. Its fading, bleeding, seeping, blurring, pooling, flowing and drying enables a new imagination for understanding water in relationship to time, architecture and the city.

Palimpsest, Symbiosis and Layering become guiding terms that inform not only how to think about the spatial conditions at the water’s edge, but also the diverse narratives and histories that exist in a place like the Bañado Sur. It is a place of great complexity, resilience, culture and tradition. Although adapted for this specific context, the thesis is an invitation to question the line of the wet and dry where city meets water around the world.