News reaches me this week that RIBA has teamed up with insurance company Norwich Union to launch an international design competition which asks architects to come up with 'innovative and interesting' ideas for building housing in flood-risk areas.
Call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I'm not sure RIBA and Norwich Union's finest have really thought this one through. Surely the best way to make sure a house doesn't disappear under three feet of water every year is to make sure you haven't built your house in a flood-risk area in the first place.
On that basis I've got an 'innovative and interesting' device that can be used to mitigate flood risk: it's called a 'hill'.
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Comments (1)
Hills are all well and good, but if you are one of the millions of people that will be buying or renting houses being built in flood-risk areas (and that includes large areas of our most dearly loved cities, towns and villages, as well as new build areas like the Thames Gateway) I am sure you would want a bit of thinking to be done.
It would make the difference between a dry or soggy sofa, thousands of pounds of damage to goods and property, whether you can continue to be insured, or at worst, meaning that your gran can stop living on just the first floor of her house more than six months after flooding takes place.
Being pithy with your article is fine, but this is a real issue, and one with very human implications. I think you would do well to think through your comments more carefully in future.
Not a blog I will bother returning to.
Ewan Willars
RIBA
Posted by Ewan | August 18, 2008 12:43 PM
Posted on August 18, 2008 12:43