Serjeant Award for Excellence in Drawing
The project “New Lohachara” is centered around the preservation of disappearing lands and cultures in the face of rising sea levels. The intent of the project is to create an architecture that augments nature: that explores Architecture as Supernature. Through investigating the potentials offered by a changing world, the project strives to embrace climate change as inevitable, and seeks to investigate the positive opportunities created by it.
“Lohachara” refers to a small Indian island that disappeared beneath the rising seas a decade ago. The narrative of the project adopts these “first refugees of global warming” as the inhabitants and missionaries of the new city. Constructed in embrace of water, New Lohachara is dedicated to the “saving” of other endangered lands from their similar impending fate of disappearance beneath the rising seas, and in doing so simultaneously revives the ancient civilisation of the lost island of Lohachara. The site of focus for the project is Venice, as a city under constant threat from increasing flood intrusion, giving the project a context for the extraordinary or miraculous.
The manifestation of Supernature within New Lohachara is split into three parts, each of which harnesses or reengineers a natural condition:
I. FLOOD MITIGATION - PRESERVING VENICE
Control of the rising sea level and thus preservation of Venice as an endangered land. New Lohachara operates as a well that intakes, stores and processes excess flood waters from the lands. The flood mitigation system looks at a long-term reactive strategy that embraces water intake and extreme fluctuation over the course of the year.
II. FRESHWATER SUPPLY - SUPPLYING VENICE
The processing of floodwater into a constructive supply of freshwater through distillation. Weather modification utilises the natural weather principles to create a “supernatural” weather system, a modified local landscape of cloud and rain that moves between New Lohachara and Venice.
III. MICROCLIMATE - RE-ESTABLISHING LOHACHARA
Utilising the power of the water intake and processing, the creation of a hot, humid microclimate within a temperate macroclimate recreates the environment of Lohachara’s tropical Indian homeland within the Venetian context, contributing to the “revival” of the lost island of Lohachara.
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