Nieuw Terschelling Part 1 Project 2000 Nicholas Howarth-Cheung Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK The Dutch have had a long historical, cultural as well as a direct physical relationship with the sea. Floods have lead to an ambitious project of subtle and heroic engineering to control this fragile relationship. This proposal attempts to aestheticise the mechanisms of control by re-framing its beauty.Sited at Terschelling on the island’s tidal flood zone, the pier is redefined as a series of structures arranged as a reflection of the towns plan extending into the sea. The last town house acts as control point, separates the pier from a ghost network of underground aqueducts connecting the sea with abandoned wells in the town. At high tide these new structures flood, fog filled facades become visible, the sea and sky merge. The water’s reflective surface consumes and reveals elements of the pier.Existing wells in the town swell with water and generate fog. A phantom pier is generated as the tide recedes replacing water with humidified air in the aqueducts. The last house is sited in two Dutch paintings, deconstructed using their rules of perspective, a new architecture hides, reveals and links the old Dutch landscape of the town and house to the new landscape in the sea. Nieuw Terschelling-Nic Howarth Cheung’s project Nieuw Terschelling is essentially one about landscape.A landscape that is not merely a backdrop but an active generator to an architectural proposal. He sets himself an ambitious task in which conflicting elements are resolved with intelligence and determination.Initially non site specific the project became grounded in the Dutch island of Terschelling. Consideration was given to the following : mass/social/scale/time/repetition/absence/change.The multiplicity of approach - using procedures of photography ,hands on experimentation with fire/steam/light and the combination of experience/perceptions of the place and constraints of geography.Anchored in specific time and place,the project moves through the interior world and exterior world,the concrete and the imaginary,the fixed and the ephemeral.The state of flux - forever composing,decomposing and recomposing itself with the changing tide and weather.A fade in -fade out.The result is that at times the proposal appears ghostly,perhaps even trembling, the elements of land and water and sky melting into one.