Tag: Engineering

M-o-s-e

The flood protection system that was installed in 2021 to protect Venice from rising sea level effects is named MOSE (for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico). The name was chosen to allude to the story of Moses dividing the Red Sea to save the judaic tribe in the Jewish and Christian Old Testament. The plans for MOSE were already introduced in the 1980s but it’s completion took amlmost 40 years.

A flooded St Mark’s Square by St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, 15 November 2019. Photo by Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty
Venice during highwater. © Andrea Merola/dpa
The M-O-S-E Sea Barrier

In the same manner the sea wall that is currently in planning for Jakarta is named – and shaped – after an ancient myth: The giant bird Garuda.

Both projects show, that the municipalities believed in the role of cultural history in the political communication of climata adaptation measures.

Lighthouse Retreat

In 2019 this 120 year old lighthouse on the Denish coast had to be moved 70 meters back

The 23-meter-high lighthouse is located on a cliff about 60 meters above sea level. When it was put into operation, the cliff was about 200 meters from the sea. In the end, it was only six meters to the cliffs.

What seems like a looney idea from a Uncle Scrooge comic, is happening all over the world. (see my post on comics here) We will see many more cultural heritage sites on wheels like this in the years to come.

To read more about the Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse, go here.

There’s a whole series of images from similar buildings here.

Conshelf or the Precontinent Project

Continental Shelf Station was an attempt at creating an environment in which people could live and work on the sea floor. Precontinent has been used to describe the set of projects to build an underwater “village” carried out by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his team in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea between 1961 and 1963. The projects were named Precontinent I, Precontinent II and Precontinent III. Particularly Precontinent II off the Sudanese coast received wide public recognition and was documented in a movie with the somewhat sensationalist yet eerie title “World without sun“. For a good overview of the project see: https://www.closed-worlds.com/conshelf-ii-iii or https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/05/27/remains-of-an-underwater-habitat-left-by-1960s-sea-dwellers

thanks to Lajos Talamonti for the lead!

Neromanna – A film about a sunken community

Athens based artist collective Latent Community produced this wonderful film about the story of Kallio in Fokida, Greece, a village that was expropriated in 1969 and was covered in 1981 by the waters of the artificial lake created by the Mornos Dam for use as a reservoir for the city of Athens. The lake has been the main source of water for the Greek capital ever since. The community got dispersed, many of the people of Kallio now living in Athens themselves.

I was lucky to meet Latent Community in their studio in Athens and discuss the impact of flooding on the collective psyche of a community and the political implications of Athens incessant thirst for fresh water.

Artificial Intelligence and false hopes: Asunder

“Asunder is an art project that responds to a growing interest in the application of AI to critical environmental challenges. […] It’s a fictional ‘environmental manager’ that proposes and simulates future alterations to the planet to keep it safely within planetary boundaries, with what are often completely unacceptable or absurd results. In doing so, Asunder questions assumptions of computational neutrality, our increasingly desperate reach for techno-solutionist fixes to planetary challenges, and the broader ideological framing of the environment as a system.” (from the artists’s website)

Found in Tactical Tech’s exhibition.

Modified marine ecosystems

Climate adaptation for coastal cities will require altered relationships to the sea and the marine ecosystem. future coastal city communities will live closer to and closer with the sea and it’s inhabitants. This will most likely require modifications of both, urban and marine landscape and structure. Engineering will not stop above sea level. The question is, how much alteration and optimization is desireable beyond our sheer technical capacity. This collaborative AI-project ask just this question. Check out the project’s web page: YANTO

Found in Tactical Tech’s exhibition.

Venice flooding from a duck’s perspective

In the Donald Duck story “Zio Paperone e la deriva dei monumenti“ by Italian comic artists Giorgio Pezzin and Giorgio Cavazzano, Uncle Scrooge together with Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie save the historic buildings of Venice from rising floods.

Original Italian cover

The story first appeared as early as 1977 and has all the ingredients of our current debates about the protection of cultural heritage from climate change. Uncle Scrooge suggests to put the historic buildings on large floating pillows that would rise with the flood and lower again when the waters receed. The story was published in over a dozen countries, the german version alone saw 6 reprints until 2013.

The following images are from a German edition:

Thanks to Tobias Bulang and Janet Grau for the lead and their kid’s comic book.

The new Alexandria skyline

In an effort to protect the city of Alexandria against coastal erosion, the local government plants thousands of concrete tetrapods along the remaining beach. This creates a bizarre, futuristic urban landscpae, unlike anything we know:

The images are from a German TV report from September 4. 2022. Find the video here.

Thanks to Annette Possmann for the lead.

Divide the Seas!


To counter the global sea level rise, several initiatives have formed to block seas off from the global water flow. The idea behind it: If you control the global water flow, you could control the sea level locally without having to tackle the problem globally. Of course, from a political point of view, this is a case of eco-protectionism taken to the next level. It would create an unprecedented case of separatism, a whole area shutting itself off from global interdependency that is essential to what human culture is – an interdependent global network.

About these plans, one scientist from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research said: “See this as a warning. What we’re saying is: Here’s a plan, a plan we don’t want. But if we end up needing it, then it’s technically and financially feasible.”

See the article from the New York Times from 2020.


Thames Barrier

The Thames Barrier was installed in the 1980s to protect London from extreme floods from the North Sea. It’s design make it probabyl to most stylish flood protection structure ever and reflects the era of it’s planning, the 1970s. The Thames Barrier has been closed 184 times since it became operational in 1982. Of these closures, 97 were to protect against tidal flooding and 87 were to protect against combined tidal/fluvial flooding. (source: wikipedia)

To see what French artist Gustave Doré imagines London without the Thames Barrier, go here.

UK; 20. Century; Engineering; City: London