The project takes the increasingly polluted and flood prone coast line of the Scheldt estuary as the basis for a new coastal condition, centred on the re-composition of the sediment of the river. As a third option between dike raising and depoldering the coastline of Zeeland, a design for a new line of defence is developed which controls the inflow of storm water, and collects sand, silt and clay. The collected clay is processed in a ceramics factory capturing heavy metal pollutants and preventing them from the reaching the polder system. The primacy of material transformation through landscape is the key concern of the project, where the daily flows of sediment and water of the Scheldt are performed as architectural rhythms, cuts and insertions in a new boundary edge. Through this research, the existing design parameters of the coastline are questioned and expanded to include multiple actors, varying future conditions and an aesthetic and atmospheric dimension.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake had a devastating impact on the town of Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture, resulting in 1,234 immediate deaths and 59.6% of residential houses being fully damaged amongst other severe consequences. The post-disaster Reconstruction Plan (2011-2018) of this town focused on rebuilding the previously existing town with large-scale engineered interventions, resulting in a fragmented set of spatial interventions which solve problems in a single faceted way. The management of a post-tsunami reconstruction process should represent a resilient design for the future. This paper demonstrates that a modified land use design, developed and achieved through an interdisciplinary approach, represents a holistic solution to the drawbacks of the reconstruction plan. Through an iterative framework, site-specific strategies are developed at the urban and the building scale that combine safety and livability by finding synergies among disciplinary fields in an integrated manner. The result of this paper is a quantified evaluation of the reduction in flood risk achieved with a new design, making spatially evident the areas in which a refinement is required to mitigate flood damage. Subject: tsunami; interdisciplinary; resilience; spatial planning; strategy