studio toró is an architectural research practice devoted to building under 40 inches or more of rainfall every year
In Latin America we have the equivalent of one Katrina every year. The number of deaths from urban flooding in the rainy area that go from south Mexico to northern Argentina hits the thousands, every year. In most of that region where 500 million people live, the majority of them in cities, annual rainfall is over 50 inches.
Nevertheless, large cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires have been struggling to keep their water supplies in pace with growing demand and drying watersheds. Meanwhile global warming has been fueling two trends: stronger storms and longer periods of draught, making water deadly both ways, when it falls and when it does not.
While the usual approach to the problem has been at the scale of urbanism and public policy, architecture has indeed an important contribution. We intend to look at urban flooding to argue that beyond matters of governance and infra-structure, individual buildings should do much more to engage water in a responsible way.
research
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manifesto
2. infiltration
3. urban scale
For 500 years we have been struggling with the rainy season in Latin America. For most of the region the amount of annual rain varies from 40 to 70 inches. In the majority of the region the rainy season is concentrated in the summer during which rainfall usually achieves 20 inches per month and it is not uncommon to have 4 inches in a single day.If 18,000 liters (5,000 gallons) can fall on a single regular lot (12 X 30 M) during a summer storm, you can imagine the impact of that much volume in the storm-water system of any major city.
In a historical perspective, it becomes clear that the Iberians who conquered the land around 1500s were never prepared for that much water, coming from places where it rains much less (21 inches in Lisbon, 11 inches in Madrid). After independence the trend continued for the models from Paris (25 inches) or London (29 inches) have only about half the average rainfall of Brazilian cities, yet distributed evenly.
One need only to look at average building in most of the tropics nowadays and the inability to deal with rain becomes remarkable. Water infiltration is the rule in low-income houses which, in addition to being pressured by densification, have been paving every open space, resulting in a fully impermeable terrain. Yet the problem is not bound by income and class stratification, upscale apartment buildings are no less incompetent when it comes to water proofing and soil permeability.
If we can agree that any problem have the seeds of its solution, we can hope that a responsible architecture attitude towards water conservancy and soil permeability can have a tremendous impact in the deadly and costly path of water. Our main purpose at Studio Toró is to engage with the way architects design it and the public at large build to argue that both need to be much more serious about water.
