Designed by San Francisco-based Andrew Kudless of Matsys Designs, ‘Sietch Nevada’ is a response to the idea of a water-poor world becoming a reality, especially in the American Southwest. With so much of the press focused on wars over oil, the world is often unaware of the slowly depleting water sources, which are indeed exponentially more valuable than oil. This futuristic urban prototype addresses the water situation as a complex underground network of tunnels and canals offers protection and the ’storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life.’
The scheme makes the existing underground water banks in the area become more than just back up tanks for droughts. In fact, the ‘Sietch Nevada’ turns these water banks into the building blocks of their new city idea. A dense underground community forms around canals which connect the city with vast aquifers, provide transportation, and agricultural irrigation. The cellular form of these caverns ‘constitute a new neighborhood typology that mediates between the subterranean urban network and the surface level activities of water harvesting, energy generation, and urban agriculture and aquaculture.’
Description from the architect:
‘In Frank Herbert’s famous1965 novel Dune, he describes a planet that has undergone nearly complete desertification. Dune has been called the ‘first planetary ecology novel’ and forecasts a dystopian world without water. The few remaining inhabitants have secluded themselves from their harsh environment in what could be called subterranean oasises. Far from idyllic, these havens, known as ’sietch’, are essentially underground water storage banks. Water is wealth in this alternate reality. It is preciously conserved, rationed with strict authority, and secretly hidden and protected.
Although this science fiction novel sounded alien in 1965, the concept of a water-poor world is quickly becoming a reality, especially in the American Southwest. Lured by cheap land and the promise of endless water via the powerful Colorado River, millions have made this area their home. However, the Colorado River has been desiccated by both heavy agricultural use and global warming to the point that it now ends in an intermittent trickle in Baja California. Towns that once relied on the river for water have increasingly begun to create underground water banks for use in emergency drought conditions. However, as droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, these water banks will become more than simply emergency precautions.
‘Sietch Nevada’ projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. ‘Sietch Nevada’ is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the ‘Sietch’ is a dense, underground community. A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns brim with dense, urban life: an underground Venice. Cellular in form, these structures constitute a new neighborhood typology that mediates between the subterranean urban network and the surface level activities of water harvesting, energy generation, and urban agriculture and aquaculture. However, the ‘Sietch’ is also a bunker-like fortress preparing for the inevitable wars over water in the region.’
Credit: Andrew Kudless (Design), Nenad Katic (Visualization), Tan Nguyen, Pia-Jacqlyn Malinis, Jafe Meltesen-Lee, Ben (Model)
