Study level

  • PhD
  • Master of Philosophy
  • Honours

Faculty/School

Faculty of Engineering

School of Architecture and Built Environment

Topic status

We're looking for students to study this topic.

Research centre

Supervisors

Dr Dan Nyandega
Position
Lecturer in Landscape Architecture
Division / Faculty
Faculty of Engineering

Overview

This project explores buildings, public/civic spaces, and landscapes as water infrastructure. Water is integral to human survival; hence, understanding buildings and urban spaces as habitable water infrastructure has the potential to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, navigate too much water (floods), and too little water (drought), and offer new modes of occupation.

With increasing rainfall intensities, floods, rising sea levels, and drought, the pervasive dichotomy between habitable spaces and water infrastructures can no longer hold. The two can't be treated as separate things. In many cases, water-related infrastructures are attached to buildings, urban spaces, and infrastructures in the form of water pipes, tanks, and filtration systems, all aimed at conveyance, retention, and discharging.

We will investigate notions of water infrastructure relative to habitable spaces and use these notions to analyse how to design spaces in low-lying coastal cities from the perspective of water infrastructure. In turn, we will explore how this approach can influence site selection, programming, form, materiality, spatial layout, modes of occupation, experience, construction techniques, technology and water use.

Research activities

  • Review of literature and relevant local and international precedent projects
  • The effects of the recent floods in Brisbane on the built form.
  • Investigate existing practices, techniques and technologies at the intersection of water infrastructure and human habitation.

Outcomes

  • Diagramming and mapping of the selected cases.
  • Developing habitable infrastructure typologies.
  • Journal paper publication from the research, and the student is welcome to continue working on the project as a second supervisor.

Skills and experience

  • Mapping.
  • Precedent projects analysis.
  • 3D modelling.
  • Diagramming.
  • Literature review.

Keywords

Contact

Contact Dr Dan Nyandega via email daniel.nyandega@qut.edu.au.