The relationship between architecture and water has been and still is as variable and fluid as water. It offers a wide variety of approaches, problems, and considerations, ranging from symbolic, cosmological, or religious aspects to infrastructure management, architecture and urbanism history, engineering, construction, and architectural design. Paradoxically, the firmitas proposed by Vitruvius (as one of the three essential axes of architecture) has and continues to confront (positively and negatively) the omnipresence of this fluctuating element, which Heraclitus identified as the essence of a changing world and alien to any idea of permanence.
Le Corbusier fully understood the extent to which the architect’s work found its raison d’être in the numerous ramifications of that essential encounter between the solid and permanent, and the fluid and transient. In 1955, his publication Le poème de l’angle droit (The poem of the right angle) – which he considered to be the definitive synthesis of his cosmological thought – clarified that the work of the creators (including the architect) was none other than to build bridges between the extremes of a hopelessly divided world. The right angle in the poem was not the geometric abstraction of the 90 degrees, but the angle between the upright human and the plane formed by the variable agreement between the earth and the water. Every possibility of human action is derived from that natural angle (Figure 1).
Almost seventy years after Le Corbusier’s poem (which was as philosophical as it was architectural), the world is hyper-technical but at a turning point where the cracks of the triumphalist story of modernity are more evident. In this context, it is important to think about the water-architecture relationship that refers us back to our primitive beings.
Water and symbology
Like earth, air, and fire, in the ancestral theory of the four elements, water has accumulated extensive symbolism over millennia, as highlighted by Gaston Bachelard. The image of water and what it evokes is almost coincidental. When you think of water (trying to detach it from its container), imprecise and ambiguous images emerge referring to its indeterminate form, which links it with the primitive. In the cosmogonic myths of most cultures, water is the element that creates the world inhabited by humans. Form sprouts from the primeval aquatic mass, which, ultimately, has its most synthetic representation in the idea of the city. According to Sumerian tradition, Eridu was the first city built by the god Marduk, when all lands were sea. Babylon was erected over the Gate of Apsu, the god who embodied the waters of chaos before creation. The Temple of Jerusalem was over the Tehom, which (in Hebrew tradition) is an underground ocean remnant of the primordial waters. Even today, it is recognised as the sacred rock that closes the mouth of the pre-cosmic space.
Since ancient times, the semantic connection between water and the origins of things identified it with the transcendent reality on earth and, therefore, the boundaries of the mundane. As a liminal element, water is the origin and conclusion of life, amniotic fluid or the river crossed by Charon.
Associated with the original paradises or those existing beyond death, it becomes a structural element of their recreations on earth, which materialise in the Gardens of Eden of the Hebraic and Christian Genesis or the paradisiac destiny for the righteous in the Quran (comprising four rivers that flow into the Hereafter). Water is also virtually present in the white sand grooves of the Zen Garden rooted in the emptiness of Taoist tradition.
The symbolic relationship between water and human-built space becomes especially eloquent in the urban foundational rituals. For the Etruscan, the sulcus primigenius indicated the perimeter of the future wall around the city, which limited and allowed passage through its doors between the inside and outside (unfounded) spaces. Drawing an analogy between the symbolic shapelessness of the spaces outside walls and water, the walled city would be like an island. In fact, terrain surrounded by water has historically prompted urban settlements. For example, Rome and Paris emerged in the space between two rivers, on the Tiber Island and the Île de la Cité, respectively (Figure 2). Additionally, cities settled on islands share the condition of being another place that detaches from the known and ordinary to enter the terrain of the unknown. This remote existential condition is given by the nature of the aquatic element that surrounds them. Hence, Easter Island, the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, Mont-Saint-Michel, the Borromean Islands, the abrupt Capri, Roosevelt Island, San Borondón in the Canary Islands, or the mythical Atlantis, have historically been the object of extensive imagination related to the original, germinal, unique, mysterious and occult.
Figura 2.
Ambrogio Brambilla and Claudio Duchetti. View of the Tiber Island represented as a ship, 1580-1585. Source: Public domain image, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, available on Wikimedia Commons.
Certain ambivalence is noticed in aquatic images of built space, that is characteristic of the semantic articulation inherent to the symbols, which has its origin in the material nature of the element. Vitruvius explains this pragmatically in Ten Books of Architecture, where he suggested avoiding the proximity to lagoons and the seaside by noon or sunset when founding a city. Instead, he noted the convenience of easy access to fresh water. In Re Aedificatoria, Alberti illustrated symbolic ambivalence through anecdotes about water’s wonderful properties. He stressed that water from the spring of Debris was cold during the day and hot at night, Epirus’ sacred fountain extinguished the flames of what was introduced into it but made the extinguished burn, while a spring nearby the pond of Gelonius made some women sterile and others fertile. Gaston Bachelard also noted (regarding material imagination) that water can act as a germ and vehicle of both good and evil. This richly symbolic semantic has largely lost its ancient eloquence, being overlapped and confused among a great variety of images in contemporary society. However, the symbol has not disappeared. Mircea Eliade argued its permanence in any human existential condition within the cosmos and Jung identified it as an archetype in the collective unconsciousness. Among the phenomena allowing the current manifestation of this ancestral burden, catastrophe – understood as the sudden dissolution of the (built) form – evidently prompts it.
From water catastrophe to domesticating chaos
Figura 3.
Master of the St Elizabeth Panels, The Saint Elizabeth’s Day Flood, 1490 - 1495, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Source: Public domain image from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, available on Wikipedia.
Since its origins, water’s relationship with the human-made world has been ambivalent. Water is not only the primary element of life, but also a necessary ingredient in the manufacturing of primitive construction materials such as adobe and brick. Notice that, for these to work, they need to dry out. Hence, architecture is born amid a battle between the sun and water. From the beginning of human societies, humidity is as indispensable as it is threatening. Both excess and lack cause problems and pose threats to survival, which are symptoms of the precariousness of human nature and the continuous need to find remedies for it. The possibility of a water catastrophe is always present, whether as drought, flood, or storm. The Great Flood myth (not only biblical but also present in many cultures) instals a long premodern tradition of attributing catastrophes to revenge or divine warnings about human actions, which must be appeased with offerings or ceremonies.
In ancient societies where water control was important for development, technical interventions were coated with a sacred discourse. For example, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China, canals or dams were built with advanced science while imploring the benevolence of the gods. However, Roman engineering marked a clear interval in history. Their aqueducts, siphons, bridges, dams, deposits, and fountains indicated a level of control of aquatic chaos that stands unrivalled even today (in the first century, Romans had more water supply per capita than in the twenty-first century). The Cloaca Maxima was unmatched until the large Collector of Asnières was built during Haussmann’s renovation of Paris (Figure 4).
Figura 4.
Henry-Charles Emmery de Sept-Fontaines, Statistical map of Paris’ sewers, 1861. Source: Public domain image, from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, available on Wikimedia Commons.
Hydraulic considerations from dominant sacred parameters strongly resurfaced in the Middle Ages. It is no coincidence that legends of great medieval saints are associated with drying swampland processes in agriculture, such as the story about Saint Marcellus of Paris and the dragon, masterfully presented by Jacques Le Goff. On the one hand, controlling the force of water was necessary as a primary source of energy in the Middle Ages (e.g., mills, machines, and blacksmith shops). On the other hand, the tendency to link every aquatic disaster to divine punishment persisted to the very threshold of modernity (and is still present today). Since medieval times, prayers, processions, or vows have often been more important than engineering.
Later, during the Renaissance and the Baroque worlds, water assumed new architectural and urban values in gardens, fountains, and festive uses of waterways. The popes of Baroque Rome (from Sixtus V to Alexander VII) addressed ordinary water supply, tailoring it with miracles and populating the city with fountains (which often used the endpoints of old Roman aqueducts). In Versailles, the Sun King’s splendour depended on vast hydraulic infrastructure to ensure the functioning of the fountains and the monarchy’s staging dynamics.
The breaking first points (as in many areas) were the Age of Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, when modern societies strongly relied on technique (stripped of all sacred residues) and believe (erroneously) to have eradicated the myth from the premodern history archives. Since the end of the eighteenth century, western cities developed new supply and water management systems. In Sabatini, Madrid, sewers replaced the old ¡Agua va! (Water goes!) and in Paris, Victor Hugo used sewers as the stage for one of the most famous chapters of Les Misérables, almost a hundred years before Carol Reed’s cinematographic and poetic take on the underground world in The Third Man.
The transformations in the human-river relationship were equally radical. In 1743, Pope Benedict XIV commissioned a scientific study of the Tiber course and its characteristics (depicted in a splendid carving by Carlo Nolli and Giambattista Piranesi) to prevent floods and improve navigation. Later, in 1858, the hydrographic map of Paris (drawn for Baron Haussmann’s Grands Travaux) included a representation of the Seine’s flooding areas. Likewise, the urban life relationship with the river changed. Widespread river channelling created physical barriers between water and citizens, eradicating activities traditionally linked to its banks. However, the nostalgia for the previous interaction between river and city resurfaced, both in recent urban projects (through waterway naturalisation) and in heritage projects seeking to recover memory (for example, the Hydraulic Museum of the Molinos del Río Segura by Juan Navarro Baldeweg).
From this point onwards, territorial aspects, entire hydrographic basins, urban aspects, and water architecture were ultimately intertwined. Clear examples are vast projects by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which were essential for Roosevelt’s New Deal (Figure 5), or the hydraulic works of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. In this context, noteworthy contemporary architecture projects emerged, such as Otto Wagner’s lock houses along the Danube Canal or Le Corbusier’s Kembs-Niefer lock.
Figura 5.
Pickwick Landing Dam, a project by the Tennessee Valley Authority, ca. 1938. Source: Tennessee Valley Authority, Creative Commons 2.0, available on Wikimedia Commons.
If there is a city that symbolises this subject throughout history, it is undoubtedly Venice. Since its foundation, it has been in a perpetual struggle with the Lagoon, always increasingly threatened by the acqua alta (high water). Venetian history is the compendium of a complex water-architecture-city relationship, from its wooden pole foundations driven into the mud and the central wells in the campi (city squares), to the subtle water-built environment connection in Carlo Scarpa’s projects and recent infrastructures such as the colossal MOSE project. Venice epitomises a new and unexpected phenomenon linked to its aquatic condition: the use and abuse of mass tourism (Figure 6).
Water and garden
Figura 7.
Sennefer’s Garden, ca. 1400 BC, in Ippolito Rosellini, 1834. I monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia. Pisa: Capurro. Source: Heidelberg historic literature digitised.
Water is the basic element that allows the garden, a space that since ancient times responds to the human need for a pleasant environment that complements the home. The term garden comes from the Old French jart (orchard) and gard (fenced). The water allowing this separate world – the fenced orchard enhancing aesthetic pleasure – has crucial, practical, and symbolic roles, which have manifested differently throughout history and evolved as garden concepts changed.
In the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris, water was diverted for distribution and storage, first for farming purposes and then to create landscapes. In ancient Egypt, these landscapes were symmetrical enclosures and in Mesopotamia they were structured in stepped terraces, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon being the most famous example. However, the history of gardening begins with the Roman hortus, which acquired an ornamental role near the first century BC., as noted in Varro’s treatise De re rustica. Two extreme cases show the relationship between the Roman garden and water: the temple of Vesta in Tivoli (27 BC), positioned on a rocky ledge over the river Aniene, and Pompeii’s residences, featuring small gardens with central fountains surrounded by beautiful colonnades. However, it was in the Villa Adriana (second century AD) where water was used in all its splendour, as the structuring element of the entire garden. The fall of the Empire and the confinement of the Middle Ages interrupted this tradition, which only survived up to the Renaissance through the continuity of Islamic customs in the south of Spain during the mid-eighth century. There, water usage and aquatic symbolism flourished, coming from the dry lands of the Middle East. In the Hispanic-Islamic Garden, there is a rich symbiosis between vegetation, architecture, and the omnipresent water, both in domestic and palatial courtyards, such as those in Alhambra composed as terrestrial recreations of the celestial paradise.
Water in the Renaissance Garden is impregnated with vigour and artistic, intellectual, and spiritual confidence reborn after the dark Middle Ages, which manifests via moving water in fountains. Remarkable water control and design emphasise human superiority over the natural element. The first gardens with scattered sculptural fountains, nymphs, and grottoes evolved to control the vitality and energy of water; from the Villa d’Este (1573) to the Baroque exuberance of the Villa Garzoni de Collodi (1652). In the early seventeenth century, the influence of Italian gardening spread throughout Europe, especially in France. In the gardens of Versailles, Chantilly and Vaux-le-Vicomte, the energy of Alpine water is transformed, evoking power (rooted in monarchical absolutism), which is expressed through large aquatic components and geometrical route designs. These were very different from the picturesque English garden (which thrived in the mid-eighteenth century), in which the stream and the pond were used to closely reproduce nature and scenarios of classical mythology. Pioneer gardens developed this concept at a medium scale employing neoclassical temples, bridges, and small jetties, such as Chiswick House (1738), Stourhead (1741-80), and Capability Brown’s extensive gardens with large lakes. The English Garden became the favourite style for new urban public parks in the nineteenth century. Their use of water was justified on the grounds of hygiene and recreation. The most influential was Birkenhead Park (1843-1847), designed by Joseph Paxton near Liverpool, which also connected ideas from Europe and America, being taken as a reference in Joseph Olmsted’s design for New York’s Central Park (1857).
Throughout the twentieth century, landscaping emerged as a discipline with water playing a vital role, often integrating complex projects at domestic, urban, and regional scales -Roberto Burle Marx’s work in Brazil was a pioneering example, offering organic vitality to the public space resulting from the harsh lines of modern architecture- as well as some other works which were crucial to address environmental sustainability and citizen participation. Contrary to the contemporary water waste characteristic of water parks and golf courses, projects recovering channelled river and obsolete sea fronts (typical of the industrial city) became relevant as new urban components enhancing social, economic, and environmental balance.
Cleansing water, pleasant water: Between hygiene and leisure
Water represents the cleansing of both body (hygiene) and soul in most ancient cultures. For example, baptism in Christianity and Wudu in Islam are two well-known sacred water rituals. Public baths, as essential urban equipment components, are the best-known features of ancient civilisations (especially in the Greco-Roman world). Baths were an essential and defining element of being urban within the array of cities in the Roman Empire. Rome’s vast imperial baths (e.g., Trajan, Caracalla, and Diocletian) were the pinnacle of a long history of bath rituals, which ended up articulating many social relationships around water.
The Middle Ages indicated a radical rupture. The urban life crisis in Christian Europe lasting until the twelfth century, coupled with the ecclesiastical doubt of the human body, minimise the urban presence of water, with water supply becoming the main concern over hygiene. In contrast, after the medieval Islamic culture cancelled the classical concept of citizen (linked to polis or urbs), the only remaining public facility of the old city was the bathroom (recycled as hammam and framed in a spiritual human-water relationship). Undoubtedly, the Alhambra in Granada is the zenith of water integration into Islamic architecture, as highlighted by Luis Barragán when promoting its contemporary values (Figure 8).
Figura 8.
Jean Laurent, Alhambra, Patio de los Arrayanes (Court of the Myrtles), 1871. Granada, Patronato de la Alhambra and Generalife. Source: National Library of Spain.
After the changes in the Renaissance and the Baroque, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there were radical turns in many areas, including the emergence of modern hygiene. The Age of Enlightenment prioritised cleanliness in all aspects of human life. This started a complex process in which the intellectual constructs of cleanliness and dirt developed their own history, as shown by Georges Vigarello or Alain Corbin’s studies. Undoubtedly, its most novel aspect is the increasing introduction of water into the homes and domestic life of the urban masses. The generalisation of washing and bathrooms brought radical changes in residential architecture and collective buildings. The prominence of hydraulic installations was unprecedented in the history of architecture (e.g., the Smithsons’ sinks at the Hunstanton school as a radical modern gesture), as well as new large-scale urban and regional infrastructure.
Modern hygiene developed in parallel and often inseparable from the use of water within the new metropolitan phenomenon of mass leisure. Since the late nineteenth century, the state’s concern for public health coupled with the need to provide recreational infrastructure – addressing the masses for the first time in history – gave rise to new connections between water, architecture, and the city. Swimming pools, public baths, gyms, recreational ponds in urban parks, water sports infrastructure, and water springs were given a leading role in contemporary architecture, often linked to landscape contemplation.
The transformation of the water spring is one of the many intertwined stories in the contemporary use of water. The modern spa (acronym of the Latin term salus per aquam) emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a very particular building type, which addressed both health and the social demands of the elite (as mentioned by Guy de Maupassant in his great novel Mont-Oriol). The architecture of these buildings was often neo-Islamic, evoking the oriental voluptuousness of the hammam. However, the current decline of the thermal bath has instigated masterpieces of contemporary architecture, such as Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals.
Water, bioclimatic design, and sustainability
Water has a leading role in the human-built space, not only as an integral part of the anthropic space but also as an essential element for its construction and maintenance. It is regularly used at different scales in the various stages of the construction process. Once used in the Roman mining method montium ruin, today water is employed in soil compaction processes, the appropriate curing of concrete structures, wetting, cooling, and heating installations, and it is stored, distributed, and used in sanitation. At the microscopic level, it intervenes in the manufacturing of construction materials. It has been indispensable for the adobe and brick constructions of the first urban civilisations, for concrete manufacturing since Roman times and as an agent in many contemporary binding materials.
In a world threatened by climate change and the depletion of natural resources, the omnipresence of water in the built space has a pivotal role in designing energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable systems. At a regional and urban scale, it is necessary to adjust and optimise its use to achieve adequate human space resilience. All this requires the implementation of different strategies, such as water harvesting (e.g., groundwater usage and subsequent aquifer recharge, or seawater desalination), and the implementation of saving policies for reduced consumption (e.g., wastewater treatment and reuse in cities) or the use of sustainable urban drainage systems.
In addition to its instrumental benefits in energy production, the potential of water can be exploited as a passive element within bioclimatic architecture to lower consumption and reduce the carbon footprint. Examples of this are recent roof ponds and solar thermosiphons (based on thermal inertia and specific heat), as well as traditional spatial design that uses water within indoor environments in dry and hot climates for cooling and moisturising.
Goal 6 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is Clean Water and Sanitation. It aims to achieve both universal and equitable access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation and hygiene services, and to improve overall water quality. Currently, more than a third of the world’s population lives in water-scarce areas and it is estimated that by 2030 seven hundred million people will be forced to move for this reason. In addition, poor management of human waste, and wastewater from industrial and agricultural practices lead to a progressive increase in pollution. All this has significant economic and environmental, as well as social and humanitarian effects, which must be solved. These challenges must be addressed from regional and urban planning and architectural design, especially by the new generations who can lay the foundations for a new and adjusted stage in the evolution of the complex relationship between water and built space.
