Nakornsawan Superbowl

When it comes to flood…Stop blaming nature… We are the one responsible. Supermachine studio expresses our view towards different future with Superbowl Project.

Design team: Pitupong Chaowakul, Nuntawat Tassanasangsoon, Wattikon Kosolkit, Yupadee Suthvisith, Suchart Ouypornchaisakul, Peechaya Mekasuvanroj, Sthapat Soichampa and Supanna Chanpensri

Thailand is a country at risk of water disaster both draught and flood. Considering its size, the country has a great length of rivers in its water network, specially the central delta. Together with monsoon behavior around the region, Thailand has always been worried about more than less water to use. But delirious sprawl of cities and irresponsible agriculture lands trigger huge imbalance of water flow; insufficient to use during dry season and larger scale flood during rainy season.

New tools
We have to change the way we live with WATER, but more than that, we need far larger and more efficient tools to manage it. We need network of hydraulic device big enough to manage 6,000-10,000 million cubic meter of water that spill out of the rivers every year. “Dams won’t work.. They are managed by politics.” We need new tools that are more human related. The PEOPLE’s tools. The tools that make us more responsible and enable us to live with WATER in the new way all together.

In this proposal, we use Nakornsawan as a location to implement our vision of a giant hydraulic tool in the network. The city is a typical Thailand’s city locating by 2 rivers Ping and Nan. It is usually flood every year but in 2011 the water broke the protecting levee into the city’s center. The whole town of Nakornsawan sank into one meter plus deep water. Our vision is to place the new WATER city in between the two rivers and slowly generate new way of living for Nakornsawan’s people.

Super Bowl; Half a million city

Can we build a massive hydraulic tool that is populatable as an extension of our own city or as a new city itself that all of people in the old city can move into? We propose to build a 20 km. long soil hill in closed shape in between 2 rivers in the East of the city of Nakornsawan. The 150 meter high hill will form a giant water reservoir capable of managing 1,500 million m3 (15% of Bhumipol dam) water. The massive water device will work together with other devices in the network sucking in water from the rivers during monsoon season with 3 giant pumps at 180million m3/day. It will slowly release the water out during dry season keeping the part of the water for 5.85 million m2 agriculture on the inner surface of the reservoir itself.

The outer surface of the bowl will be 40% covered with forest of diverse species. In time, people will populate and urbanize the outer surface of the hill in specific area without harming the fully grown forest. The new city will be thin but continuous one running up and down the surface of the hill allowing the residents to be close to the forest. In our vision, the city is one continuous architecture netting on the giant water device. Its structure will be standing on the soil to strengthen the reservoir as a whole. The new architecture is a vast 28.3 million m2 of mix-use programs (from house to school, cinema, market to government facilities) able to inhabit half a million people, the size of downtown Nakornsawan itself.

Super bowl is a sustainable city of its own as it has power sources from wind turbine, water, hydro-generator, bio-gas and dye-synthesized solar cell installed on all of its surface. Hydroponic planting system is also a built-in element on the whole building skin. People will plant their own consuming vegetable while traditional terrace rice planting will be allowed one crop a year inside the reservoir. In this city, agriculture still exist but in much more responsible and water-efficient way.

Less cars are allowed in the new city, parkings are distributed along the band in nodes. The residents use cars just to travel to other cities. In Project kingkong, they will use 3 lines of in ground Metros. 3 levels of public transportation connect people in the city via 3 interchange stations on each side of the peripheries. On top level, which is the water level, people will travel with boats. Public facilities like parks or sport stadiums are floating elements on water including airport.