Banksie Critchley Living on Unstable Ground: Florida's Sinking City

The unstable geology of West-Central Florida frequently gives rise to a phenomenon known as sinkholes. Entire buildings and sections of roads can be swallowed by caving ground, putting lives at risk. The proposed domestic architecture has been designed to survive their occurrence by means of a frictional dissipative steel structure, a sacrificial crumple zone and a tuned liquid damper. These strategies allow desirable living conditions to be created whilst ensuring that the buildings are recoverable and reusable after a sinkhole has occurred and that the inhabitants are kept safe during a fall.

Back to Proving Ground 2013