Water Waits For No One
My thesis explores how architecture can challenge political procrastination and provoke action in the face of climate collapse—particularly the threat of flooding along the Humber Estuary. With Hull projected to be underwater by 2050, the project questions architecture’s role not just in adapting to this future, but in resisting the delays that led us here.
The project manifests as a staged Festival of Protest, set across three sites in the city. Each acts as a spatial chapter in a cycle of inaction: from delayed decisions, to community survival, to the eventual normalisation of disaster. Using ephemeral construction methods, salt-based materials, and performative rituals, the project becomes a living protest—evolving annually as parts of the architecture erode, submerge, or collapse, physically marking time and inaction.
The architecture is participatory and symbolic. Inflatable elements, DIY protest kits, and salt-crystal walls invite people to build, inhabit, and protest together. Rather than proposing permanent solutions, the project speculates on temporary architectures of dissent, drawing attention to the slow violence of climate inaction. Water is not only context but medium—used to erode, activate, and reveal architectural layers over time.
Materially, the work experiments with salt, plywood, mesh, and water pipes, creating structures that react to their environment. These tectonic assemblies serve as educational, performative, and political devices—each designed to decay, provoke, and be remade.
Ultimately, this project argues for architecture that doesn't wait. By embedding protest into construction, it repositions architecture as a civic tool—one that makes visible the invisible delays shaping our future and empowers people to reclaim space, voice, and agency in a submerged world.
