Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen

The future will bring devastating heat-waves to Berlin, transforming the city into a burning oven of frying concrete, glas, iron, and asphalt. Here, the Fluss Bad Berlin will give local citizens and visitors the opportunity to cool themselves, thereby mitigating dehydration and sunstrokes, but also to connect and experience on a bodily level to the bio-diversity of the water. In a similar vein Flooded Modernity is a project about how the concept of modernism as an architectural ideology is being washed away by the pervasive climate crisis. An architectural ideology based on fossil fuels for its production of building materials and that spurned a new life style free from the constraints of living close to the earth. Both physically (the modern highrise, the urban city space) and mentally (access to new ways of producing food and new modes of transportation moving with high velocity). Being washed away by rising waterlevels, extreme weather events (hurricanes, floodings, forest fires etc.) the Villa Savoye in Flooded Modernity becomes the victim of its own un-intented side-effect: The climate crisis caused by the excessive consumption of fossil fuels. In this way, the Flooded Modernity relates to the Fluss Bad Berlin project as a before and after: The first representing the ending of modernist ideology, the second, as a new way of co-existence that emerges in the aftermath of modernism: Restoring destroyed natural habitats.