CH2O

Monday, October 19, 2009  |  Permalink

(New Switzerland. All images by Waterproof.)

The Maldives' climate change media event reminded us of an exhibition mounted by a group of architects, designers and artists for EXPO.02 in Switzerland. Working under the collective name Waterproof, they imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.


(Goodbye, glaciers! Hello, oceans!)

Waterproof's imaginative, sometimes hilarious, but always thought provoking images reflect something we've always been interested in: how countries might adapt to a climate changed world.

If in the unlikely event that everyone becomes carbon negative, not just carbon neutral, tomorrow, climate change isn't likely to be reversed anytime soon. Before whatever historical climatic condition that was codified as the international goal is reached, countries will experience water and food shortages, hotter and wetter weather, habitat lost, perhaps even extinction. During this interim, how will countries cope logistically? They will be geographically transformed, but will they also (intentionally) mutate culturally, even biologically?


(Switzerland on stilts.)


(Switzerland not on stilts.)


(Fjords as the new national — i.e., sacred — landscape.)


(Hawaiiana as the new traditional costume.)


(From premier winter destination to the new Riviera. The rich and powerful will arrive at Davos for the World Economic Forum not in chartered jets and snowmobiles but in swanky yachts loaned to easily bribed world leaders by shipping oligarchs.)


(A new breed of mountain dogs for sea-level domesticity. Where's Flipper?)


(With access to new local ingredients, a new national cuisine, or at least new dietary practices, develops.)


(New mountain hamlets. Instead of against ice avalanches, the landscape will be augmented to protect people from tsunamis.)


(The elite Swiss Navy SEALs.)


(Eternally landlocked, Switzerland emerges as a new naval superpower. Everyone will turn to them to patrol shipping lanes in pirate-infested seas, that is, if there is still a global trade to speak of when much of the world has presumably drowned.)


(Swiss engineering, which once conquered voids and perforated mountains, is retasked to traverse maritime abysses.)


(Just as soon as the flood arrives, land reclamation begins. Switzerland is the new Netherlands.)


(The national sport, Schwingen, on a sandy patch of an actual beach.)


(Pasty white Swiss permanently tanned.)


(New Canton heraldry with oceanic iconography.)


(Surfing in the shadow of the Matterhorn. Best known for tennis in the singular figure of Roger Federer, Olympic swimming becomes a national obsession.)

Waterproof were Alexandre Bettler, Sara Bochicchio, Manuel Borruat, Cédric Decroux, Eric Emery, Yves Fidalgo, Axel Jaccard, Sébastien Rappaz and Frédéric Seydoux.

Labels: climate change