The future of ecological water landscape. Adapting the existing to sea level rise.

Climate change is producing a radical mutation in the world of design, inviting designers to change their attitude from designers of the present to facilitators of the future, placing them before the challenge of planning the unexpected of a territorial structure that we know will change drastically, but in ways not actually foreseeable. The following research focuses on this change of attitude, probing the attention on the issue of sea level rise through a compositional and design exploration. If technical solutions such as dams and resistant waterfront are activated on one side, on the other it is necessary to identify coexistence strategies with the variation of the sea, especially for those peripheral areas where it is not possible to foresee heavy infrastructure investments. The challenge is to imagine new aquatic landscapes of the future, to create both the basis for dialogue and a reference tool for change. For this purpose, the research started by wondering what the constitution of the current landscape is, how it can be defined and what the bases are for an imaginary of future water landscapes. The proposed solution is that of exploration through the representation of a compositional catalog of the water space, which allows to sample the current elements of which the territory is composed, and then, through the instruments of drawing and composition, probing its evolution according to the scenario of sea level rise. The result is therefore that of a large table of elements that speaks of the territory and its transformation, of the current relationship between architecture and water and of what could come, an orientation abacus for the composition of the future water landscape.