UC Students Win Top Honors in International Underwater Architecture Contest

University of Cincinnati architecture and interior design students recently led the world in an innovative 21st century competition – a global contest to design forward-looking underwater architecture.

Just announced as the winners in France’s Archipelaego Competition were UC students

• Sarosh Ali
• Jason Rohal
• Heather Vorst

The three won the international competition, which was open to both architecture students and professional architects around the world in a contest “to encourage the public to preserve the oceans” by increasing public awareness of the need for their better management.

For their efforts, the three students – all from UC’s nationally Top Ten-ranked architecture and interior design programs housed within the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning – will jointly receive the Jacques Rougerie Architecture of the Sea Award and share a cash prize of about $2,000. (The award is named for French architect Jacques Rougerie who specializes in designs sited in unusual spaces, like underwater. For instance, he has created designs for a proposed project that would be the world's first underwater museum to be located off the coast of Egypt.)

Underwater construction efforts at the bottom of UC’s Olympic-sized lap pool
When designing UC's winning competition entry in spring 2008, team member Jason Rohal, 21, of Cleveland, was one of a handful of UC students who literally immersed himself in the design process – by participating in underwater design and construction exercises at the bottom of UC’s Olympic-sized pool as part of an Extreme Environments design class.

Rohal credits that hands-on, underwater experience for improving the group’s design for an eco-hotel/research center to be located on the Belize Barrier Reef, the second largest reef in the world. He said, “We most certainly couldn’t have come to such obviously good design decisions without that actual underwater experience. The scuba-diving exercises did inform our design. We also talked with researchers like UC surgeon Tim Broderick who have been part of NASA experiments where professionals work in a weightless atmosphere.”

The UC students’ actual underwater design experiments led to a number of overall and quite specific design decisions for Ali, Rohal and Vorst. These include

• A “Swiss cheese” or skinned frame upon which their eco-hotel/research center rests. The gaps or holes in that frame provide places for divers to rest or pull themselves along because users of extreme-environment shelters will need ways to conserve physical energy. Rohal stated, “We all got very tired very quickly when working underwater. So, we incorporated resting places and features to allow divers to pull themselves along into our design.”

• Special storage needs. “We couldn’t really believe all the equipment we had to put on for scuba diving and all the specialized gear we could have used,” said Rohal. That meant that any design had to incorporate easily accessible and plentiful storage.

• Suitable materials both inside and out. All materials inside the eco-hotel/research center need to be moisture resistant/slip resistant. The glass or polymer used to create the structures façade must be resistant to organisms that typically grow on objects underwater.

• Tidal energy is harnessed to supply the center electrical energy needs.

If the idea of underwater architecture seems too futuristic – like Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” consider that underwater hotels and research structures already exist.

The UC students’ designs simply take the concept one step further, creating an eco-hotel and research center combined wherein the proceeds from eco-tourism would fund needed research. For instance, in the case of this winning design in the Archipelaego Competition, the students deliberately chose to site their project along Belize’s Barrier Reef because greater research is needed there. It’s a reef that is still largely unexplored. Ten years ago, 90 percent of the species on that reef were still unidentified.

For Rohal and his partners, the real payoff for their project would come if eco-tourism and research were to grow in that area. Said Rohal, “If someone were to ever develop a project based on our work, that would be amazing, absolutely great. We deliberately made it development worthy. It’s a modular design that could be built above water but then sunk and assembled below water. That would lessen the intensity of the effort and the expense – which is something that we learned in our own hands-on underwater construction exercises at UC. It’s much easier to build the requisite parts above water and then assemble completed pieces in place below the surface.”

The three UC students learned a number of lessons from their project, completed in a spring quarter 2008 Extreme Environments course led by Brian Davies, associate professor of architecture.

Said Vorst, “The most important thing I learned is to always keep in mind: Challenge is a positive, not a burden.”

The project and the competition also provided her with the inspiration to consider incorporating water into building designs as a functional element to serve people. She explained, “Since working on this project, I’ve thought about incorporating water into buildings as a means of helping those who are physically challenged and have special needs. Many times, those with physical challenges actually have greater mobility and freedom when in the water. So, how can we incorporate water into buildings in a way that might help the physically challenged?”

For Ali, the project and class were “a lot of fun. The challenge of designing for an underwater environment meant we couldn’t fall back on preconceived assumptions. We were pioneers, just taking carefully researched guesses, but there wasn’t a whole lot of existing built structures to guide us.”

• See a video of UC architecture and interior design students practicing an underwater building exercise.

• Read more on the top-ten rankings of UC’s interior design and architecture programs.

• Apply to UC’s undergraduate interior design and architecture programs.