Caissons on the Lower Dnipro River: Monolithic Foundations for Post-Conflict and Disaster Recovery

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Caissons on the Lower Dnipro River: Monolithic Foundations for Post-Conflict and Disaster Recovery

Master’s Degree Project 2025

Along the Lower Dnipro, where floodplains re-emerge from the ruins of the Kakhovka dam, the caisson is reimagined as an architectural typology. Cast from the rubble of war, it floats and stands in this embattled post-industrial waterscape, carrying memory within its hollow core. Harbors, crossings, and a memorial unfold as acts of renewal, binding water, history, and loss into a living architecture. Here, infrastructure becomes testimony, and visions of recovery begin even while the conflict endures.

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Caissons - prefabricated concrete boxes with a closed bottom and an open top - are monumental geotechnical floating units of space. Deployed along Ukraine’s embattled Dnipro River, these volumes, whether floating or fixed, serve both infrastructural and architectural roles in Lower Dnipro’s post-conflict recovery.

This thesis proposes the caisson as both a typological strategy and a symbolic actor that navigates across multiple sites and provides solutions for the technological needs of the people inhabiting Southern Ukraine.

The caisson is envisioned as a multifaceted, meaningful structure: a support, a void, a monument, and a beacon of recovery and reconstruction. Through a series of site-specific interventions, this thesis explores architecture that reflects the riverscape while embodying memory, displacement, and geopolitical instability.

The design investigation is rendered in detail at the Kodak Quarry in the Dnipro Oblast’, where a flooded quarry- created by the destruction of two-thirds of a historic fortress- becomes the site for a floating monument caisson. Suspended within this contested terrain, the caisson serves as a vessel for reflection, remembrance, and reoccupation.