River's Edge

Down in Texas they haven't had much rain in months and everything is drying up.  Here in St. Louis, the draught seems to be coming to town too, but it's different.  We are a confluence of two great and two pretty good rivers (OK, the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Meramec), and there is plenty of water underground in Missouri.  So unless there is some kind of catastrophe, we will go on pulling water from our rivers and keeping our vegetation alive.

That's one way the rivers prop us up, and there are others.  You can drink the stuff, based on treatment systems that have been around for 100 years.  You can track your culture - and previous cultures, like Cahokia - that expanded and contracted with the rivers.  They flood, but for the most part the floods come slowly and they always recede.

What surprises me a little is that we don't seem to have a distinguished architecture built around this.  There are houses at the rivers' edges that anticipate the floods, but they usually look impoverished, or at least unlovely.

(A photo taken for its irony.  I'm sure there are way better illustrations of the point.)

I don't see why there can't be a wonderful river's edge architecture.  It seems perfect, first of all, for treehouses - the real deal, houses in trees.  Or wonderful cantilevered things with giant balconies.  Or how about houseboats, moored but ready to float -  hearkening back to riverboats.

Well, maybe not.

Could be a class thing, or an economic thing.  River people are pretty down-market.  I think they are proud of that, but they sure don't seem to be celebrating their lifestyles in their structures.