Galveston

This is not what you think. Yes, a house on stilts, and yes, to escape floods. But this determined American City went to unbelievable engineering lengths to avoid wet feet. Spooked by a hurricane in 1900 and subsequent floods, the town decided to raise the ground by building a perimeter wall, jacking up all the buildings on stilts, "some as much as seventeen feet", and then proceeding to fill the space within the walls up to the new ground level. Thanks (again) to pruned for the link, and poetry; "Once airborne, a proto-Archigram city in quasi-flight, fill was delivered from a canal that engineers had dug down the middle of the island." More pictures, text,and poetic quotes at pruned. Enjoy.