Patrick F. Spear » Posts

A tweet from my sister the other day made me realize just how many floating city-type projects we’ve been seeing in the last little while. With space exploration having taken very small baby steps in the past few decades, these projects seem to be fulfilling people’s desire to escape the Terran earth. They range from small scale, immediately-feasible structures right up to large scale visions of a sustainable life adrift.

On the small scale, there’s the recent Citadel, soon to be built by Koen Olthuis in the Netherlands. The 60 apartments are part of a larger on-water project that is made to address the rising Dutch coastlines. Though the apartments floating on top of the waters, the remain physically connected with the mainland. The buildings promise to consume 25% less energy thanks to reduced needs for cooling.

Morris Architects takes the next step up by abandoning the shore entirely. They propose to make use of 4000 oil rigs would by converting them into luxury hotels that rest out on the blue sea.

The Swimming City, by Andras Gyorfi, is a similar project- though it’s larger (as it’s not restricted to the size of an oil rig) and distinctly more playful.

On the large scale, there’s Vincent Callebaut’s magnificent Lilypad. These vegetation-covered, solar powered, zero emissions, free-floating islands would provide home, work and play for 50,000 people/archipleago.

The Lilypad itself appears to take great influence from BIG’s Mer project:

And National Geographic outlines a series of other similar projects in this article. So, the impact these projects have on the imagination is clear.

A number of factors have driven these watery visions to relevance and popularity. The green influence is obvious- any floating form of habitation would help reduce the damaging sprawl of typical urbanism. As well, the fixed-size, self-contained nature of each unit is a good defense against the looming threat of overpopulation, and living adrift would render inhabitants immune to rising coastlines. All of these things are pressing, hot-button topics.

But personally, what I find hilarious is how these projects are deemed as “green”, because of their goals of self reliance and zero ecological impact- and I laugh because those very same properties essentially make the projects giant disaster pods. Sure, any zero-impact project seeks to grant us a level of isolation from the environment so that we may stop having a negative effect on it- but if you cut ties to land entirely and let structure become nomadic, then there is no need for the environment at all. Just give us our world of water, keep the UV levels reasonable and make sure at least some algae survive- and the rest won’t matter. We’ll be fine.

Perhaps one of the reasons these projects are inspiring to us is that, deep down, they illustrate the continuity of our current lifestyle in the future, even if we’ve dealt a fatal blow to environment in the present?