14 DAY TRIAL // Floating houses have been around for some time now, but they've only been used domestically, to give shelter to a family, in the shallow and safe waters inside harbors or on rivers. Now, a team of artists from New York envisioned and designed a multi-purpose floating island, about 80 by 25 feet in size, which can house a small community and offer it everything needed for a basic existence, including sustenance and electrical energy.
The entire ensemble is to be powered up via wind and solar power, as the future houses, one of which is soon to be made available, will have both wind turbines and solar panels. Its designers say that there will be enough generating capacity on board to cover all the requirements that a small community might have.
Organic crops can also be grown on board, with purified water, which can be drawn from whatever location the large boat is floating on. Its creators envision a nomadic human existence, following sea levels prompted by global warming, where larger versions of their design roam the waters around what's left of the main lands, and communities aggregate in artificial “island chains.”
Hollywood even made a movie on this idea, in which all people roamed the oceans on boats, on account of the fact that there was no more dry land anywhere to be found. Naturally, this cannot happen in real life, but the inhabitants of Indonesia and the Maldive Islands might need these boats rather sooner than later.
The entire structure is built from easy-to-obtain materials, including recycled wood, metal, plastic, fabric and others, all carefully positioned on top of a barge or more. The group behind the Waterpod initiative says that rising sea levels, demographic booms, mass species extinction and resource scarcity may soon render the idea a little less Sci-Fi-sounding, to some people at least.
“Based on an economy of movement, this structure is adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment. It gives shape to the communities of the future, marking a new nomadism. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies. With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize the future fifty to one hundred years from now,” the Waterpod website says.
