Floating Sustainable Ocean Cities
Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut has designed a floating city with the noble goal of housing displaced peoples who’s homelands have been destroyed.
The Lilypad Project may be one of the most complex and forward-thinking green design projects ever conceived. Each individual ‘pad’ is structured to be a self-sustaining city that can travel the world’s oceans and rescue refugees due to disasters and rising sea levels.
They would be powered by a combination of thermal, tidal, solar and wind energy and each would have a huge capacity – housing up to a half-million people a piece. The three-dimensionally complex design creates hills and valleys as well as recreational, commercial and residential spaces, giving them an organic complexity that makes them somehow believable as places where humans could live out entire lifetimes.
Based on the design of a lilypad, they could be used as a permanent refuge for those whose homes have been covered in water. Major cities including London, New York and Tokyo are seen as being at huge risk from oceans which could rise by as much as 3ft by the end of this century.
The ‘Lilypad City‘ would float around the world as an independent and fully self-sustainable home. With a lake at its centre to collect and purify rainwater, it would be accessed by three separate marinas and feature artificial mountains to offer the inhabitants a change of scenery from the seascape.
Source: Mail Online
This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Architecture, Engineering, Green Designs, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.