Inhabitat

Wow, if only there was some howard hughes-esque billionaire who was passionate and reckless enough with their money to invest in something like this, a true legacy.

Fantastic. I would love to assist the Architects who conceive such amazing ideas.

Jesseneale1;
Wow, if only there was some howard hughes-esque billionaire who was passionate and reckless enough with their money to invest in something like this, a true legacy

I think Maianga is right, there are billionaires in Dubai that would probably build a smaller scale version of this. Unfortunately no one in the west would.

This project is eerily similar to BIG/PLOT’s floating city, not just in concept but in final form and rendering.

The original can be seen here:
http://www.big.dk/projects/mer/mer.html

I only got one word for this; Wow!

The architect was really thinking about everything when he designed this :)
The round windows were a bit wierd though :p

The reality is that future climate change refugees will be facing starvation, disease, and resource conflict. They won’t be living in lovely floating cities. Real solutions are needed, not fantasy.

It looks nice till the wind picks-up and three sisters waves occur.

This appears to be a big waste of resources, especially to make it hurricane or typhoon-proof, and about as financially practical as living on the moon, relative to solid ground on the earth.
Why not just not create those 50,000 people who need a place to live? When the environmental movement started, ZPG (zero population growth) was the reigning mantra. With a projected total world population of 10 billion people, almost double what exists now, the fundamental issue facing the health of our planet is human overpopulation. It’s not a sexy subject, and almost a taboo subject, but it’s the bottom line. Humans are no different than all the other “invasive” species we fret about. If anyone has ever raised an animal, fish, reptile, etc., for any length of time, it quickly becomes apparent what happens when there are too many animals inhabiting the space. Filth. I wonder and doubt that people can overcome or mitigate through technology the exponential harms to the environment that we have been creating since the industrial revolution. The ultimate of hubris.
As a post above said, we will have to deal with all the turf and water wars that will first arise, before indulging in such Spielberg fantasies as floating cities.

All things are new again. Upon seeing the Lilypad I was taken back in time to our own original design for a floating city. In 1971 as part of a 4th year architecture design team at Cal Poly, SLO, CA we were asked to design a vacation resort of the future. A quote by the philosopher Seneca, \”Beyond all things is the sea\” inspired us to create a floating \”Sea City\”. A six sided mother ship was the central core of each City and was surrounded and attached to six sided housing modules. The City could grow or shrink as the housing units would move from area to area to always be in the best climate for a vacation. The core was connected to land with an underwater umbilical cord for required services. The small recreational boats were contained within a dock at sea level, and the entire City could be raised to buffer against rough seas. We had even envisioned that libraries would not be needed on board, since all books would be available on hand held computer screens. 37 years later some things have happened, but the technology to make this Sea City work is still a long way off. It reminds me of architect Paolo Soleri\’s design to stick a city in almost anything, a dam, or a bridge. It is much easier to sketch and verbalize than to actually build. But a vision for the future is what gives life promise. B

Combine this idea with those of the late great Wolf Hilbertz and his Sea-cretion technic and you
can build this for pennies with chickenwire and a few solar panels, don’t need no billion dollar sponsor.

This is amazing. If someone built this it would definitely be enough to make me wish I was a refugee. Of course the real things never look as good as the blue print pictures. =)

I can only support frances’comment. While it can certainly be fun for the designer to indulge in Modernist escapism, I can see no benefit for the wider community in this design. If the Great Ideas about zero emission are any good then it would certainly be commendable to think about ways to make them available to an as large number of people as possible. However it seems to fall to Dubai billionaires to indulge in zero-emission living – as if they were interested. And unfortunately Dubai billionaires do not constitute a sufficient percantage of the world’s population to make an impact against global warming. And even for them, why float about in the sea? Just for fun of course. If you can make urban life independent of agricultural land resources, you would not have a shortage of space on land. And yes so much more, what about global warming causing the seas to atrophy, how are the inhabitants going to cope with cyanide-generating algae all around them. It can make one angry to witness these proposals implying that we would just be able to withdraw from the problems.

This is so amazing. If you need someone to try it ou and live on it to try it out, sign me up. I’ll be a ginnea pig.

Beautiful! I’m imagining however that it will be grossly populated by exiled infamous corp execs on the run from abandoned land-bound laborers and stakeholders.

hmmm …. this one came first

but all credit to pixelab who have done an astounding job on the copy!!

how do we get a car on this island