Amphibious city design by Vincent Callebaut
Vincent Callebaut’s architectural exercise is an impressive floating city for a population of 50,000 inhabitants. The idea is that in a future of rising sea levels and natural catastrophic events provoked by climate change, these islands will be refugees for the few lucky thousands.
Green walls, solar panels, massive landscaped areas and energy saving take center stage to arrive at a theoretically self-sufficient community. It’s all so impressive, but is it feasible? At the moment definitely not. The steel superstructure to support such a huge artificial island doesn’t exist and the energy amounts to build such a humongous thing defy the eco-logic behind its existence.
Of course a design exercise is meant to provide food for thought. On the more pedestrian side of life, it is a bit early to talk about eco-refugees, there is still a lot we can and ought to do before rushing onto floating arks. Given that not all of us live exactly where the waves break, I suppose designing and proving that a creation of similar size could achieve sulf-sufficiency on firm ground would be a more logical step.
[Freshome]
