Will Cities of the Future Float?

By Wendy Laursen 2015-07-30 20:26:46

A group of biologists, nautical engineers and biologists, backed by Paypal founder Peter Thiel, plan on building a floating city, or “seastead” by 2020.

The Seasteading Institute has run an architectural design contest for its Floating City Project held in partnership with DeltaSync (Netherlands) and judged by an international panel of experts.

The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit think-tank working to provide a machinery of freedom to choose new societies on the blue frontier.

A feasibility report supports the idea that a seastead project is economically feasible, with each platform costing less than $15 million – about the same price as land in London or New York.

Here are the winners of the design competition:

First Place (Two entries tied for first place)

Artisanopolis – submitted by Gabriel Sheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick White (Roark 3D)

First Place (Two entries tied for first place)

Storm Makes Sense of Shelter – submitted by Simon Nummy (Atkins)

Third Place

Prismatic Module Island – submitted by Matias Perez (Architect)

Runner-Up

Expanding Ocean Network – submitted by Min Seok Kim (Seoul National University)

Runner-Up

Metabolic City – submitted by Yin Tao-chiang (TDArch)

Runner-Up

Design of Floating Sea Farms – submitted by Shinji Sato (Nihon University, Faculty of Science and Technology, Oceanic Architecture)

Honorable Mention

This entry did not conform to the contest rules, but the panel of judges agreed the design deserved an honorable mention for its “inventive and speculative spirit…the candidate re-imagined existing technologies to ameliorate our eventual dystopic fate of trash riddled oceans.”

Fantasea – submitted by Derek Ramsey (Cal Poly)