• Updated visualisation of "Eleos", series 2024
SITE SELECTION, WHERE ON WATER: the shore versus the open sea
I can hardly imagine another landscape allowing such creative freedom as the expansive mirror of the sea. The benefits to founding the first-of-its-kind floating metropolis out on the water by the shore greatly outnumber the challenges.
The present paper argues that the surest means to bringing the project to fruition, considering its scale and difficulty, may be not simply to convince of its plausibility and benefits, but to prove its indispensability.
I can hardly imagine another landscape allowing such creative freedom as the expansive mirror of the sea. The benefits to founding the first-of-its-kind floating metropolis out on the water by the shore greatly outnumber the challenges.
The present paper argues that the surest means to bringing the project to fruition, considering its scale and difficulty, may be not simply to convince of its plausibility and benefits, but to prove its indispensability.
An entity sufficiently powerful to trigger and later nurture the nascent floating urban typology is the existing coastal Metropolis: an entity in actual critical need of such a massive undertaking, as a means for its further proliferation if not survival. Ever expanding beyond its means, the established coastal city is ever fumbling for balance and the means to safeguard its integrity and prosperity. Its voracious appetite for resources may be channeled into sustainable expation over sea instead of continued expansion over land at the cost of global non-renewable resources. The prize of this approach is the opportunity of applying only mostly the best of ourselves into building these brand new cities.
Why not far out on the unregulated open sea instead of by the shore? It is difficult to argue for regular people numbering in tens and hundreds of thousands to volunteer in a rickety socio-political experiment in the middle of some ocean, given the unforgiving reputations of the sea and seafaring sovereign nations. The first Floating City by the shore must succeed, so that others may follow in order to de-sress the land, restore natural overland habitats and repair and expand the marine ones.
