RESTORING
ENRICHING
PROMOTING
NATURE
The hexagon buoys’ casings. Inside of them, the floating chambers encircle the drum shells of the Flyers and Walkways telescopic supporting pillars.
• Conceptual drawing of biogenerative marine topographies for "Eleos"
Integrating the philosophy of regenerative design reflects into what happens above water as well as underwater. A core goal of the community is to provide as much foodstuffs as possible locally. This means using sections of the Flyer cores for vertical farming and even reserving plots on the Macrostructure’s green roof for seasonal farming, crofting and husbandry. The way in which the Macrostructure is designed also allows for a later increase of its surface by assimilating further structural units (in the case of the prototype – hexagons floats), with specialized functions such as husbandry and vertical farming, wind and solar farms, fisheries and algal biofuel ponds, industrial parks, etc.
On the other hand there is a great opportunity just under the floating city, that goes beyond landscaping the seabed for esthetic gratification. From the water mirror vertical farming may go up, as well as down. Using Hugo Hilbertz’s (Autopia Ampere’s) mineral accretion ground work, metal meshes electrified by the Islet’s wind and solar farms stretch down to the sea bed, over time accumulating calcium carbonate, thus shaping the underwater framework into plateaus where all manner of kelp beds, algae pools, fishing grounds and mollusk farms will be cultivated by the Islanders. And stretching from one Islet to the next, coral waterways will show the way to sailboats and darting minisubs. Furthermore, discarded biomass from all the farming and aquaculture along with the accreted ampere limestone will in some way or another find a place as building materials.
Environmental architecture: regenerative design and marine biotope accretion
Regenerative Design, also known as Cradle to Cradle Design, is a process-oriented design theory that involves processes which restore, renew or revitalize their own sources of energy and materials, creating sustainable systems that integrate the needs of society with the wellbeing of nature. What sets it apart from sustainable design is one key point: under the term sustainable, lost ecological systems are not returned to existence. As part of regenerative design though, those lost systems will ultimately “regenerate” back into existence. And while in field use the word “sustainable” is meant to equate “self-sustaining”, in actuality the general understanding remains that of something “built to last”, “capable to endure”. Together the “re” and “generate” roots mean “the capacity to bring into existence again”. Under this understanding, an item or system that is regenerative has the capacity to bring itself into existence again
Regenerative Design, also known as Cradle to Cradle Design, is a process-oriented design theory that involves processes which restore, renew or revitalize their own sources of energy and materials, creating sustainable systems that integrate the needs of society with the wellbeing of nature. What sets it apart from sustainable design is one key point: under the term sustainable, lost ecological systems are not returned to existence. As part of regenerative design though, those lost systems will ultimately “regenerate” back into existence. And while in field use the word “sustainable” is meant to equate “self-sustaining”, in actuality the general understanding remains that of something “built to last”, “capable to endure”. Together the “re” and “generate” roots mean “the capacity to bring into existence again”. Under this understanding, an item or system that is regenerative has the capacity to bring itself into existence again
