Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG, has designed a hurricane-proof, sustainable, floating city commissioned by Oceanix, and presented to the UN’s Roundtable on Sustainable Floating Cities.
The hexagonal city, aimed to be populated by 10,000 people, has been designed to respond to extreme weather conditions and rising sea levels, which are expected to affect 90 percent of coastal cities by 2050.
The design unveiled yesterday in New York, at the United Nations headquarters, was convened by Oceanix and MIT, alongside the Explorer’s Club and UN-Habitat.
The city is habitable, off-shore, and made up of six clustered islands per village. Each village is 12,500h with 1,650 residents, and then repeated, to form an archipelago home for 10,000 citizens.
Ingels says that the hexagonal shape has the omni-direction of a circle but the modularity and rationality of something man made.
Each of the modules will be built on land, and then toward to sea, with the arrangements of the cities remaining flexible and adaptable to the sea levels.
The islands are further resilient to category-five hurricanes, are sustainable and each island contains 3,000sqm of outdoor agriculture.
The buildings will only be four to seven stories high, to retain each island’s centre of gravity and the buildings will taper out at the top to provide shading and extra roofing for solar panels.
“The idea that we are presenting here is not that we will all be living at sea in the future.”
“This is simply another form of human habitat that can be a seed, that essentially can grow with its success as it turns out to be socially and environmentally desirable.”
Image: oceanix.org
