A FLOATING WORLD.

EXPANDING THE LAND.

This project demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, water-based communities, docked and roaming. The Waterpod embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. As a malleable space, the Waterpod is built on a model comprised of multiple collaborations. The Waterpod codifies the language of mobility in contemporary architecture and historicizes the notion of the permanent structure, simultaneously serving as composition, transportation, island, and residence. Navigating on New York’s creeks, estuaries, harbors, kills, bays, and rivers, the Waterpod is able to dock temporarily in any of these spaces while constantly representing its potential to enter international pelagic waters, and thus assume the status of a contained Micronation. The Waterpod is the island that came and went, it is New York’s eighth island that exists for the summer, ephemeral like the earth itself.

As with all art forms, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future. The Waterpod is heavily networked with communications technology, exemplifying a trend towards immateriality, an objectless but continuously recorded space. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities that mutate with the tides. It responds to solar, lunar, and stellar radiation, as well as to tidal flow, wind, temperature, precipitation, resources, and geographies. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity.

Taking a cue from modern-day gift economies and in preparation for the coming world where people are going to need to rely more on themselves and their communities, the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis. With no fixed abode, humans will become acquainted with a nomadic way of life in an artificial, wholly constructed environment. We will depend as little as possible on material contingency with this found freedom of creation. Based on an economy of movement, this structure is adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment. It gives shape to the communities of the future. The Waterpod marks the dawn of a further Nomadism.