io9: floating city

An Airborne City Emerges from the Clouds

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:30:00 PST

This floating city is connected to neighboring towns by long, graceful catwalks that seem to reach out of enormous banks of mist on overcast days. Far below, there's a planet-bound industrial complex.

Turkish concept designer Tolgahan Güngör knows how to capture the hulking menace and delicate catwalks of airborne cities. You can see more of this recently-graduated design student's citiscapes - futuristic and otherwise - at his gallery.

[via Concept Ships]

A Floating Ecopolis for the Age of Rising Seas

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:00:00 PDT

When climate change allows oceans to wash over the lands we once called home, you're going to want to immigrate to one of the ecopolises that Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut created for his LILYPAD concept project. Callebaut's cities will float on the oceans swollen by the water from melted icebergs, and produce their own foodstuffs for up to 50,000 people whose homes are stacked inside "hills" where plants are grown.

With a sunken lagoon at its center, the LILYPAD can also produce energy for coastal cities, via a combination of solar, thermal and photovoltaic energies, plus wind and tidal power.

The idea is to create a planned city, with regions devoted to work, shopping, and living. Its shape is based on an Amazonian lilypad, and the central freshwater lagoon acts as ballast, keeping the city stable.

People would live along walkways on those hills, as well as in and below them.

Here is what the hundreds of atolls in the Maldives might look like after climate change submerges most of the land and LILYPADs replace islands.

LILYPAD: A Floating Ecopolis [via Archinect]

Waterworld's Aquatic Dystopia Is A Design Breakthrough

charliejane — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:03:00 PST

Waterworld may have drowned at the box office, but this shot of Kevin Costnersailing into the 1,021 ton floating city shows how breathtakingly original and stark its postapocalyptic vision was. Critics mocked Waterworld's massive $175 million budget, but the truth is, you can see every penny on screen. The makers of Waterworld didn't just show us a model or mock-up of the floating city, they actually built the thing.

The city is donut-shaped, with a ring of floating platforms and towers and massive hand-cranked gates. There's a pervasive myth that this set was destroyed by a tropical storm, but really just a smaller and relatively minor set sank, says Rodger Pardee, who worked on the production. Think of it as a proof of concept: If the world really does turn into an aquatic dystopia, we really might need to build fortified cities on the water.

The set was 365 feet in diameter and weighed about 1000 tons, writes Pardee, who teaches at Loyola Marymount University. It had to be able to rotate so you could shoot from different angles and have the ocean in the background while it was moored in harbor. And then the filmmakers towed it out to sea so they could get wide shots of it under attack. It's an engineering marvel, as long as Kevin Costner doesn't open his mouth.

Waterworld - On Location [Rodger Pardee's Webpage]