Waterpod 

The Waterpod™ is a floating, sculptural, eco-habitat designed for the rising tides. It will depart in May 2009, explore the waters of New York Harbor, docking at several Manhattan piers on the Hudson River , and visiting all 5 boroughs.

The Waterpod demonstrates future pathways for water-based innovations. As a sustainable, navigable living space, the Waterpod showcases the critical importance of the environment and art, serving as a model for new living, d.i.y. technologies, art, and dialog. It illustrates positive interactions between communities: private and corporate; artistic and social; aquatic and terrestrial while exploring the cultural richness of New York's five boroughs and beyond. The Waterpod embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration.

With this project, we hope to encourage growth and progress as we visualize the future.
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Through its dilatory, watery peregrinations, the Waterpod intends to prepare, inform, inspire, provoke, and fortify humanity for tomorrow's exterior explorations.

A FLOATING WORLD

The Waterpod demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based communities, docked and roaming.

It embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. It intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and future living spaces.

In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis.

As a malleable and autonomous space, the Waterpod is built on a model comprised of multiple collaborations. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities; an archipelagos that has the ability to mutate with the tides.

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.

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.

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, marking a new nomadism.

The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.

With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize the future fifty to one hundred years from now.

Collaborators: Mary Mattingly / Mira Hunter / Cory Mervis / Eve Tremblay / John McGarvey / Derek Hunter