The Future Of Dwelling: Rocking The Houseboat

As the sea level rises, humanity will need to become more comfortable with the idea of living on water. And even though living on water is nothing new from a vernacular perspective, in this paper, we will discuss the evolution of water dwelling ideas, into a modern floating housing typology. This typology explores design ideas around the systemic interdependence of three concepts: live, work and farm. Dwelling in general needs to address much more than just the requirements needed in a place for living, after the pandemic (COVID-19), the circumstances have proven that working from home is not only possible but a good alternative, which implies that a dwelling will have to also house space for small industry or professional services. In a similar way, the next generation of dwelling will reclaim certain elements of farming and resettle them in the city. Produce will be grown in-house through hydroponics or other high-tech irrigation systems designed to help the household cope with the cost of living. Residential design needs to get to a point where functional sustainability becomes a habitual part of the design process. Forcing smart technologies to be embedded in a systemic way in dwellings designed for adaptability and versatility. These new dwelling typologies will need to be designed for production and filtration of water, generation of energy, urban farming and the capacity to sustain a work environment. The idea is to move to a level of self-sufficiency that will be especially necessary in communities in areas where the rise in sea levels and the climate change crisis produce seasonal or permanent flooding. In these instances, the dwelling will need to float allowing for entire communities to adapt to the change preventing Immigration, which would generate unwanted pressure in resources and infrastructure of adjacent areas. When neighbourhoods designed to float adapt to the environmental changes around them, living on water as independent floating communities existing in a sustainable symbiosis between the built and natural environments, we would not only have changed our conception of dwelling, but also the idea of city. This resultant system that we will call third nature will manifest as an urban proposal where sustainable design moves from the microto macro-scales: house to block to city, developing a systemic interdependency between the inhabitants and their surroundings as they participate in the development of a new type of environment for living. In this paper, we will explore through a journey from the vernacular to the modern, a series of philosophical and ethical ideas that will manifest on the design of a floating environment created to better the quality of life of its users and to lessen the burden that overpopulation is placing in cities, by creating a hybrid space for dwelling, farming and working.