You guys, I’m freaking out about how cool these things could be. A recent skyscraper concept competition yielded some really interesting designs, among them this utterly amazing concept, which they inexplicably call a “water-scraper” instead of the decidedly more euphonious “seascraper,” as I have dubbed it. Think of it: a partially self-contained structure floating in calm seas, growing food, harvesting wave energy, and providing a home for… well, not that many people, but more than a few.
Wrap your mind around it! It’s glorious! It’s beautiful! It’s quite possibly green! And once you got your sea-legs, it’d be just like living in any other arcology. Oh, there aren’t any yet? Well maybe that’s because they didn’t think to build them at sea!
Clearly these are idealized, and likely fail to account for a number of factors like storage space for food and products, waste management, and that sort of thing, but I see no reason why there shouldn’t be a cluster of these things (as they indeed suggest), each one specializing in this or that. Really at this point I’m just laying the foundation for the sci-fi novella I’m going to have to write on account of all the imagineering going on in my head following this post.
Want so bad.
[via Inhabitat]
That is an awesome idea! I’m ready to move in. Where can i sign a lease?
One other thing that has to be considered: Internal pressure has to be kept equal to external pressure, or the structure has to be made incredibly beefy to compensate. That means if your living quarters are at a depth of, say, 30 meters, air pressure will be 4 atmospheres absolute (or ATA) which is 216.09 PSI or 4.053 bar.
Yeah, I imagine they’d have to have a series of airlocks or something to get to the lower areas.
The atmospheric pressure difference wouldn’t be acceptable, I expect. I’m not how much compressed air we can breathe for long periods of time. They’d probably just make the structure really strong. That’s what it looks like, anyway.
It probably would, but you would have a problem if you went too fast to the surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_sickness
I say we call the first one Rapture.
And move in some little sisters?
Would you kindly not make obvious references to video games?
heh.
Hear Hear for the rapture idea. That’s the first thing I thought of too.
Why are there old-timey coffins floating around the roots?
I think that’s the “harvesting wave energy” from the post… I’m not really sure how that works though.
Ben, check this out for the “harvesting wave energy” idea:
http://www.biopowersystems.com/
Looks like the digger from The Matrix.
Careful what you wish for….
Did you stop to think about the damage that storms could do to these structures? If a heavy storm hits these “seascrapers”, the swaying of the structure would certainly cause destruction within people’s living areas, throwing the inhabitants and any objects not secured around the cabins. I’m sure this would not bode well for anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves inside during said storm…
You have to realize that things like this (or an equivalence) happens on land a lot. They are called earthquakes. I’m pretty sure we still have lots of buildings standing from them, and I bet we can apply similar technology to these water-scrapers. Especially if we manage to make a pressure thing that changes pressures for the scraper, then you could always submerse it when a storm is coming. That way you could avoid the surface waves and deal with the underwater ones easier.
Large waves would probably just make them bob up and down, and the weight of the thing might just keep it upright. That being said, storms wouldn’t be fun. I can’t imagine these going anywhere stormy, anyway. Who’d buy an apartment under the North Atlantic?
Maybe those floating coffins are for that reason, some sort of extra-seascraper stabilizing device, that sways with the water to keep the main building balanced
i liked the portable instant skyscraper better.
http://www.evolo.us/competition/compress-first-aid-deployable-skyscraper/
And where will our waste be dumped? into the ocean?
You could poo in the same place the fishes do.
It might be cool looking, but this idea is anything but green. Buildings leaving metals and inorganic deposits in the water, displacement of living organisms and a worse carbon footprint, not to mention how much more expensive it would be to make and maintain. in terms of eco-friendliness, deforesting an area would do less damage than this.
Another really interesting thing about the design of these things.. The shape provides for the possibility of almost unlimited expansion. Picture a floating construction platform resting on the surface, wrapped around the structure which would be free floating inside. Additional levels could be build very easily on top of one another, witch would push the rest of the structure deeper until it eventually comes to rest on the sea floor and begins to anchor itself with its own weight into the sediment. The stability of the standing structures could be reinforced by linking multiple structures together at various depths, providing not only a physical structural reinforcement but a pathway for perhaps an underwater transit between the structures. Entire cities could be constructed like this.
it might be a little bit of a problem to move around because the lower you go the higher the pressure increases
The problem with this design is obvious. There’s a reason that 90% of an iceberg is under water. The top of this object is denser than the bottom, it would flip over. Even if the projections at the bottom are weights for ballast it simply doesn’t make sense to waste all that material when you could simply flip the “waterscraper” over and put the bulging part underwater.
Ensure that you are in the open ocean and generate power from deep ocean thermal – probably the largest renewable energy source on earth.