Aimed to support educational, cultural, and artistic projects based on the knowledge of the marine environment and its comprehension, the Jacques Rougerie Foundation recently announced the winners of their 2012 competition. The Foundation’s ambitions are to encourage young architects’, designers’, and engineers’ creativity, by promoting groundbreaking projects that will have an impact on our future lifestyles. The purpose is to imagine unprecedented solutions to current challenges, and to work in compliance with sustainable development. More images and the descriptions of the winning projects after the break.
Award: Architecture, Technology, and Design of the Sea Laureate: Milorad Vidojevic, Milica Pihler, Jelena Pucarevic Project: Lady Landfill Skyscraper
Lady Landfill Skyscraper is thought of as a floating island, whose main goal is removing the non-degradable materials from water. The potential solution is to accumulate and recycle the waste or to use it as an energy source. This skyscraper is a self-sustained structure organized by a functional hierarchy. The multiple recycling phases occur in the same place inside the building. The upper parts of the skyscraper are intended for housing, recreation and other activities that would provide a comfortable stay.
Award: Architecture, Technology, and Design of the Sea Special Mention: Gianluca Santosuosso Project: MORPHotel
This project intends to develop a new luxury hotel concept where users have the opportunity to experience a stay in a floating system moving around the world. The MORPHotels, thanks to their linear structure developed around their “vertebral spine”, are able to adapt their shape according to the weather conditions and the site morphology. It also allows them to have access to places which were still unexplored until now and as a result to develop a new kind of tourism.
Award: Architecture, Technology, and Design of the Sea Coup de Coeur Paul Maymont: Boris Lefevre, Charly Duchosal Project: Plastic Incontinence
Living on the water can be seen as a utopic dream. But considering nowadays’ situation, it could also be seen as an emergency exit. This new territory could welcome a kind of people that keeps on increasing: people who are excluded and disappointed by our society. Some pioneers have already tried the experience, the Ha Long Bay, the Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon River have been for a long time the witnesses of a whole new lifestyle. A tough lifestyle which is also freer, and ruled by the following aspects: “Mobility”, “Flexibility” and “Self-Organization”.
Each sphere can be built independently, and then be (or not) assembled to other spheres. As a result, their shape is designed by their inhabitants’ needs, whereas in our society it is the shape that urges us to new needs. Consequently, the final city model is not fixed but flexible. Anyone can settle in anywhere they want, move around as they are pleased, and nothing is definitive. It is not an object, it has to be considered as a system, it can be corrupted by its users but can also be paired with other types of systems, cities or societies.
Award: Architecture, Technology, and Design of Space Laureate: Teïva Bodereau, Cédric Bodereau Project: S.A.M. (Station Autonome Modulaire)
The project is led by the idea that a space equipment intended to receive men, has to multiply several layers of pressurization to ease the maintenance and the manufacture, as well as offering a better security system and a real impression to live in space. They are not trying to create a hermetic capsule to survive in a hostile environment, but they are looking for a possibility to move, to interact, and to maintain one’s living place. The project S.A.M illustrates this assumption.
Besides, once again in order to promote a perennial human occupation, the project S.A.M is structured with repetitive modules which are geometrically simple. This geometrical and material systematization is used to ease the construction, the maintenance, the fixing and to put it in a nutshell, the technical understanding of the space station. The first layer of pressurization is the core of the station. This regular tetrahedron links up the 4 identical branches that form the main living spaces. The whole facility is then placed in another regular tetrahedron which constitutes an invisible viable cover for human beings in short and middle term. The last layer is composed by mobile deflectors and is not pressurized, but protected by radiations or space fragments.
Award: Architecture, Technology, and Design of Space Coup de Coeur Paul Maymont: Guillaume Prugnier Project: Une Goutte d’Océan
The shape of this travel module is round, soothing and enveloping and is inspired by water’s benefits. The module is thought as a miniature planet with several strata, in which the volume of water will be the central core. The center is occupied by a 10 meter-diameter drop of water, around which is organized the everyday life. The module is model after a cloister with a central fountain, its peripheral alley and a zenithal opening to contemplate the sky.
An imposing peripheral glass roof oriented in the direction of “the departure-site/arrival-site” enables the body to receive other landmarks to understand where we are coming from and where we are heading. Both living places’ radius leads to this external place and enables the passengers to keep track of this horizon. Technical rooms are located in every pole of the module, they are separated by a peripheral hallway which is accessible from an airlock.
Award: Architecture & Sea Level Rise Laureate: Koen Olthuis, Mahtab Akhavan, Laura Weiss, Alexandre Voegelé Project: Thalassophilantropy, App-grading Wet Slums
The project Thalassophilantropy, App-Grading Wet Slums proposes to redo the organization of disadvantaged area of seafront cities, and to offer solutions to sea level rise. The project main idea is based on the creation of constructions and services located on floating systems. The latter take part at the same time in galvanizing the neighborhood and being functional no matter how high the sea level is. On one hand, the neighborhood’s inhabitants can live there safely on every level: energy, food, drinkable water supplies, accommodation. And on the other hand, they have a solution against occasional floods, and at the end the issue of sea level rise.
Jacques Rougerie Foundation financial grant is going to be used for the application of their project in the disadvantaged area of Dhaka seaboard, Bangladesh.
Award: Architecture & Sea Level Rise Special Mention: Vincent Niccoli, Gabriel Bourdet Project: NOÉ
This project is important in a way that it brings forward-looking solutions. This project is also aimed at bringing natural, material and technical solutions. From a natural point of view, “NOE”‘s purpose is to gather the different characteristics of diversification while creating its own biodiversity.
Etymologically speaking, the term of biodiversity alludes to the diversity of the living, that is to say all the processes, the ways of life, or functions that keep an organism alive. The project will enable people to live on this island while slightly increasing the animal and vegetable population. Even if these Islands have an inferior number of species comparing to a surface of the same size on the continents; there is most of the time a superior percentage of animals on these islands. According to this assumption, the project “NOE” has a major goal as from the point of view of being independent from the fossil energy as well as developing its own biodiversity.
Finally on a material level and despite its modernity, the project “NOE 2012” is willing to respect the ancestral traditions of the Maldives’ populations. It is neither about imposing a lifestyle, nor an occidental origin for the constructions to come. It is designed as an island with a farmland, which is also a building land of whose population will keep her freedom to design their accommodations.
Award: Architecture & Sea Level Rise Coup de Coeur Paul Maymont: Marion Ottmann, Margaux Leycuras, Anne-Hina Mallette Project: Hydropolis
This project is aimed at the Egyptian river called the Nile, known for its important rises that have threatened the country for years. This project is located in the Green Valley, which is a fertile territory along the Nile. Prior to the construction of the Aswan flood barrier, the Nile valley lived to the rhythm of water rise level. Taking account of the limit of the flood barrier, this project proposes an alternative solution based on a “River-City” modular system. Each one of these cities is structured by an hydrologic system and converge to a lake reservoir. On the country scale, you can obtain a natural regulation of the Nile, according the rises rhythm and the farming rhythm.
The main idea is to divide up the Lake Nasser in each of the module cities thanks to a reservoir lake 200 meters deep. Thanks to this lake and to a hydrologic system, we obtain a more natural regulation of the rising waters. Every “River-City” is surrounded by the Nile, connecting all the module cities together. They are composed by a cover-dyke adapted to the shape of the mountains that mark out the valley. There is a traffic (roads, bridges) coming from this dyke and connecting the city with the outside world.
