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Callebaut Dreams Up Waterworld Eco IslandsPublished on 30-06-2008  by   Skyscrapernews.com    

With the threat of climate change in the forefront of everyone's minds these days, architects are constantly required to come up with newer, more greener environmentally loving features for their proposals in order to prevent the situation getting worse.

One architectural studio however have decided to stop clawing at the hope of suddenly reversing all the damage done with turbines and solar panels and come up with a design that deals face on with the fact one day we may all need to take an evolutionary step backwards and develop gills as our oceans rise in a near Kevin Costner, badly made, apocalyptic flood situation.

Named the Lilypad , the project is the brain child of architect Vincent Callebaut, who some of you might remember came up with a project to help ease the smog situation in Paris last year.

It will basically be a massive floating ecopolis which not only will deal with the refugee problems the loss of land will cause but will also be more practical than people with bad acting skills searching for land using a small child with an obscure tattoo.

The shape of the project is directly taken from nature and uses the leaf of the humble Amazonia Victoria Regia lily pad and blows it up to 250 times its size to create a structure with a half a million square metre surface area in which to create a fully self sufficient and emission free living space.

The structure will be a half aquatic and half terrestrial space which will be developed around a lagoon area made up of which will provide ballast to help it float about on the oceans currents while the upper part will be centered around three mountains dedicated to work, entertainment and hopefully the largest mountain will be made up of shopping facilities.

Housing will be 'planted' in suspended gardens and will follow and organic, flowing street patterns further adding to the naturalistic look of the place, although externally it also looks like it would make a pretty good log flume ride.

In order to make the project totally environmentally friendly the project uses almost every alternative energy sources imaginable from the commonly used solar and wind sources to the not so common tidal power, osmotic energy and phytopurification as well as filtering co2 emissions and water recycling.

All these techniques added together could mean the project would actually generate more clean energy than it actually needs in the right conditions making it probably the first project of such a scale to be able to make the claim of being entirely green.

Whether the scheme will ever set sail on the high seas is debatable but it does go along way to proving that building massive structures is possible without making a massive environmental impact.

However, the probable price tag for such a project would probably need the involvement of several oil rich nations and at least some thought on how to protect us from Jack Sparrow.

Sources with huge photos:

http://www.skyscrapernews.com/news.php?ref=1607

http://www.tuvie.com/lilypads-futuristic-floating-ecopolis