When someone tells you they have an apartment on the water what they really mean is adjacent to it. But one architectural firm is pitching the Mayor’s office on a floating neighborhood to be built in Boston Harbor right next to Charlestown.
Yesterday I had the chance to attend TEDx Boston and, as usual, it was a great mix of business leaders, academics, scientists, and more. Happier’s Nataly Kogan, Harvest Power’s Paul Sellew, Outline’s Nikita Bier, and iRobot co-founder Dr. Helen Greiner were all among the familiar tech faces to take the stage.
Among the most interesting was Brian Healy, Design Director at Perkins + Will, who spoke about his aim to build a new kind of coastal community right on the water.
“The harbor has always been essential to Boston’s history,” he said. “It used to be the center of the city and we turned our back on it,” by polluting the waterway.
Called Floatyard, the plan has not been greenlit, but has been presented to the Mayor and has already won an award for design from the magazine Architecture. It would use lightweight floating concrete tubes to build a base for the community in the Harbor. The units would be aimed at young professionals who want access to downtown. Energy could be provided by wind or solar, or perhaps even by harnessing tidal energy. A big piece of the design is oriented around building a community that has the resiliency to withstand superstorms like Sandy, which may become more likely due to climate change.
The Boston Globe covered the proposal back in April, and I wrote about a similar proposal by a Dutch firm in March of last year.
Floatyard is actually just one project in a new trend within architecture towards designing for extreme weather. While we’re not going to be able to design our way out of the rising coasts and stronger storms brought on by climate change, given that some of that change will happen even if we act aggressively, these kind of designs come not a moment too soon.
I for one would love to live on a floating community in the Harbor, though I shudder to think of the cost. What about you?
Images via Perkins + Will
