Metamorphosis Project

About half way through architecture school I was given a design project by one of my professors at the beginning of the semester. Usually we were given a ‘fun’ project to loosen us up and then a more serious project, which usually coincided with something the professor was working on at the time. The project which we were given was to design vacation a house for our favorite architect. At the time I was very interested in Paolo Soleri who I had spent time with in the Arizona desert helping to build his visionary city Arcosanti.

I thought about where Soleri would go to 'get away' and recharge his batteries. Since he lives and works in the high desert I thought he would enjoy being him out on the ocean for a while. I began to think about what would be the ideal structure in which he would be comfortable that could thrive the rigors of the open sea. I needed to design an artificial island of sorts which would remain relatively stable in the most severe storms yet not be affixed to the land. I wanted Soleri to drift in solitude and contemplation.

I the late sixties the Scripts Institute of Oceanography built a deep seas research vessel called the Flip.

This vessel consisted of a front section built in the shape of a ship and a hundred foot long tube at the rear. The vessel was towed far out to sea and then a series of ballast chambers would flood in the tube causing the entire vessel to ‘flip’ vertically in the water. The top third of the vessel stuck out of the water and provided a very stable platform from which the scientists could gather data for all sorts of oceanographic and atmospheric experiments.

I proposed Solerie’s house should follow a similar shape. My professor and fellow students were skeptical of the stability of such a design from my early sketches. So I built a small model from a drinking straw with a weight at one end, representing the ballast, and a foam chunk at the other end representing the actual dwelling. I also built a small wave chamber. When I subjected my crude model to the full furry of a simulated storm of epic proportions in the chamber, the model barely bobbed or oscillated at all in the water.

Once the basic form was agreed upon, I began to design the guts of this thing. In order to survive on its own in the harsh environment of the open ocean I realized it needed to be a living, breathing organism. Because a human, or humans, were to live on this thing there needed to be a symbiotic relationship between them and the vessel to ensure the sustainability of the collective organism. First there needed to be a source of capturing and storing energy. Where does energy come from on the open ocean? I could think of four sources, solar, thermal (differences between surface temp. and deep water temp.) and mechanical in the form of wave and wind action. I decided to use both solar and wave action in varying forms.

I thought of wave action as being more consistent and therefor more reliable than wind action. I proposed running a vertical column though the center of the stem. This shaft would be have openings at the top and bottom to allow a column of water to rise up and down as waves passes by outside of the stem. A turbine with oscillating blades would be mounted either at the top of the shaft, to catch air flow, or at the bottom, to catch water flow.

But how would this vessel be constructed? Initially it could be built using common ship building techniques with steel or composite materials. I became aware of an emerging technology of growing a concrete-like material called 'seacrete' or 'biorock' in the ocean using low voltage electricity and the chemical nature of sea water.

I began designing a structure that would grow out of the saturated minerals present in sea water, as well as utilize high tensile membranes (eventually also grown using bio-engineered algees and other organisms). A large part of this was to utilize wave action to provide the energy required to make it all happen. This led to the realization that at some point the structure could produce a surplus harvested of energy to 'take it to the next level'.

I have to admit that this is a fanciful pet project or 'Gedankenexperiment'. I have been working on this since the mid 80's, pulling together developing technologies that I have encountered along the way as well as my own personal experience from my various long distance nautical endeavors over the years.

With the continued development of nano-technologies, as well as the emergence of carbon/graphene based materials, the possibilities are even more attainable than when I first envisioned them. The sea- crete technology alone, coupled with solar, wind and wave based energy capturing systems has relevance in today's world for reef restoration of coastal communities around the world as sea levels and meteorological conditions intensify due to global warming.

For an overview of the Metamorphosis project and older pictures of the various stages see:

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