Water & Architecture

Initial Thesis Idea: Water & Architecture

By: Jonathan Smith

During my Senior year here at SIUC, I was an undergraduate research assistant for Professor Robert Swenson. Over the course of the school year I worked on various parts of 3D modeling and research to go in his book on steamboats. I learned a great deal from the experience. It turns out that steamboats were every bit as architectural as many buildings I've experienced, they just weren't land locked. It turns out that the water drove the design of the "moving buildings." This concept stuck with me over the course of a year and I began experimenting with multiple water-based concepts in architecture.

Now imagine a few hundred years in the future. By then technology will have an extraordinarily larger impact on our lives than it even does today. The environment we live in will not be as it is today either. What sort of meaning will the architecture of this futuristic time period have in society? One thing is for certain, the parameters that architecture is designed around are constantly changing and will continue to do so throughout time. In this future, what if global warming were to have a substantial impact? Would this make land a commodity that is very uncommon? How would the architecture adapt to non land-based areas? These are a few of the questions that have intrigued me about building architecture on water in the future.

These questions and interest I have explained are to give you an insight as to the direction I am heading for my thesis and why. I want to design a water-based architectural site that will act similar to a self sustaining city. Although the timing for this design may be a bit premature, it is very much relevant. There are a variety of conceptual ideas for manmade islands and barges that sustain life on long sea bound trips. For my thesis I wish to incorporate many of these aspects. I want the "city on water" I design to be completely self sustaining and allow for expansion of population. I foresee the project being highly conceptual, but on the same note, very realistic for the not so distant future.

A piece of architecture on water could start to help alleviate a multitude of issues. Some of these issues include global warming, overpopulation, sustainability, and devastation from natural disasters. I still have a vast amount of information to attain in order to make the project worthy of a graduate thesis, but the idea has stuck with me so long that I'm almost self obligated to pursue it. I'll keep my research and new finds up to date on the blog and you as the reader can find out if I crash and burn!