The Open_Sailing Project
Drifting villages, or what the Apocalypse has to do with your social life.
Here’s a little-thought-about fact: Oceans cover 71% of Earth’s surface, yet 6.7 billion of us cram into the other 29%, elbowing our way through pollution, overpopulation and various other delights of contemporary civilization.
Enter Open_Sailing, a visionary initiative pioneering an entirely new form of marine architecture.
The project aims to reinvent our habitat by designing a sustainable, technologically sound sea-based lifestyle, shielded from potential natural and man-induced disasters. An “International Ocean Station” to the International Space Station, if you will.
In practical terms, this translates into a drifting, inflatable “village” of modular shelters surrounded by ocean farming units and energy pods. All components are fully flexible — fluid, pre-broken, reconfigurable, pluggable and intuitive — and powered by innovative technologies that maximize energy efficiency and ensure a sustainable, self-sufficient model.
Initiated by Royal College of Art designer Cesar Harada, the project has drawn an international, multidisciplinary team of 15 designers and engineers working under the mentorship of various marine experts.
We want to live at sea. And we want to do it well: comfortably, sustainably and safely. We want delicious food, a great social life, space to work and play. We’ve come together; a diverse team from all walks of life to design our future on the ocean. With our combined skills, we’re pioneering innovative architecture, navigation and sea farming techniques.
The first Open_Sailing prototype is 50 meters in diameter and fits 4 people. An inaugural test will set sail from London to Rotterdam, and results will be available in July.
While the project is very conceptual, the vision behind it is firmly grounded in reality (we’re underutilizing our natural habitat and overexploiting the parts we are using), urgency (where do we go next?) and visionary problem-solving — and that we can appreciate. With the right tools, thinkers and technologies, we think Open_Sailing can change the world — literally.
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Even though my first reaction was “This is so brilliant” it was very quickly replaced by “Oh, no! We went there too”… It is very hard not to think of the human species as a destructive force that fucks up everything it goes near to. This is why the idea that we might be inhabiting the oceans makes me extremely uncomfortable. We will literally be invading the only remaining part of earth that belongs more to other species than us (and that’s questionable even at this point).
Teddy:
All good points, although it’s worth noting that the project aims for the “islands” to be completely sustainable. (How feasible that is, of course, is a different story.) And an unsustainable lifestyle on land takes much more from the oceans than a sustainable lifestyle at sea. It just does it more indirectly. Even the sheer maintenance of continental landscapes, particularly in urban areas with dry climates, is incredibly straining on the oceans. Just look at Palm Springs and Dubai and other places that transplant a tropical climate to a natively dry one. The mere watering of artificial greenery in Palm Springs can sustain that a community of that size at sea and still tax the environment less.
But, of course, the question remains how well we’ll be able to balance a sustainable needs-based lifestyle at sea (because it doesn’t take that much to fulfill basic needs) with a wants-based culture (does Dubai really need that preposterous island-palm?).
I, for some reason, am terrified of the open water, but I like this because it means more room for me on dry land