The Floating House

From the editor 1.0 Executive Summary 1.2 Mission 2.0 Company Summary 3.0 Products and service 4.0 Market analysis summary 5.0 Strategy and Implementation Summary 6.0 Development requirement 7.0Management Summary 8.0 Long-term plan

The Floating

House

FROM THE EDITOR

In recent years ,the global warming is getting more and more serious than before. According to the hap-

pened in Japan's earthquake, we know that we should do something to prevent the Nature's counterattack. So the floating house be created. We can use the floating house to adapt the sea-level rise. And the floating house would becoming the trend in future.

Executive

summary

Dutch Answer to Flooding: Build Houses that Swim The Dutch are gearing up for clmate change with amphibious houses. If rivers rise above their banks, the houses simply rise upwards as well. Such innovation could be good news for hurricane and flood-stunned . But are water lovers prepared to live on swimming family arks? BY SUSANNA CONTINI HENNINK DELFT - Living in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, the Dutch are always trying to come up with new ways to make the most of their limited space. With a plentiful supply of lakes and marshland, they have been draining land and building islands to live on for centuries. But in recent years, the focus has shifted. Increased rainfall melting glaciers and rising sea level are carrying more water through Europe's rivers and flooding Holland's deltas. The Dutch have re-alized that building higher dikes to keep out the sea is no longer a so-lution to the water problem.

Spatial planners are now looking for ways to accommodate more water, rather than continue fighting to keep it out. One solution is setting aside land which can be flooded by excess river wa-ter - so-called calamity polders. Archi-tects and city planners are also looking for creative solutions, offering residential and leisure facilities on or near water. For example, the new Amsterdam sub-urb of IJburg on the IJ lake will include 250 stationary floating homes, as well as space for converted barges and house bats. The city of Groningen is creating a neighborhood where water, homes, in-dustry and leisure facilities will intermin-gle. And a sting of luxury villas is being built near the river Maas on a site which

A panel of project developers last week dis-cussed some of the benefits and problems of building on water with civil engineering stu-dent from Delft Technical University. To build floating homes means finding answer to in-frastructure problems such as accessibility to public services and the supply of utilities and drainage, the experts said. 'Living on water will probably be attractive to a limited num-ber of people,' said Jan Winsemius of town planning research group Midelkoop. 'But that is not a problem. The construction sector should abandon the notion that all housing projects must target everyone,' he said. Some advantages of water homes are that much of the construction can take place at a distance from the building site. And you can build in wet areas where housing currently is not possible. Nevertheless, 'living on water is not likely to provide a solution to our housing shortages,' said Arie van Wijngaarden, project director for floating homes in IJburg. Van Wijngaarden pointed to the extra space floating homes require and the fact that wa-ter cannot support high-rise flats.

However, Frits Schoute, former professor of multi-media communication at Delft Univer-sity, predicted that rising sea levels, de-creasing supplies of fossil fuels and a lack of sufficient drinking water will force people to seriously consider the option of living on the seas. Schoute took early retirement to de-vote himself full time to his plan to build a floating plat-form on the sea to be pow-ered by wind, sun and wave energy. His project is intended to be a model for cities floating on the seas, which he claims will be man's next frontier.

A Floating House offers the follow-

ing features and advantages:

1. Mobility

2. Solid, long-life construction

3.Large rooms with 2.5 m high

ceilings

4. Special insulation for all-year

living 5. Attractive price 6.Environmentally friendly and

energy-saving 7. A low-draft unsinkable floating

platform, made with InnoVida

panels 8. Self-sufficiency due to its own

water treatment and eco-energy

systems, and suitability for use in

nature conservancy areas

Company Summary

MAASBOMMEL, Nether-lands — This low-lying land has a new weapon in its never-ending battle with the tides: amphibian houses. For centuries, the Dutch have built dikes to protect them-selves from the sea. Now, with predictions of more frequent flooding due to climate change, they are looking for ways to live with water, not fight it. That change of thinking is re-flected at a new housing project in this central Dutch village about 60 miles southeast of Amsterdam. It is a community of amphibious homes.

Unlike the houseboats that line many Dutch canals or the float-ing villages of Asia, the several dozen homes are being built on solid ground. But they also are designed to float on flood wa-ter. Each house is made of light-weight wood, and the concrete base is hollow, giving it ship-like buoyancy. With no foundations anchored in the earth, the structure rests on the ground and is fastened to 15-foot-long mooring posts with sliding rings, allowing it to float upward should the river

flood. All the electrical ca-bles, water and sewage flow through flexible pipes inside the mooring piles. The 700-square-foot struc-tures are on the “wrong” side of a dike in a beautiful flood plain of one of the country’s main waterways, the Maas River, overlooking lush marshland and a harbor. Housing also drives idea That addresses another con-stant fight in the Netherlands — finding space for housing in Europe’s most densely populated country, says Chris Zevenbergen of Dura Vermeer, the company be-hind the project. Interactive: The greenhouse effect He says floating houses could help make up the 40 percent shortfall in land suit-able for development over the next 50 years. At a starting price of 260,000 euros, or about $310,000, for a house with three small bedrooms, the homes are at the high end of the market for a village like Maasbommel. But many have been sold, and the first residents are about to move in. “They are pretty much just regular houses,” says builder Hans van de Beek. “The only difference is that when the water rises, they rise.”

Boats required So, during times of high water, people will need a boat to get from the dike where they park their car to the “comfort” of their floating home. For more than 1,000 years the Dutch have been holding back the sea, and even reclaiming it. Landfills and windmill-driven pumps have created vast fields, called polders, for new cities, pastures and cropland. If it weren’t for its system of dikes and canals, as much as half of the Netherlands could be submerged. The country was hit by flooding twice in the past decade, in 1993 and 1995, causing billions of dollars in damage. In 1953, more than 1,800 people died during a deluge, referred to ever since simply as “the disaster.” Scientists warn that global warming will make it worse. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change predicts rainfall in the Netherlands could increase by up to 25 percent and the sea level could rise 43 inches in this century. “Due to the changing climate, the Netherlands and its delta areas will be confronted with ris-ing water,” Zevenbergen says. “This is a way for people to live in the low-lying areas that would otherwise be uninhabitable.”

Products and service

They come in all shapes and sizes, from traditional-looking homes that just happen to be floating on water to ultramod-ern houseboat concepts that look like they might be able to fly, too. Some are high-end, while others are cobbled to-gether from reclaimed planes, trains and automobiles, proving that you don’t have to have a large budget to take your home to the high seas – or the lake, bay, river or canal.

Streamlined Wooden House Boat Technically a house barge, since it can’t propel itself from one location to another, this home on the Eilbekkanal in Hamburg, Germany is warm, homey and modern with its curved wood exterior. Inside,

“Train Wreck” Houseboat Made from Train Car A repurposed train car forms the center of ‘Train Wreck’, an otherwise very house-like floating home at South Forty Dock in Sausalito, California. In a former life, it was a 50-foot-long, 120-year-old Pull-man sleeper car. Owners Renee and Henry Baer cut it in half, split it into a ‘V’ shape and attached it to a 20-by-40-foot concrete hull. Pink Shantyboat Made with a Bus This is technically a ‘shantyboat’, but it looks more like a parade float that veered off into a marina. And hey, there’s a lot of trash in the world – why not put it to good use? Spotted on the River Adur in England, this houseboat

clearly has an owner with a creative eye for recyclable ma-terials. A bus and a washing machine are just two obvious elements included in the de-sign. Dubai Houseboat by X-Architects Made from two catamaran beams, stainless steel and glass, this collaboration be-tween X-ARchitects and de-signer Leen Vandaele is a crisp and modern home base in the Dubai marina. A terrace with a glass roof, reached by a spiral staircase, also acts as a sun deck.

Geometric Houseboat in Copenhagen Spotted in Copenhagen in 2008, this highly unusual houseboat sports a geo-metric metal facade and what appears to be a secondary glassed-in structure for sunbathing. Cosmic Muffin Boeing Houseboat It started as a 1930s Boeing Stratoliner, owned by Howard Hughes. The tail and wings were cut off to transform it into the houseboat it is today, dubbed Cosmic Muffin and based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Floating House In-spired by Nature The curve of ocean waves just as they’re about to break inspired this elegant houseboat on the Willamette River in Oregon. Architect Robert Harvey Oshatz employed wood and plenty of glass for an organic feel. “I believe that every house has a sense of poetry to it, so what I wanted to do was design a house which would reflect the poetry of the movement of the river,” he said.

Solar-Powered Houseboat Concept If the Waterworld version of apocalyptic predictions ever comes to pass, this solar houseboat concept could be a relatively comfortable way to survive the chaos.

Inspired by a fishing bobber, the house has a flotation belt and is half-submerged for sta-bility even in the face of large waves. An up-per-level garden grabs all those harsh rays of sunlight, which are also harvested for power. Low-Budget Floating House You don’t have to have a lot of money to own your very own floating house. As these two images prove, low-budget houseboats are certainly possible, es-pecially if you don’t

care too much about aesthetics. Three-Story Sausalito Houseboat Houseboat living isn’t necessarily tiny living. This three-story, 4,000-square foot monster of a floating house in Sau-salito definitely proves that even people who like to live large (literally) can have a home right on the water.

Modern Floating Home on Lake Union With a limited allowable footprint and a re-quest from the homeowners that the design be fitting both for living and entertaining, Vande-venter + Carlander Architects designed this floating home in Seattle to be versatile and elegant. At 2,824 square feet, it’s larger than many homes on land, and even has an 887-square-foot deck. Aluminum cladding, strate-gically placed windows and decks allowed the designers to achieve a look that is “visually interesting and coherent.”

Covey Island Boatworks Arctic Home Faced with harsh winter conditions, the Inuit have long taken shelter in upside-down boats. Inspired by this practice, Covey Island Boat-works has designed an extreme arctic home that puts a different spin on the word ‘houseboat’. Using the same construction methods and materials that make a boat light-weight, flexible and strong, the boat builders created this prefabricated off-grid structure specifically for use on dry land.

MAASBOMMEL, Netherlands — This low-lying land has a new weapon in its never-ending battle with the tides: am-phibian houses. For centuries, the Dutch have built dikes to protect themselves from the sea. Now, with predictions of more frequent flooding due to climate change, they are looking for ways to live with water, not fight it. That change of thinking is reflected at a new housing project in this central Dutch village about 60 miles southeast of Am-sterdam. It is a community of amphibious homes. Unlike the houseboats that line many Dutch canals or the floating villages of Asia, the several dozen homes are being built on solid ground. But they also are de-signed to float on flood water. Each house is made of lightweight wood, and the concrete base is hollow, giving it ship-like buoyancy. With no foundations anchored in the earth, the structure rests on the ground and is fastened to 15-foot-long mooring posts with sliding rings, allowing it to float upward should the river flood. All the elec-trical cables, water and sewage flow through flexible pipes inside the mooring piles. The 700-square-foot structures are on the “wrong” side of a dike in a beautiful flood plain of one of the country’s main water-ways, the Maas River, overlooking lush marshland and a harbor. Housing also drives idea That addresses another constant fight in the Netherlands — finding space for hous-ing in Europe’s most densely populated country, says Chris Zevenbergen of Dura Vermeer, the company behind the pro-ject. Interactive: The greenhouse effect .

He says floating houses could help make up the 40 percent shortfall in land suitable for devel-opment over the next 50 years. At a starting price of 260,000 euros, or about $310,000, for a house with three small bed-rooms, the homes are at the high end of the market for a village like Maasbommel. But many have been sold, and the first residents are about to move in. “They are pretty much just regular houses,” says builder Hans van de Beek. “The only differ-ence is that when the water rises, they rise.”

Boats required

So, during times of high water, people will need a boat to get from the dike where they park their car to the “comfort” of their floating home. For more than 1,000 years the Dutch have been holding back the sea, and even reclaiming it. Landfills and windmill-driven pumps have created vast fields, called polders, for new cities, pastures and cropland. If it weren’t for its system of dikes and canals, as much as half of the Netherlands could be submerged. The country was hit by flooding twice in the past decade, in 1993 and 1995, causing billions of

Cut into the ground, the first floor gives one the sense of being cozy and enclosed but also provides views out in all directs to the lawn, garden and forest beyond. More lim-ited fenestration on the upper levels grant greater privacy. What is perhaps most com-pelling is that the materials and construction methods are remarkably simple and inex-pensive, yet the net result is a home sure to be unlike any other on the block.

dollars in damage. In 1953, more than 1,800 people died during a deluge, referred to ever since simply as “the disaster.” Scientists warn that global warming will make it worse. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change predicts rainfall in the Nether-lands could increase by up to 25 percent and the sea level could rise 43 inches in this century. “Due to the changing climate, the Netherlands and its delta areas will be confronted with rising water,” Zevenbergen says. “This is a way for people to live in the low-lying areas that would otherwise be uninhabitable.” however, revolving around a lower-level open family living space with individual rooms above separated as needed and allowed to ‘push’ the ceiling below into this area only as needed. De-spite the functional aspects of the design, though, it is hard to escape the sense that every-thing is upside-down.

Strategy and

Implementation Summary

The architects who designed houses for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right development in the Lower Ninth Ward had to juggle two challenges. The first was how to build the houses high enough so that they would escape floodwaters -- even if they might not withstand the inundation that occurred following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The other was how to preserve the intimate New Orleans-style streetscape where people could sit on their porches and visit with passersby.architect Thom Mayne, whose firm Morphosis is based in Santa Monica, Calif., has come up with the most radical reconciliation of the need for height and the need for neighborliness so far. He designed a house that sits just a few steps off the ground, until – heaven forbid – the flood waters start to sweep across the low-lands again. If that happens, the house is meant to float, rising gently on a pair of steel poles mounted at either end. Not 5 feet, not 8; Mayne’s house would float up to 12 feet above the waters. “As long as we’re doing this, we might as well make it a really huge safety factor,” Mayne said.

Not that the residents are supposed to ride out the next storm in the floating house. Mayne is quick to point out that the buoy-ant design is only meant to give the own-ers something to come back to after the waters recede. Not that the residents are supposed to ride out the next storm in the floating house. Mayne is quick to point out that the buoy-ant design is only meant to give the own-ers something to come back to after the

waters recede.The house floats because it’s built on a 5-foot-thick, 55-foot-long concrete coated foam chas-sis that contains all the plumbing, electrical con-duits and everything else you’d find in the crawl space under a conventional house. The barge-like chas-sis, and the rest of the house for that matter, was prefabricated on the Uni-versity of California Los An-geles campus, trucked across the country, and as-sembled at 1638 Tennessee St. “It’s a dry dock boat,” Mayne said. “As the water would rise, it’s going to rise up the pylon.” Though Mayne is aware of floating

houses in Holland, he believes his is the first permitted floating home in the United States. He said he would eventually like to see as-sembly lines churning out floating chassis for future houses in flood-threatened coastal regions around the world. The so-lar-electric power system, storage batter-ies, and green appliances in Mayne’s

Mayne is tall, lanky, conversationally intense, and seems much younger than his 67 years. He’s probably the biggest of the big-time architects who have con-tributed designs to the first phase of Make It Right. At the same time he was designing the floating Make It Right home, he was also drawing an office tower to be built in Paris. The tower will straddle a Parisian road-way and rise to within centimeters of the height of the Eiffel tower. Just months before Hurricane Katrina and

the subsequent flooding, Mayne won the Pritzker Prize – think best director Academy Award, only for architects. Mayne is known for rather severe, angular designs. Sure enough, there’s a certain ice-berg-like quality to the roof line of his long, rectangular, floating house. But, he says, the design of the shell isn’t as important as the chassis. In fact, future home owners could select another architect to draw up a dif-ferent shell, or design one themselves. “Do people want an architect-designed house,” he said. “Maybe yes, maybe no. … It’ll be the choice of the consumer.” The sunlit inside of the house is an exercise in raw industrial chic. From the splintery wall texture (some kind of painted composition board?)

to the unadorned fluorescent fixtures, to the simple sliding doors, and unfinished lumber beams, the place has a certain harshness that will be charming to some and off-putting to others. Mayne said that he may cover the huge gal-vanized steel tubes that dominate the living room and rear bedroom with camouflaging cabinets, so that they call less attention to themselves. Those are the pylons that allow the house to float. “It’s about a tragic extreme,” he said of the silvery tubes. “You don’t decorate a seatbelt.”

From the press release: "Known as the FLOAT House, the structure is a new model for flood-safe, affordable and sustainable housing and is de-signed to securely float with rising water levels. The innovative house was built for actor Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation, which is helping with the rebuilding of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. he concept for the FLOAT House emerged from research on the local flooding record, the social and cultural history of the city, and the ecol-ogy of the Mississippi Delta. In the event of flooding, the base of the house — reconceived as a chassis — acts as a raft, allowing the house to rise vertically on guide posts, securely floating up to 12 feet as water levels rise. While not designed for occupants to remain inside during a hurricane, the inno-vative structure aims to minimize catastrophic dam-age and preserve the home-owner's investment in their property. This approach also allows for the early return of occupants in the aftermath of a hurricane or flood."

Management Summary

What is a Floating Home? A "Floating Home" is a legally-permitted structure, with no means of self-propulsion, which occupies a permanent berth and is subject to property taxes. It complies with all applicable codes and is connected to all utilities and services, including wa-ter, sewage, electricity, gas, telephone, and cable television. Floating home marinas are privately owned and charge home-owners monthly berthage fees. Our communities evolved from the free-spirited artists, ship-builders and writers who lived aboard the arks and the various types of boats which were informally anchored in San Francisco Bay beginning in the 1800's.

Long

Term

Plan

In the event of flooding, the base of the house — reconceived as a chassis -- acts as a raft, allowing the house to rise vertically on guide posts, securely floating up to twelve feet as water levels rise. While not designed for occupants to remain in the home during a hurricane, this innovative structure aims to minimize catastrophic damage and preserve the homeowner’s investment in their property. This approach also allows for the early return of occupants in the aftermath of a hurricane or flood. "When Brad Pitt launched Make It Right, he promised the residents of the Lower 9th Ward that he would help them build back stronger, safer and better able to survive the next storm or flood. The FLOAT House is helping us deliver on that promise. For the first time, this house brings technology to Americans that was created to help save homes and speed recovery from flooding. It’s an approach and design that could and should be replicated all over the world now threatened with increased flooding caused by climate change," says Tom Darden, Ex-ecutive Director of the Make It Right Foundation. Designed in re-sponse to Ninth Ward residents’ specific needs, the FLOAT House serves as a scal-able prototype that can be mass-produced and adapted to the needs of commu-nities world-wide facing similar challenges. On track for a LEED Platinum Rating, the state-of-the-art home uses high-performance systems, energy efficient appliances, and prefabrication methods to produce an affordable, sustainable house that generates its own power, mini-mizes resource consumption, and collects its own water.