ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY

ELASTICITY, AN UNDERWATER CITY

Oceans 2001

World



PROGRAM : Submarine city of 50 000 inhabitants completely autonomous

LOCATION : All over the world

SURFACE AREA : 1 Km²

PRIZE : First prize winner at Godecharle’s competition 2001, Brussels, Belgium






Between the gravity of the earth and the weightlessness of water, Elasticity is a town without a location. Its organic design gives it birth, life and death through the assimilation of the submarine universe. It is utopian and therefore does not claim to be a transplantation of terrestrial life.

A recycled interface : the shaped roof, made of 1 km² metallic net and wrapped in a coating of expanded polypropylene, is stretched just above the water. It makes a transition of the body’s two movements in space : walking and swimming. Its lower curve is the substratum of minerals and trace elements that are indispensible for the formation of a new inverted soil, the niche of aquatic plant life. Two parallel glass blocks fix a point on the horizon and reduce it to infinity. The place seems empty, no space! These two glass moniliths recycle the salt water; one purifies the sodium and the chlorine, the other is kept for fresh water. A bubble of air sucks in the oxygen supplied by the photosynthesis of the phosphorescent algae. The air contaminated by CO2 ejected by the human body is purified. On the one hand, this aquaculture generates th energy for food, which attracts aquatic animal life, and on the other hand it generates the mechanical and electrical energy of Elasticity. This oceanic beacon compressed between the two blocks of glass is a giant float from which hangs a vertical town, ensuring that it moves according to the ocean tides.

Elasticity is in fact only a fifter that evolves like an elastic spring according to the depths of the ocean and the demography of the town. It piles up all the common cells of all the fractal scales of contemporary society. It is, in fact, a landscape of transplants pierced by rising tides. The family explodes. The private space fades into an aqua-urban space. The divers carry their private bubble in the shape of a rucksack fitted with a demijohn of compressed air. The pre-formed auto-inflatable joins to others and therefore also gives its architectural expression of the fractal family.

Furniture and buildings are no longer just on of the osmotic pressures in the ocean universe. This flexible town will metamorphosis in two hundred years into a coral reef and the biodegradable synthetic material will leave the organic material in its place.

The town is no longer eternal!

COPYRIGHT : VINCENT CALLEBAUT ARCHITECTURES



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PHONE : 0033.1.45.70.86.41
WEBSITE : www.vincent.callebaut.org
EMAIL : vincent@callebaut.org
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Vincent Callebaut Architectures
7, place Félix Eboué
75012 Paris
France

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