Aquarius (Copyright Bartels Engineering) (click-2-enlarge)
What if Nike would start to invest in its environmental image by collecting the waste in one of the continuously growing plastic soups in our oceans and the company would start building an, also continuously growing, Nike-shaped island? What if Adidas would copy that idea with its own logo in an adjacent ocean? What if BP would take just another ocean, collecting their oily product at the end of their lifecycle.
In the Netherlands more and more offices are researching floating architectures. Sometimes these vessels are thought in concrete, sometimes in polystyrene. In the case of WHIM an entire archipelago is thought out composed of the plastic from the plastic soups in our oceans. I am reading that plastic degrades in such little pieces that fish actually eat it. We have to deal with this plastic soups. Fast. And I suppose we don’t have to expect BP to help us.
This all crossed my mind when looking at the design by Bartels shown here. This Dutch engineering firm has held an internal competition for a floating community of 10.000 people plus an Olympic Stadium near Amsterdam. Why combining housing and a stadium would a good idea, the statement by Bartels doesn’t say. In the winning scheme the dwellings take the form the Olympic rings, while the stadium has become a ‘splash’. Pretty weird all. If covered in actual water, flowing from its sides, over a transparent body, I could see the ‘splash’ become something. Frozen motion.
Aquarius (Copyright Bartels Engineering) (click-2-enlarge)
Aquarius (Copyright Bartels Engineering) (click-2-enlarge)
Aquarius (Copyright Bartels Engineering) (click-2-enlarge)
Aquarius — The ‘Splash’ Olympic Stadium (Copyright Bartels Engineering) (click-2-enlarge)
