The idea and stimulus for the Waterpod comes from projects like Constant Nieuhaus’s “New Babylon”. Mr. Nieuhaus created a movable compartmentalized city that would occasionally extend onto the water. The Waterpod also stems from the concepts and visions of many micronations and their ideals of the free state, many times floating on water and occasionally, in virtual space, from Sealand, to the Republic of Rose, to Transtopia. The look of the Waterpod is an update of Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome structure, but using recycled and sustainable materials with tension fabric structures (a modernization of the sailboat sail.) Other influences include literature, architects such as Louis Kahn, and stories such as those of Reishee Sowa of Puerto Aventuras, Mexico. Mr. Sowa built an island out of soda bottles and lived on it until 2005.

As a completely sustainable, navigable living space, the Waterpod will improve and illustrate the positive interaction between communities: private and corporate; artistic and social; between sustainable city-life and humans’ desire, ability, and inability to traverse terrestrial-aquatic boundaries. As with all of my work, I am interested in exploring new living possibilities for the future. I imagine this as one possibility for the future of community living when land becomes scarce.