Architect Vincent Callebaut, designing like a theatrical rock star, has a vision for the future of humanity. It’s pretty stunning, as long as we don’t kill the oceans first. There is a lot of brilliance here, but his use of visual metaphor ties it all together. Excellent vision, excellent storytelling, possibly an excellent experience for those who might…

Aequorea

A floating city, long a great idea, but in this vision, 3D printed using the garbage we have dumped into the world’s oceans. Killing two birds with one stone.

Callebaut proposes a new civilization living on and in a new continent made of self-sustaining 3D-printed cities. The material source would be an underwater farm recycling ocean pollution into building materials.The recycled materials would also provide for actual farms for that whole food thing.

The architect refers to the inhabitants of his idea as aquanauts.

Callebaut takes inspiration, or finds metaphor, from a variety of sea creatures. His structures self-build an exoskeleton via natural calcification like sea shells, and is named for a bioluminescent jellyfish. Each structure is largely produced from petroleum-based waste recovered from the ocean, mixed with a gelling algae, and extruded by 3D printers. His sea scrapers would recycle  their own waste, generate energy using ocean turbines, filter sea water into freshwater, and grow their own food. Each floating environment could house around 20,000 aquanauts.

Weburbanist has more pictures, we know you want pictures.

Vincent Callebaut is a young (as architects go) Belgian ecological architect who creates sustainable projects for the future. He is internationally known through projects produced within his company; Vincent Callebaut Architectures. Callebaut seeks to change the way his client’s think by proposing new and dramatic solutions to the problems of civilization. His Town of Tomorrow, seeks to incorporate everything that would allow a future population to live in an environmentally sustainable way.

This is a great  new spin on the classic Come Sail Away, but not Somewhere Beyond the Sea.