Waterpod Project catches and releases New Yorkers' imaginations

Waterpod™, 2009. Photograph by Eve K. Tremblay.

Ericka Osborne sends a recommendation to check out the New York Times coverage of the Waterpod Project. The project is currently floating its way around NYC, and is unfolding day to day as an experiment in alternative, future-based land use and infrastructure interpretation, innovation, and celebration.

In her artist statement, Mary Mattingly describes the project this way:

The Waterpod demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based communities, docked and roaming.

It embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. It intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and future living spaces.

In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis.

As a malleable and autonomous space, the Waterpod is built on a model comprised of multiple collaborations. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities; an archipelagos that has the ability to mutate with the tides.

The Waterpod is mobile and nomadic, and as an application for the future it can historicize the notion of the permanent structure, simultaneously serving as composition, transportation, island, and residence. Based on movement, the Waterpod structure is adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment.

As with art, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.

With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize the future fifty to one hundred years from now.