Vincent Callebaut’s Coral Reef Island, a proposal for Haiti. Photo courtesy of Vincent Callebaut

What is it about water that captures our imaginations? Yes, we certainly have been warned about rising sea levels and the 100-year flood’s awkward rechristening as the 3-to-20-year flood. But if stats really got through to us, obesity wouldn’t be a crisis and we would all have retirement savings. When it comes to visionary designs for the future of the built environment, flood scenarios dominate the design briefs—standard-issue earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanoes just can’t catch a break.

In our collective architectural imagination, the next century looks like a fanciful sci-fi resort in which we jet from floating airports to floating Scottish villages, soak in pools that float (wink-wink) in rivers, and furnish our floating apartment complexes with flat packs we bought in floating IKEAs.

And now that Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy has filled New York’s subway tunnels with water, it doesn’t seem so farfetched to imagine a fleet of gondolas sending commuters down a river underneath Broadway (which would certainly be an interesting entry in our Architecture + Weather category in the A+ Awards!). So, in preparation for only the most picturesque of disaster scenarios, we bring you some of our favorite futuristic designs for the all-waterfront property of tomorrow. Dive in!

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Image courtesy of Vincent Callebaut

Today, while the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was busy coordinating Food Day events across the nation, we got to thinking about all the delicious plants that will have to grow on buildings if our rapidly urbanizing world is to produce enough sustenance for the projected 9.1 billion people who will need access to fresh food by 2050. Could it really be a coincidence that so many of the causes CSPI addresses—healthy eating, hunger, food security, agriculture policy—find some resolution in the promise of agritecture, farmscrapers, and other utopian portmanteaus? We think not!

As the vertical farming trend has taken off in recent years, many architects and designers have begun tackling the question of how to marry agriculture with architecture. Here’s a look at some of our favorite concepts (most of them unbuilt) for fanciful food-producing pyramids, geodesic domes, flower pods, and insects. Check out the pictures!

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