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20 / Speculative housing / Changing conditions

World of Water Hyacinth.

What if a home could change its relationship to the ground?

World of Water Hyacinth is a speculative proposal for housing amid disrupted patterns of settlement. Developed in the context of the pandemic and rising-water scenarios, it imagines prefabricated homes that can form different groupings on land and water. The project tests adaptability through components, assembly, and the scale of a community.

An imagined water settlement / Units and their surroundings

The collage explores a possible arrangement of homes on water within the competition proposal.

01 / The components

Begin with a unit that can be assembled.

The proposed unit uses a lightweight steel frame, bolted connections, and prefabricated panels. Services are integrated into the framework. Inflatable compartments are conceived within the base as a flotation mechanism. The system drawing sets out these ideas as parts of a speculative building method.

01 / States of the settlement

The diagram traces how residential and shared units might regroup across everyday, pandemic, and changing-water scenarios.

02 / The settlement

Let the grouping change with the conditions.

The architectural question extends beyond a single floating home. Individual units are imagined as part of a larger community that can rearrange its relationships as circumstances change. The tall collage brings together a supporting framework, inhabited modules, and different possible positions within the system.

02 / An adaptable collective

The collage explores the relationship between repeated dwelling units and a larger framework for communal life.

Component / Home / Community

Adaptation across more than one scale.

The proposal uses an imagined floating settlement to investigate how the construction of a dwelling and the organisation of a community might respond together to change.

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Studio
Competition
Instructor
Zukang Lei
Collaboration
Team work with: Zemin Yan, Yaoxin Xu, Fangdong Hong, Xuejing Li
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