3.C.CITY: CLIMATE, CONVENTION, CRUISE
By WORKac and Ant Farm (US)
3.C. City is designed for our current global context, with climate change, rising sea levels and sinking cities challenging architecture to engage in urgent diplomacy among the species, and become an agent of change for the future.
3.C.City is a floating city, unbound by any national allegiances and designed to facilitate dialogue and discussion — between people, as well as animals — on the pressing environmental, political and social issues associated with climate change. It is a vessel and a vehicle of dreams. It is a centre for discussion and debate.
3.C.City rises from three submerged stability pods, bending a thickened perimeter of housing and public functions to create a giant interior landscape of participation, centered on a congress hall that allows dolphins and other sea creatures to have an equal voice with their human counterparts.
3.C.City challenges conventional ways of living and interacting and proposes a new symbiosis between ecology and infrastructure, public and private, the individual and the collective. Within its perimeter shell, a series of circular cuts in the ship’s decks provide vertical connections, interconnected shared facilities and spaces for collective interaction. Flexible and repositionable inflatable walls hold horizontal infrastructure and wet spaces while creating space for private, individual, and family life.
A series of new green infrastructures flow throughout and around 3.C.City. A shingled skin of solar panels, pockets of greenhouses and gardens, an algae farm for biofuel and a water-collection system in the form of a river, waterfalls and reservoir all combine to render 3.C.City’s infrastructure as architecture.
BIO
Amale and Dan founded the architecture firm WORKac in 2003 and have achieved international recognition for projects that reinvent the relationship between urban and natural environments. The firm is known for embracing reinvention and collaboration across disciplines. WORKac strives to develop intelligent and shared infrastructures and a more careful integration between architecture, landscape, and ecological systems.
WORKac has won acclaim for projects such as the Edible Schoolyard at PS 216 in Brooklyn, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, and the widely publicised three-story New York offices of Wieden+Kennedy. Recent award-winning projects include the Stealth Building, a residential conversion of a historic New York cast-iron building, and the library in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, New York.
WORKac has won acclaim for projects such as the Edible Schoolyard at PS 216 in Brooklyn, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, and the widely publicised three-story New York offices of Wieden+Kennedy. Recent award-winning projects include the Stealth Building, a residential conversion of a historic New York cast-iron building, and the library in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, New York.