The Floating City: Kate Stuteville '18 B.Arch

July 2, 2020
Who
Kate Stuteville
What
Student Work | B Arch Capstone Project, Taught by Susannah Dickinson, Associate Professor of Architecture
Where
San Francisco, California
When
2018
Image
The Floating City, by Kate Stuteville

Narrated through speculative design, The Floating City by Kate Stuteville tells the story of a future world dealing with rapidly rising sea levels and population growth, by proposing a new type of community that can inhabit a world we have yet to build upon: the water’s surface. The project begins in the year 2100 in the San Francisco Bay, where unused industrial infrastructure on the edges of the city is sacrificed to rising water, leaving these relics of the past half-submerged in a marsh landscape. Taking full advantage of the new environment, a growing population of people begin to craft a new life there, allowing for more bottom-up development than the previous setting permitted.

At their core the communities consist of osmotic power machines and fog nets that provide energy, water and an apparatus for which to build upon, attach to and come together. What forms around them comes from the ingenuity of its inhabitants, and takes full advantage of the new building surfaces by leveraging their ability to move around fluidly as the communities need. At this stage the floating communities begin to influence areas beyond their site, and possibly beyond San Francisco itself, carrying with them new implications for technology, community, culture and politics.


Image Gallery

Click a thumbnail below to view a larger image and begin slideshow:


All images are by Kate Stuteville and may not be used or reproduced without express written permission of their creator.

Latest CAPLA News, Projects and Profiles

Image
Lauren Bon

Lecture Recap | The Cyborg Watershed of the American West | A Jones Studio Grand Challenges Lecture featuring Lauren Bon

An engineered network of waterways flowing west from the Rockies sustains life in one of the hottest regions on Earth, forming a “cyborg watershed” that blends natural systems with human-made infrastructure and regional mythologies. Bon explored this system through her large-scale artworks, examining buried waterways, the complexities of policy and politics, and the pursuit of a civic identity shaped by water rather than boundaries.

Image
Group photo of four CAPLA students who are members of the ISAPD

CAPLA to host Indigenous Design Symposium focused on community, sustainability

CAPLA’s Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning and Design (ISAPD) will host an all-day symposium on April 6, bringing together students, faculty and practitioners to explore Indigenous approaches to the built environment. Featuring Indigenous designers and supported by campus partners, the event will highlight community-centered design, sustainability and the role of Indigenous knowledge systems in shaping more responsible relationships with land.