When Cities Drift: The Social and Climate Meaning of Floating Architecture

By Seoyun Nam, Seungju Lee

Floating, yet firm. It is the site of AquaPraça, a floating plaza designed by Carlo Ratti Associati and Höweler + Yoon, first exhibited in Venice before embarking for COP30 in Brazil. According to ArchDaily (2025), the plaza accommodates over 150 people and will serve as a stage for climate dialogue before becoming a permanent cultural space in the Amazon. What seems like a spectacle is also a prototype: a test of how humans might inhabit instability in a century of rising seas.

 What are these houses floating on water? How and why do we keep on making this? Floating architecture refers to structures built on buoyant platforms for residential, commercial, or public use. They are increasingly framed as sustainable responses to sea-level rise, land scarcity, and climate disruption. Unlike ships, these buildings are not transient vehicles but places to live, gather, and work. In its simplest form, floating architecture transforms water from an obstacle into a foundation.

AquaPraça emphasizes the civic dimension of floating design. Inspired by Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo (1979), it deliberately revisits the idea of a temporary, mobile theater. But where Rossi critiqued modernist rigidity, AquaPraça aligns with what the Venice Biennale has called the “Hydrocene,” an epoch where water becomes the primary determinant of urban and ecological systems (ArchDaily, 2025). Its ballast systems maintain equilibrium at eye level with the water surface, underscoring how closely architecture can coexist with shifting aquatic conditions. In this sense, AquaPraça is not just performance art but a political proposition: that adaptation must be civic, collective, and inclusive.

The surge of interest in floating construction is directly linked to climate change. In July 2025, the European Drought Observatory reported 63 percent of Hungary’s land suffering severe drought, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects global sea levels could rise by one meter by 2100. Urban crowding compounds the urgency. Floating neighborhoods in Rotterdam, designed by MAST architecture, already demonstrate modular, interlocking units that adapt to tides (ArchDaily, 2025). Singapore and South Korea experiment with floating research stations. The UN-Habitat’s Oceanix City initiative proposes marine communities powered by renewable energy. Together, these projects suggest a future where floating may become not exceptional but ordinary. 

The idea itself is ancient. In ancient Egypt, the Thalamegos commissioned by Ptolemy IV functioned as a floating palace, complete with banquet halls and bedrooms, illustrating how floating platforms could sustain daily life and luxury at scale. Indian cosmology imagined the Floating Temple of Brahma resting on the cosmic ocean, representing creation and balance. Even the Tower of Babel, in its allegorical interpretations, has been read as a challenge to nature’s limits (Moro, 2003).

Indigenous communities carried these ideas into lived environments. The Uros people of Lake Titicaca have long inhabited reed-based floating islands, sustaining communal life upon water (Heggen, 2021). The chinampas of the Aztecs transformed shallow lakes into agricultural platforms, blending engineering and ecology (Venice Biennale Mexican Pavilion, 2025). Floating bridges and pontoons, used in Roman and Persian warfare, demonstrate that mobility on water was once a strategic necessity (Ferraro, 2012). Venice itself, though not technically floating, was built on piles in marshland, producing an amphibious city whose endurance inspired later architects.

Earlier visions such as Shimizu Corporation’s Marine City (1970s Japan) imagined ocean megastructures with modular living units and aquaculture, anticipating many of the climate-resilient strategies now being pursued. More recently, projects such as Seoul’s Some Sevit (2011) highlight how floating architecture can also symbolize urban modernity and leisure, distinct from climate adaptation 

Modernist thinkers often used ‘floating’ as a metaphor. Walter Benjamin described urban modernity as a ‘floating’ dislocation, a detachment from place (van Drunen, 2011). Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo embodied this idea, creating a theater that drifted through Venice as a critique of permanence. Such symbolic projects frame floating as reflection: a chance to ask how people experience space, time, and memory. Contemporary designers continue this symbolic dimension. D.K. Brown’s floating light platforms, for instance, function as speculative heritage, reasserting myth and memory through ephemeral architecture (Brown, 2021). Floating, in this view, is as much about identity as about infrastructure.

 The true significance of floating architecture lies in its social meaning. By turning plazas and homes into buoyant spaces, architecture raises fundamental questions: Who controls aquatic territory? How are water resources distributed?

 From luxury villas marketed to the wealthy to civic forums designed for the public , floating architecture can take many forms. The range itself shows that floating is not a single idea but a field of possibilities, shaped by who builds it and for what purpose.

Floating architecture will almost certainly become more visible in the coming decades. Yet its growth will require navigating trade-offs.

• Cost: Advanced materials and ballast systems are expensive, risking exclusivity.

• Durability: Structures must endure storms, saltwater corrosion, and long-term climate variability.

• Equity: Without governance, floating neighborhoods may exacerbate inequality, privileging those who can afford to float.

• Ecology: Floating platforms alter aquatic ecosystems, raising concerns for biodiversity and water quality.

Nevertheless, the balance of probabilities is positive. As technologies improve and cultural acceptance grows, floating structures will become capable of embodying resilience through coexistence.

From the myths of Atlantis to the islands of Lago Titicaca, from Venice’s amphibious foundations to AquaPraça’s cultural plaza, floating architecture forms a continuum of human imagination and more importantly, resilience. Its significance today is not only technical but social. As Benjamin, Rossi, and contemporary designers suggest, floating is a metaphor for how societies live with instability. In the Anthropocene, this metaphor has become material. Floating architecture is no longer a relic of indigenous practice, but a civic strategy, a cultural statement, and perhaps a necessity. At its essence, floating architecture demonstrates that survival need not mean withdrawal. By building upon water rather than against it, humanity finds new ways to stay rooted, sustain community, and imagine continuity when land alone is no longer sufficient.