It’s a timber-clad residence with open-plan living, light floorboards and big home windows giving perspectives throughout Chichester canal. This constructing designed via way of means of London-primarily based totally Baca Architects has a completely unique feature – it floats.

Completed this month, the amphibious residence changed into advanced as a prototype via way of means of Baca and Floating Homes, a producer specialising in flood-resilient housing, in reaction to a opposition released remaining yr to discover a approach to London’s housing crisis.

The residence is supposed to be practical, affordable and ready to cope with floods, via way of means of growing with the water levels. Ultimately the corporation desires to release redundant waterways via way of means of constructing on “bluespace” sites – artifical docks, canals and marinas – throughout London.

“Collectively, bluespace has the capacity to supply as many as 7,500 floating houses with minimum disruption to present communities”, says Richard Coutts, director at Baca Architects.

Floating structure has actual capacity to assist ease a number of London’s housing problems, says Alex De Rijke of dRMM architects, which received a opposition to layout the UK’s first floating villages in London Docklands.

“Architecture can handiest reply to overpopulation via way of means of addressing the questions of density, economic system and pace of construction,” says de Rijke, “The area of big rivers in city regions can provide solutions to those questions.”

Architects and metropolis planners internationally are beginning to appearance past the conventional confines of the metropolis, toward constructing on water as one of the solutions to lowering inner-metropolis populace density and additionally growing flood-resilient designs. Global harm to towns from flooding should quantity to 1tn a yr via way of means of 2050 if no movement is taken, in line with a World Bank report.

Floating structure is not anything new. Traditional floating villages are not unusualplace in deltas and alongside the Mekong river in south-east Asia. But integrating age-antique designs right into a cutting-edge metropolis is a specific remember entirely.

Some towns are similarly beforehand than others. IJBurg is a group of floating homes constructed on six synthetic islands on IJ Lake in Amsterdam, designed via way of means of Marlies Rohmer. It changed into conceived to cope with the metropolis’s vital housing scarcity hassle in addition to its vulnerability to flooding – extra than 1/2 of of the Netherlands is at or under sea level.

The housing is a mixture of highly-priced waterside condos and social housing, with approximately 30% of the network’s 18,000 homes allotted to low-earnings citizens. When whole, the improvement will offer houses for 45,000 citizens on 10 islands.

In Copenhagen, structure organization Urban Rigger has unveiled floating pupil housing crafted from stop of lifestyles transport bins. Each Urban Rigger has 12 studio residences which percentage a courtyard whole with a BBQ area, motormotorcycle racks and a kayak landing, and is powered in component via way of means of sun energy.

Tethered to docks withinside the metropolis, the primary college students are because of pass on the stop of the yr and could pay around six hundred a month. Over the subsequent decade, the corporation plans to construct 1,000-1,500 bins in “harbour, canal and river extensive towns” throughout Europe, says founder Kim Loudrup.

It’s approximately “the usage of infrastructure it really is now no longer getting used for whatever other than searching nice”, says Loudrop, who admits floating housing is “handiest a part of the puzzle” in relation to fixing metropolis housing crises. The splendor is, he says, that this sort of housing “may be initialised and utilised immediately; it comes in, remains for a time frame after which can pass away again.”

Building on water isn’t always straightforward, however. The recent crumble of the Makoko Floating School in Lagos, one of the maximum well-known examples of floating structure, indicates a number of the complexities.

The award-prevailing lagoon shape designed via way of means of Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi of Dutch studio NLÉ Works changed into constructed to offer a faculty and network centre to a floating slum withinside the metropolis however collapsed in June after heavy rainfall.