Year-End Issue: Water

Dear FuturArc readers, For the Floating Homes projects profile in this issue, we started with an observation that FuturArc Prize (an international Green design competition that focuses on architectural interventions in Asia) has, over the years, attracted an increasing number of solutions for waterside communities or water-related concerns. It has also been noticed that this proliferation of proposals mostly came from Indonesia and Vietnam entrants, a reflection of the daily lives of the people there or a sign of their most urgent needs. Common among these entries has to do with keeping people afloat, literally—floating cities, communities, or even single buildings—based on the premise that the future will face a kind of deluge on a global scale, which would render land-based survival impossible. This idea that the future is water has already taken root in some parts of the world with the development of real-life case studies such as OCEANIX City, a large-scale sustainable floating city currently being built in Busan. Back to the present, taking water as an elemental cue, this issue reminds us of the necessity of designing with Nature-based principles to include...