Flood Proof Home Designed to Float

Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis in combination with graduate students from UCLA have unveiled a brilliant solution to the problem of flooding – a house designed to rise with high waters. The aptly named Float House has been developed over the last two years as part of the Make It Right foundation’s mission to rebuild New Orleans with homes that are affordable, sustainable and storm-resistant.

The prefab units benefit from a straightforward approach – appearing to take their aesthetic inspiration from the “shotgun shacks” that already line the city’s streets – that can be easily produced on a mass scale for $150,000 each. The Design Observer explains the details of the homes:

It’s a long box, sided in fiber-cement panels with a folding, photovoltaic roof. Inside, rooms range along one wall and open onto a gallery running the house’s length. Beneath the house is a modular chassis of polystyrene foam blocks encased by glass-fiber-reinforced concrete. Inside the chassis are the house’s guts — plumbing and electrical and mechanical equipment, plus rainwater collection tanks and battery packs charged by the sun. (The house is equipped to go off the grid.)

The dynamic design includes guideposts that are built-in to either end of the structure, enabling the homes to gently rise with floodwaters, while remaining anchored in place. Perhaps the most exciting part is that the Make It Right foundation has plans to bring the houses to the market almost immediately.

Design Observer: Float House