The reason to do a floating house is related to the sheer amount of water (partly threat, partly landscape) available in the Netherlands. There are plans being developed by the Dutch government to built whole neighborhoods floating on water. We would like to contribute to that and additionally show how to solve that in a sustainable way where the water/landscape aspects gets tightly interwoven with the architecture and energy concept of our house.

The house will rotate for one reason amongst others because of climatic and energy aspects. One side of the house will have a closed façade which in summer will continuously face the sun in order to shade the interior and minimize the solar heat gain inside (lesser cooling). We call this closed part of the house the ‘heat shield’ where a passive solar cooling system will be integrated. In winter when the suns altitude is lower, the ‘open’ glass façades of the house will continuously face the sun. This will generate a solar heat gain for the interior (passive heating) which requires less energy for an actual heating system.

Since the house is floating frictionless on water the rotation won’t require much of an effort. Since water reflects the sun rays we further expect having a great impact on the interior of the house in terms of daylight availability but also atmosphere. We aim to combine sustainability, low energy conception, movement and special landscape features into a unique lifestyle and design