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Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis

Team Zhenyu Fan, Jiangyong Chen, Eda Esen

Mass migration is a global crisis faced by millions of people: every two seconds one person is currently getting displaced. Mass migration has two states: the migratory and the settlement state. During the former, migrants cross land or maritime borders desperate to reach new settlements. The Mediterranean Sea is a territory where these maritime crossings become more and more common every day. Due to the harsh conditions of the sea and the circumstances of water transit, people come face to face with life-threatening events while the casualties arise. Most of the fatalities during the maritime crossings, occur between land and sea, when a lot of migrant boats capsize while approaching the coast.

E.S.C. intends to interfere in this undefined territory of the sea by designing a floating infrastructure that provides a safe zone for people threatened by remaining stateless in between foreign borders. This dynamic infrastructure that is mobile, flexible, and time-based consists of a double layered unit, which can generate adaptable inhabitable spaces that can be deployable on land by a sequence of inflation and unfolding strategies. Multiple individual units that behave autonomously aggregate to form a body-plan. During the period of deployment, the units within the system can generate a certain degree of water-based urban­ism. A backstage-operating control system handles the interaction between the different units and adapts to any changes of the environmental elements in real-time.

Transportation is a network. E.S.C. chooses to intervene against the inac­tion in mass migration at the nodes of flow, to establish a level of awareness and monitoring of the global conditions of migration by proposing a durational design of water-based urbanism.