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Change happens on the heels of vision. It isn’t enough to modify existing structures for improvement; you have to create new ways of doing things to cause revolution.

While the above statement is quite true, it isn’t always easy to accomplish. Through time, true visionaries have appeared infrequently. Men like Isaac Newton, Nicholas Tesla, and Leonardo da Vinci. Sometimes though, it is people or ideas that exact change on a smaller scale. And it is with the combined effort of the millions of scientists and designers around the world that we can improve our lives on a daily basis.

Last night I watched an interesting news story from Holland on a home developer who doesn’t work against the sea, but with it. Thirty percent of Holland’s land mass is fill-in, wetland that was reclaimed from the sea called polder. This land is below sea-level. To protect the land from the sea Holland uses tens of thousands of pumps to pull the water out. Also, as many people know, Holland has an elaborate dyke system that is constantly being built higher and higher to hold back the ocean. Despite man’s best efforts, nature will do what nature does, ever change.

In the story on the CBS Evening News they showed the homes Mark Van Ommen is constructing ON the waterways of Holland. Beautifully crafted homes designed to float. What a simple idea. If the sea rises, so goes the home with it. If you want to move to another part of Holland, hook your home up to a tugboat and move it.

In looking further into this idea, I found architect Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio.nl who has been designing amphibious houses.

A cross between a house built on piers and one that floats, the amphibious house rests on piles when the water level is low. When the water rises, the buoyant foundation lets the house come loose from the piles and float. When the water level recedes, the house slowly sinks back onto the piles. Source: Washington Technology

Amphibious Home

Floating homes are not a new idea. We’ve had houseboats moored to piers for many years. The amphibious homes are more than houseboats. They are built on a concrete and foam platform in a factory, allowing the homes to be mass produced by skilled artisans. Because of the concrete platform the homes can be built much larger than your typical houseboat. By building the homes in a factory, materials and construction skills can be controlled with total quality management.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. How true, how true. Floating or amphibious homes might not be revolutionary, but they are certainly innovative. And it will be these kinds of innovations, ones that work with - rather than against nature, that will secure our future.