MANGROON HOUSEBOAT
La Parguera in Puerto Rico is a beautiful natural site surrounded by mangroves that provide many benefits including stabilizing the coastline, water quality protection, and shelter to a variety of wildlife. The design happens among the mangroves, exploring the urban and architectural scale to create a floating city as an extension to the existing land community that has already developed a hybrid lifestyle living along the coast. The city contains a sustainable decking system that imitates the biological structure of a mangrove root section. The decks cluster the floating houses that are mobile and capable to re-configure to a growing city. An outer layer of panels, inspired by the mangrove’s canopy, wraps around to protect it against storms and provide seamless integration with nature.
Site Analysis
Master Plan
The spread-out mangroves are enclosed and separated following the bio logical structure of a mangrove roo t section. The bubble-like structures define the space and create a pattern across the site that adapts to the mangrove layout. The points at which the circles intersect determine the best locations for the decking clusters.
Sustainable Decking System
The scientific perspective of observing a mangrove root section to connect architecture with its environment inspired the floating deck's circular pattern. This floating deck is composed and designed following the root's biology. The sustainable elements increase its independent functionality from external sources. Each decking variation has an external agroponic farm for local farmers to sell their goods at the floating markets, has radial solar panel organization for recharging boats and markets, and has an internal natural pool at the core's pavilion. The pavilion's roof oculus allows natural light into its interior and reflects into the pool. This structure acting as a nucleus is the center piece for each branching decking structure.
Floor Plans
Architectural Elements
Residential and Market Houseboats
Houseboat Plans
First Floor Plan
Second Floor Plan
Roof Plan
The ground floor is all opened to its environment where the kitchen opens to its external living room. The ceiling’s tall height imitates the longevity of mangrove roots. The second floor features the house's private rooms and living room. An interior set of moving curtains divide the spaces into different configurations. One finds the outer porous retractable panel mesh protecting the interior curtain wall. The house’s canopy or mesh forms into an exterior balcony allowing cross ventilation and natural light. Lastly, the roof plan is accessible from its exterior ladder staircase.
Artboards
Elevations & Sections
Publications
| Designing for a Sustainable Future
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Second-place winner Vanessa de los Angeles Crespo and partner Ana Yu won 750 euros for their design of a houseboat compound in La Parguera, Puerto Rico . The project gave them a chance to explore how to build an entire ecosystem based on mangroves in the popular seaside town . Crespo is a native of the island.
“One of the challenges was that we had never built in the ocean,” said Crespo. “So, how can we build a sustainable city that is not terrestrial and fit our project among the mangroves?”
| Winners of Houseboat Contest Design Design Innovative Structures
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Second place winner Vanessa de los Angeles Crespo and partner Ana Yu won 750 euros. Their design was a houseboat compound in La Parguera in Puerto Rico, which integrated the topography of the area, including mangroves.
| Estudantes de arquitectura competem para construir a melhor
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In this competition, in which 16 students with individual and group work participated, three winners were selected, who, in addition to a monetary prize, will have the opportunity to meet the R&D department of Go Friday, in Portugal, where they presented, personally, the winning projects. "The Lantern House", by Lauren Elia, was the winning project, followed in second place "The Mangroon", by the duo Vanessa Crespo and Anan Yu and, third, "Aria", by Tiffany Agam and Isacio Albir. The proposals presented by the young architecture students have in common the answer to a challenge: to create floating houses, designed from structures capable of facing climate change, adapting to the environment.
| Architecture students compete to build the best houseboat
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For Vanessa Crespo and Ana Yu, the project gave them a chance to explore how to build an entire ecosystem based on mangroves in Puerto Rico’s seaside town of La Parguera. Crespo is a native of the island.
The duo’s design was a two-story houseboat built with concrete and foam to provide buoyancy, an open first floor with columns, and a second floor lined with windows and trusses that are made of recycled plastic and can be shuttered in case of a storm.
“One of the challenges was that we had never built in the ocean,” said Crespo. “So, how can we build a sustainable city that is not terrestrial and fit our project among the mangroves?”
La Parguera, a popular tourist destination because of its cays and bioluminescent bays, already has a sizable number of houseboats, said Crespo. But they are stationary. Crespo and Yu’s structures would have motors to propel them into open water.
Their circular docking stations not only accommodate the houses but provided each with a small saltwater pool. To revitalize the area, the docks also will have a number of stations for markets as well as fishing farms and an area for agriculture, so that plants can grow using the surrounding water.
“La Pargura already has a tourism base, and we see our project as a way to extend that tourism,” said Yu.