Bauhaus of the Seas Sails

Summary

The vision of the BoSS project is to demonstrate and archive solutions for climate neutrality with a particular focus on coastal cities as an interface to healthy seas, oceans and water bodies, envisioning a new triangle of sustainability, inclusion, and design focused on the most critical global natural space. The BoS will offer opportunities to engage with communities for an environmentally sustainable, socially fair, and aesthetically appealing transition. Seven lighthouse demonstrators, located in four different regions and aquatic ecosystems in Portugal (estuary), Italy (lagoon and gulf), Sweden/Germany (strait/North Sea/river), and the Netherlands/Belgium (delta) will showcase the transformational and uptake impact at the EU level serving as lighthouse pilots for the implementation of Horizon Europe mission objectives and showcase innovative solutions. The seven pilots will all provide tangible examples of mission-oriented approaches that are impactful, measurable, and targeted. The action plan includes the deployment of “drops” in all pilots designed to generate “ripple” effects at the local (demonstrator) level but then also at the city/region levels (demonstrating effects of scale) and at a broader level (showing the replication. The BoSS, therefore, introduces an ecocentric narrative that is both cosmopolitan and rooted in nature-based solutions, plural and testimonial, proposing a design approach to complex socio-technical-ecological and more-than-anthropocentric problems. An agenda that moves from fixing to caring, growth to nurture, and certainty to contingency will enable designers, architects, and engineers to think about assemblages instead of systems and change the outcome from extinction to precarious flourishing. The design of these interactions generates new aesthetics and, most decisively, a critical awareness of the history, contemporary, and future: designing beyond humans to sustain our future.