The ocean is full of infrastructures that once sounded crazy. With his almost 400 meters in length the ship Ever Given would surely sound like science fiction to any 19th century engineer, as would the ability of the Blue Marlin to transport infrastructure the size of an aircraft carrier or the gigantic dimensions of the ship’s engine Emma Maerskwhich at 13.5 meters high and 27 meters long looks more like a mansion than a machine.
In naval engineering the limit is your imagination. Or, if the technique still does not allow you to translate the idea into reality, wait long enough.
The Italian designer must have thought something similar Pierpaolo Lazzarinifrom the Lazzarini studio, who in 2009 began to think about a crazy idea: building a floating megacitya gigantic structure capable of hosting tens of thousands of people, hotels, commercial spaces, parks and even facilities for aircraft and other smaller vessels in the middle of the ocean.
Breaking the mold
Not only that. Already starting to dream – Lazzarini must have thought – why not give it the appearance of a terayate, a boat format so large that it surpasses the super, mega or even “gigayacht” categories. And curling the curl a little more: Why not design that mass to look like a sea turtle?
It seems crazy, but that’s what came out of the workbench of Lazzarini, a studio that has already made headlines for its designs. dream vehicles, luxury boats, flying devices either architectural proposals floating.
Of course, without the caliber of his latest idea.
His proposal is called Pangeos and was presented as nothing more nor less than an immense “itinerant floating city”a chelonian-shaped vessel of 550 meters in length and a beam of 610 m at its widest point, measurements that would make it a true titan of the seas, much larger than the Ever Giventhe transatlantic Wonder of the Seas or even the Seawise Giant.
“At the moment it’s just a concept, but it’s starting to become more than just computer animation,” Lazzarini recognizedwhich launched an online dossier with images and videos. In an attempt to go further, in 2023 its promoters promoted an NFT crowdfunding to sell “virtual spaces”.
All in all, it does not seem that Pangeos will become a reality in the short term.
The studio estimates that shaping its project would cost around 8 billion dollars and the work that would last about eight years. Once finished it would become “the largest floating structure ever built”, with 60,000 accommodations. Its hull will be divided into 30,000 floating cells.
Its wings are designed to get energy of the resistance and the waves that break against the hull and along its roof there would be solar panels that would supply it with energy. The vessel, with a draft of approximately 30 meters, would be capable of moving at a speed of five knots.
Building a record structure requires record resources. Not only because of the enormous amount of funds and work that Pangeos would need. Giving it shape will require a huge shipyard—”tera shipyard,” he points out—in which they have also thought.
The idea is to have a facility with a dock that can be flooded to allow it to float once the yacht is finished. The structure designed by the studio would 650 meters wide by 600 long and would have its own access to the sea. As for where, those responsible have opted for Saudi Arabia, a location located about two kilometers from the King Abdullah Harbor.
Although Pangeos is fascinating and its structure seems straight out of a science fiction movie, it is not the first floating community project. Long before Lazzari, other studios embarked on the adventure of designing their own traveling cities. One of the most recent is the MV Narrativean exclusive residential ship of 229 meters in length and 547 “residences-cabins”.
The crown of the projects, however, goes to another structure worthy of the most fertile imaginations: the enormous Freedom Shipa boat designed for 100,000 passengers. Norman Nixon launched the proposal in the 90s, but so far he has not managed to put his impressive infographics into practice.
They all share the same basic ingredient: ambition and imagination.
Images | Lazzarini Design Studio
In Xataka | This is Freedom Ship, the megaship designed to become a floating city with 100,000 passengers
*An earlier version of this article was published in November 2022
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