“This project began as a revision of naval architecture. Last semester’s research class, I was focused purely on the boat as a home, without considering the city it might be in. The city in question became the Chesapeake Bay, which is rapidly sinking. By gathering satellite images of shorefront houses that are most immediately at risk, I have narrowed them to 3 categories. The first is high density, almost always with a typical coastline, as this is the easiest for developers to build a traditional American suburban home, with a pier in the backyard and a street out front. The second is low density, still with a typical coastline. The final one is low density, with geographical features, sand bars, marshes, or spits of land that create a staggered or nonlinear progression from land to water. More importantly than any of this, perhaps, is the cultural relationship that we as humans have with the water. The richest relationship on the East Coast that has existed to date is that of the 18th and 19th century, when fishermen, sailors, and scoundrels set sail for months at a time. Leaving wives and children at home, these seaside towns kept their windows faced out to the infinite horizon, searching for a speck.

What was home for those sailors? Home is the weather you’re in, and hearth is the boat. The daily journeys are that of the sun and waves. Corridors are ladders. Roomy is not having to hunch. Sun is light, but it is also deathly heat. There is no immigration at sea. There are no government induced enclaves. There are countries and cultures, the individual wooden worlds. Sea is the blender. The ethnicities and proclivities of ancestors define your trinkets and your behaviors and those you let stay aboard for one more meal, they do not necessarily define your place.

The final driver of this project began as a polite disagreement between Erin and I, she pushed me to think outside the boat. We eventually realized that seeing the world that this thesis lived in as two sided, land and sea, flattened the indeterminist potential that setting sail has. Instead, to convince those afflicted by sea level rise to run into the waves and not the hills, I have designed a process in which the landlubber melts down his stable home and builds a new domesticity at sea. Over many moons, architecture is rethought. The beginning of air and end of water is all that matters. The heavy hearths abide by the rules of buoyancy, they lay along this horizontal divide. The light frame, free to go where it wants, stretches vertically above and below. Drawing up stencils of ribs and stretching a skin of fiber and resin between them, a home has been created, cutting through the water at bow and stern yet bulging to bear whatever the creator has decided. By throwing a tarp over the frames and putting a bed below decks, there is a spectrum now between exposure and enclosure. There is another spectrum here; community and isolation.”