The floating lily community - Process

This week has been very interesting. We chose to work with the Amazon water lily and focus on the reality of seasonal flooding and the challenges that presents to local communities.

The lily plant holds many interesting solutions, one of them being the intelligent management of material to create a stable structure. The leaf of the plant is actually stable enough to hold a human being standing on top of it without collapsing.

Inspired by this, we looked at the structure of the lily leaf's vein structure to understand how this worked. It shows an amazing handling of loads through a 360 degree branching system that divide the force equally in many parts of the surface, thereby making it stable.

We also looked at the structuring of the plant leaves, and got inspired by the centralized anchor and the surrounding branches of leaves connecting to it.

From this, we got the idea to recreate the leaf in a scale that could construct small communities. The leaf structure in itself would be used to create adaptability to flooding, and be stable horizontally, but able to move vertically with the fluctuating surface.

Here are some of our sketches from learning about the plant's biology and system!