A floating house is a watercraft with living quarters, designed more for comfort of habitation than for speed of movement on the water.

The essence of the phenomenon

Building technologies developed by the start of the 21st century make it possible to build housing on water that is no less comfortable than an apartment in a large metropolis. At the same time, the mobility and high energy independence of such housing resolves the question of an "economic base for an independently thinking, independent person" even in places such as Northern Eurasia, where entire segments of the economy had previously been closed to competition, and people depended on centralized networks for the distribution of resources, benefits and powers. In modern conditions, this reproduced dependent or artificially simplified models of relations between people in society — on a level scarcely different from ancient Egypt — making society as a whole uncompetitive and immersed in illusions.

To improve infrastructure and build community self-governance, the Volzhskaya Volnitsa (Volga Free Folk) project envisions the creation of Floating Cities made up of several floating houses.

A floating house on a pontoon barge

For the inland waterway system of the European part of the Russian Federation — one of the most extensive in the world, and at the same time one distinguished by the longest winter downtime (which makes freight and passenger navigation, unlike habitation, not especially profitable) — the concrete base of a classic pontoon barge is one of the best suited platforms for a floating apartment building, a floating mansion, or even a floating office center.

A barge base can support housing of any format and any degree of comfort — up to a 500-square-meter palatial mansion by interior floor area. On the secondary market, barges — of which a great many remain from the decommissioned hydrofoil fleet — can be bought at a relatively low price. Barges have been listed for both 15 and 7 million rubles. It is possible to negotiate an even lower price for an old barge. If you then refit it into four 100-square-meter apartments plus a shared boiler room, the resulting housing ends up on the market at a fully competitive price. In addition, several ship-repair enterprises that specialized in building barges remain in the Nizhny Novgorod Region from the old fleet, which makes it easier for a medium or large developer to set up new production for building and selling several such houses, as a way to diversify a development or shipbuilding business.

Advantages of a barge-house

  • Resistance to the coldest winters, including being frozen into the ice. The only requirement, on a river with ice drift, is to moor such a house for the winter in a backwater or away from the main flow of ice.
  • Convenient to transport with a standard river tugboat.
  • Convenient to use as a mooring or even a whole cargo terminal (while still leaving room for comfortable living) for ships, yachts and motorboats.

The floating boat-house

A floating boat-house is built on pontoons and placed on a lake or in a backwater. It will not survive ice drift on an open river, but will happily sit out the winter "frozen in" on still water. Such a house suits fishermen well, and people whose profession keeps them on or near a body of water.

Advantages of a boat-house:

  • Low cost
  • A fully individual design

Motorboats and yachts of the "floating dacha" type

These offer a high degree of mobility, but are uncomfortable (or energy-intensive) during the cold season, which in our climate is quite long. As far as permanent residence on the water is concerned, they suit as a complement to any type of "winter" floating house.

The Lavang company's floating concrete townhouse

Lavang is a curious company from Yekaterinburg run by enthusiasts who publish, right on the corporate website, their unsophisticated bits of social commentary, inspired for the most part by watching mainstream political broadcasts — which brings to mind Levsha from the amusing late-Soviet cartoon: "They don't clean their rifles with brick dust!" the craftsman shouted at an official as unmovable as a Zen Buddhist priest, without realizing just how uninterested that official was in any change.

That said, the "Houseboat" design the company offers is quite interesting. The company offers a new construction of such a house for 7 million rubles; it can be split into 3 or 4 two-story segments and put on the market at a perfectly reasonable price. The house is more compact than a barge, but, being a concrete structure, is fairly resistant to outside wear. One point that raises questions is that in its later structures the company switched from a concrete bottom to a polymer one. It would be interesting to know what operational problem drove that change, and whether it will limit the house's use to small isolated Ural lakes rather than large bodies of water.

See also

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