yacht design » house boat

With the price of land going from crazy to ridiculous I've decided that only 'house with a sea view' I'm likely to ever be able to afford (without selling my soul to a bank, of course) is a house boat. So I thought I'd design one. And not a normal, boring one, either - a geodesic one!

It all began a long time ago when I built several kinds of 'geodesic' frame using a kit set (Astro-logix) I'd bought. I was struck by the strength of one type of frame in particular, an icosahedron (an object with 12 vertices, 30 edges and 20 faces). This sat in the back of my brain for a good, long time and then resurfaced when I started to think about what my ideal house boat might look like. A single icosahedron is not a very useful space, but a pair of them ... now we were getting somewhere. With some further embellishments I came up with the following design concept:

wire-frame

shaded

The next step involved coming up with a way to help me visualise the design concept in a more detailed way. There was nothing for it but to build a model. This involved a lot of MDF, time, glue and paint ...

plan (from underneath)

side elevation

oblique 1

oblique 2

oblique 3

As you can probably see I didn't quite get the nose and tail junctions correct - but that's why we build models first, right! And now I've got something that I can walk around to help take this idea further. The next step is to try to come up with an efficient way that this house boat might be constructed - specifically, a generic framing element and hub system. Stay tuned ...