Floating hotel - Sigge Architects

World cup football fans to be housed in floating hotels

Thousands of 'refreshed' fans celebrating their team's 2022 success in the sea - what could possibly go wrong?

Hosting big sporting events offers that heady cocktail of fabulous opportunity and major headache. The Brits know that from London 2012 Olympics and the art-imitating-life spoof TV documentary Twenty Twelve.

No wonder, then that the Qataris are scratching their heads over their contr0versial hosting of the 2022 World Cup. Yes, they’ve brought in Zaha Hadid to work her magic on their stadium design, but what about accommodating all those football fans? There’s a drastic shortage of hotel beds in the Emirate, apparently.

Luckily, help is at hand from the Finnish city of Turku. There, the 60-year-old architecture firm Sigge has thought up a way of holding all these visitors in floating hotels. Their idea being both green and sustainable wouldn't be out of place in our Vitamin Green book - furthermore, being modular it can easily be customised for the client. Apparently, the Qatari powers that be are also enamoured with the hotels’ relative independence, in that each would have its own sewage treatment, power generation and recycling facilities.

 

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Sigge is best known for its projects in its homeland, along with the Finnish Embassy in Berlin. And this proposal could be good news for them, as they lost out with their proposal for a 2022 stadium for Qatar. This time round, they seem to have chosen the best possible partners in Global Accommodation Management, which describes itself as “leading the alternative real estate field with the latest innovations in floating accommodations”.

 

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GAM and Sigge claim they could put up thousands of guests in these hotels. Each large, glazed pod would be linked to the mainland by boats and Qatar’s new transit lines. Interestingly, the pods themselves would be attached to a massive artificial island, Oryx, which is being constructed off the coast of Doha. Designed by HOK and ABS Architects, it’s already promising five temporary floating hotels, presumably Sigge’s creations would be attached to them.

In theory it’s a clever solution, which would get the Qatari’s out of a tight corner, so to speak. All they need is a sea captain with the combined skills of Barbarossa, Themistocles, Nelson, Togo and Spruance to police things and we're sure it'll all go swimmingly. . . 

 

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