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In 1967, Buckminster Fuller developed plans for a tetrahedronal floating structure called Triton City. Commanding and futuristic, the project was a commission by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for low-income residences that could float off the coasts of major American cities. While Fuller’s design was pronounced “waterworthy” by Navy inspectors, it never got past the model stage.

Yet interest in floating architecture has grown rapidly in recent years, spurred by global climate change and an international buliding boom. Fifteen years ago, Dubai’s coastline was less than 40 miles in length, but frenzied construction of spectacular residential islands in the territorial waters will soon increase it to as much as 510 miles. Most of the proposed waterfront homes will be floating, and in Dubai, almost all these new structures are designed, built, and sold by the Dutch. Nearly two-thirds of the Netherlands lies below sea level, and Dutch urban design and architecture boast a centuries-long tradition of managing water. In fact, in 2000 in Kinderdijk, Netherlands, I devised the “Amphibious Living” project: a design competition that called for the “abandonment of the compulsive control of water, for the acceptance of climatic influences, tides, and seasons in the living environment.”

Two of Dubai’s current Dutch-designed waterbound projects are truly extraordinary. One design firm is developing a floating mosque. Seawater will be channeled throughout the mosque’s thick walls and floors, providing a natural cooling system. Another Dutch company has plans to construct a chain of floating residential islands around the famous tree-shaped island Palm Jebel Ali, which will spell out fragments of poetry by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. (One of his lines that will become an island reads: “Not everyone who rides a horse is a jockey.”)

Officials from New Orleans have also kept an eye on Dutch advances, visiting the Netherlands’ first amphibious houses in the town of Maasbommel. Completed in 2005, the string of 46 brightly painted two-story floating homes are each built with cellars and are pierced by two steel columns. The cellars make them buoyant, and they rise and fall with the level of the river. Lessons from Maasbommel have translated well: Make It Right, Brad Pitt’s green housing initiative in New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward, includes plans for a similarly designed floating house by the Los Angeles firm Morphosis.

Back in the Netherlands, more and more expansion plans reserve plots for floating dwellings in developments with names such as “Water Gardens,” “Blue City,” or “Gold Coast.” Thanks to a number of “water villas” being realized by respected architects like Herman Hertzberger and Art Zaaijer (and the introduction of tailor-made mortgages), living on water has transcended the world of adventurers and odd-jobbers and has become socially desirable, symbols of their inhabitants’ freedom and independence. Architecture firms (Aquatecture is one) are also capitalizing on this trend. Floating houses are becoming so popular that sometimes artificial lakes are built to host them. In the economically weak region of East Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands, a public-private partnership is developing a 1,976-acre expanse of agricultural land that has been reflooded in order to establish an ideal residential and recreational environment. And it’s not just for residences; there are also plans for office buildings that swim.

Fuller’s initial utopian vision for low-income housing tethered to coastal cities might have its successor in a bizarre proposal by the rising Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. Callebaut, whose practice is dedicated to ecologically responsible designs, came up with a prototype for Lilypad, an “ecopolis” that can house up to 50,000 people. Designed to resemble the giant aquatic plant Amazonia Victoria Regia, Lilypad is a completely carbon-emissionsfree, self-sufficient metropolis. Time will tell whether Callebaut’s vision will be realized, but as projects from the morphing Dutch landscape to Dubai’s poem-on-the-sea attest, the demand for seaworthy urban arks is on the rise and keeping pace, one hopes, with our global sea levels.