Living on a drilling platform

If oil and gas extraction ends in the future, there will be about 150 unused drilling platforms in the North Sea. What can we do with them? Recent graduate Benjamin Kamper has a solution.

In his Master’s thesis project Running Out Of Gas On The Fast Lane, Benjamin Kamper (A+BE, Robotic Building) proposed using artificial intelligence to accommodate various residential functions on a discarded oil platform.

Work, recreation, living space, food supply, energy generation: everything was given its own colour while swarm intelligence arranged the spatial distribution of the functions and assigned more or less predetermined volumes or ‘spheres’ to them.

Kemper then covered the volumes with an external skeleton and connected them with pipes that have a connecting and supporting function. The whole is a bit like a bony, grown structure. Kemper sees parallels with Peter Cook’s Montreal Tower and the Atomium in Brussels. See more about this project here

Photo (c) Benjamin Kamper