An Archipelago of Temporary Floating Habitats, 2023

The water levels of Prespa Lake have been declining over the last 30 years, having decreased

by approximately 313 centimeters to this day. The reasons behind these changes are dierent and demonstrated in various forms, such as increased air temperatures, decreased relative humidity, amplified evaporation, augmented cloudage, and reduced levels of sunlight, all of them not only being the result of the eects of climate change, but also of the use of water for irrigation systems by the three countries and the influx of polluting nutritional and dangerous substances.

The idea behind An Archipelago of Temporary Floating Habitats is to develop an archipelago of floating facilities intended for coexistence between people, animals and plants and make  of natural materials that will be able to adopt to the water levels in case of further water withdrawals. This archipelago is composed of rafts tailor-made for people, animals and plants according to their needs, as an attempt to both support the preservation of the biodiversity of Prespa Lake and the water purification through specific plants and offer the locality as a tourist destination, thus reducing the intensity of use of the water for  agricultural purposes. In this particular case, a single prototype is presented, intended only for plants and animals or for the species of birds known as terns.

The project was created in collaboration with Monozero Manufacturing and the architects Martina Peneva, Sara Ilievska, and Srna Davitkovska. Gratitude also goes to MES (Macedonian Environmental Society) and Ljupco Krstevski.