Aquadapt: An Underwater Habitat That Rewrites Its Rooms by the Hour

Underwater, every cubic metre is hard won. Each one must be pressurised, lit, ventilated and defended against the sea, so a room that sits empty for twenty hours a day is an expensive luxury. Most visions of life below the surface answer that pressure by shrinking the room. Aquadapt answers it by refusing to let any room keep a single job.

Aquadapt is an underwater habitat designed by Paweł Swacha, Jakub Koźlik, Daniel Stawicki and Magdalena Niewiadomska. It received the People's Choice Award at EHC - Pacific. The team frames the project around adaptability of function, so the space follows the current needs of its inhabitants. They pair it with a social aim: a place where residents feel safe underwater and can build modern communities by living together and cooperating.

One Curved Module, Three Shifts a Day

The clearest argument in the project is a sequence of three cutaway drawings of the same curved module. In the morning it behaves like a compact apartment: a shared dining table at the centre, a kitchen tucked beside it and a sleeping cabin closed off at the far end. By day the partitions move. The dining set disappears and lounge chairs take its place, while standing figures gather in a room that now reads as a common lounge. By evening the module opens into one long social floor, with counters, a round pendant lamp and figures holding drinks.

What stays still is as telling as what moves. Across the drawings the small compartments at one end of the module, the wet rooms, hold their position. Only the open floor beside them changes. That is a sensible split for a pressurised vessel: fix the plumbing and services, then free up everything else. The scalloped ribs running along the top of the hull repeat unchanged above each scene, a reminder that the structure stays constant while the program turns over beneath it.

Furniture That Rises From the Floor and Drops From the Ceiling

A room that changes three times a day needs somewhere to put its furniture. The team's functional layout drawing shows that place: dense shelving grids built into the floor and ceiling plates. In the upper pair the two layers stay closed and flat, leaving clear standing room between them. In the lower pair, blocks of shelving descend from above and rise from below to form tables, stands and storage at body height.

This is where the adaptability stops being a diagram and becomes a mechanism. Rather than relying on furniture that must be carried away and stored, the module treats its own slab and soffit as a reserve of objects. The idea is strong. Its weakness is that the drawing shows two states and not the in-between, so how these elements are operated, secured and maintained in a pressurised hull is left for a later stage.

Cinema, Farm, Playground: The Same Shell Over Longer Cycles

The daily cycle is only the first layer. Three more drawings stretch the same hull over longer time spans. As a cinema, rows of seated figures fill the module's whole length and face a screen wall. As a farm, the floor fills with trays of seedlings and the far end carries tiered vertical growing racks. As a playground, the floor becomes a marked court where figures play football. In each case the module's outline does not change at all.

The farm scenario is the most important of the three, because it shows a community growing some of its own food in its own living space. The playground matters for a different reason. It admits that people living underwater need room to run, not only to sleep and eat. Read together, the six scenarios describe a settlement that schedules its rooms the way a town schedules a community hall.

A Ring on Stilts, Rooted Like a Plant

Pull back from the interiors and the module turns out to be a segment of something larger. The main rendering shows a multi-tiered ring of curved tubes standing on thin stilts above the seabed. Its levels are offset from one another, and the lit windows trace each tier through the blue haze. Further off, similar platforms appear as faint silhouettes, which suggests that one ring is meant to sit among many. The circular plan keeps the community facing inward, with every unit looking across a shared void.

Begoña Fernandez-Shaw, who judged the competition, singled out this collective logic and the way the structure meets the ground. She also named the project's thinnest layer:

This proposal is different as it works mainly not as a unit but as a group of units. The adaptability of the spaces is also very interesting in such a reduced frame. It is also interesting the way it is anchored to the sea ground, almost like a plant. It also addresses issues of energy, food and air supply but it is not very developed.Begoña Fernandez-Shaw, Principal Partner, Rojo/Fernandez-Shaw Architects, Spain

Why This Project Matters

Aquadapt moves the underwater habitat debate away from the heroic single capsule and towards the ordinary rhythms of a neighbourhood. Its real proposal is a timetable, not a shape. The same curved room serves as breakfast table, lounge, bar, cinema, farm and pitch, and the drawings make that case so clearly that a reader can follow it without a word of text. For any environment where enclosed volume is costly, from the seabed to dense cities on land, that is a transferable lesson.

The project is also honest about where it is still incomplete. As the jury comment notes, energy, food and air supply are raised but not fully developed. The retracting furniture likewise remains a promising diagram that has yet to be tested in detail. Even so, the core insight holds. A community underwater will depend less on how much space it can build than on how many lives each space can hold, and Aquadapt designs directly for that.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Paweł Swacha, Jakub Koźlik, Daniel Stawicki, Magdalena Niewiadomska

Competition and award

People's Choice Award, EHC - Pacific

Jury

Begoña Fernandez-Shaw, Principal Partner, Rojo/Fernandez-Shaw Architects, Spain

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