The Hovering Building: A Circular Exhibition Complex Suspended Over Water

What if an entire building could float? Not literally, but perceptually: a series of cylindrical volumes raised above turquoise water, connected by lattice bridges, their rooftops thick with gardens. The Hovering Building takes that provocation seriously, proposing a circular exhibition complex where craft, education, and leisure orbit one another inside a tubular structure that seems to defy its own weight. The geometry is continuous, looping visitors through galleries, workshops, libraries, and even an underwater cinema without ever breaking the spatial rhythm.

Designed by Khadidja Moussa Abakar, Dana Amro, and Farbod Fathi, the project was submitted as a People's Choice Award entry for the Athenaeum competition. Sited along Rio de Janeiro's waterfront, the proposal leverages the city's coastal breezes for natural ventilation while orienting its primary volumes to frame harbor views. The program is aimed at craftspersons but opens generously to tourists and residents, making the building both a professional resource and a public destination.

Timber Lattice Ceilings and a Library That Breathes

Inside the library volume, diagonal timber beams weave into a lattice ceiling that filters light across white bookshelves and reading tables below. The structural pattern is not decorative afterthought; it organizes the roof span while giving the interior a rhythm that draws the eye upward and outward. Below this level, the basement opens into a curved, tiered seating area flanked by planted palms, with a suspended reading space hovering overhead. The section creates a productive tension between enclosure and openness: readers sit within a lush, semi-subterranean pocket while remaining visually connected to the floors above.

Terraces Framed by Triangulated Canopies

The outdoor terraces reveal how the building mediates between interior program and waterfront environment. A triangulated canopy structure frames glazed volumes against the sky, offering shade without sealing off Rio's breezes. From the waterfront terrace, dining furniture sits beneath geometric overhead framing, and the view extends across the harbor to the interconnected volumes beyond. These in-between spaces are critical to the project's logic: they ensure that moving through the complex never feels like corridor marching. Instead, each transition offers a moment of open air, a shift in light, a new angle on the water.

Stacked Volumes, Lattice Bridges, and the Harbor Crossing

The elevation rendering makes the project's ambition legible in a single frame. Stacked volumes clad in timber sit on either side of the harbor, linked by a lattice bridge that stretches over turquoise water. The bridge is not merely connective tissue; it is inhabitable space, continuing the exhibition program across the gap. The timber cladding unifies the complex visually while signaling the project's material commitment to sustainability alongside its solar panels and green roofs.

Rooftop Gardens and the Radiating Canopy

At roof level, circular planted beds are arranged beneath a radiating canopy structure, transforming what could be dead space into a productive landscape. The green roof is not just environmental performance; it gives the building a visible fifth facade, relevant for a structure designed to be seen from surrounding waterfront promenades and elevated vantage points across the harbor. The axonometric drawing clarifies the overall composition: cylindrical volumes with lattice walls and an undulating roof sit alongside a waterfront plaza, anchoring the project to its public edge. The drawing reveals the programmatic density packed inside the circular forms, from gallery and retail spaces to craft shops enriched with virtual reality, meeting rooms, auditoriums, and outdoor reading areas.

Why This Project Matters

The Hovering Building treats sustainability and spectacle as complementary rather than competing goals. Solar panels, green roofs, and natural ventilation driven by Rio's breezes are embedded into a form that is genuinely exciting to look at and move through. The circular geometry is not arbitrary: it generates continuous circulation that keeps visitors oriented while eliminating dead-end corridors, a real functional benefit in a complex with this many overlapping programs.

More ambitiously, the project asks what a building for craftspersons could look like if it rejected the warehouse-as-default model. By floating workshops, galleries, and cinemas above water and connecting them with inhabitable bridges, the design argues that the spaces where people learn and make things deserve the same spatial generosity typically reserved for museums and cultural institutions. That conviction, carried through every level from underwater cinema to rooftop garden, is what makes the proposal worth paying attention to.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Khadidja Moussa Abakar, Dana Amro, Farbod Fathi, Athenaeum

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Project credits: The Hovering Building by Khadidja Moussa Abakar, Dana Amro, Farbod Fathi, Athenaeum.