Voice of the Sea: A Glowing Underwater Beacon Drawn to the Rhythm of Whale Migration

Most underwater habitat proposals begin with the human: how much air, how much space, how far from shore. Voice of the Sea begins with a whale. In nearly every drawing, a humpback crosses the frame, and the architecture positions itself around it: a lit column on the seabed, a dome riding the swell, a cage of curved ribs that a diver and a whale share as equals. It is a project about coexistence before it is a project about shelter, and that order of priorities is both its strength and its limit.

Voice of the Sea is by Drina Cortez and is set in Bermuda. The proposal was Shortlisted at EHC - Pacific, a competition that asked entrants to consider how humans might inhabit the ocean.

A Migration Map Before a Floor Plan

The site drawing does not start at the building footprint. It layers a satellite view of ocean and coastline with thin route lines, cargo ships and labelled seasonal zones: feeding grounds, a migration corridor, nesting grounds. Below the waterline, the same sheet drops into a depth section, marking the continental shelf and soundings down to 9000 feet. Rock stacks break the surface while a whale's body hangs beneath them, and at the seabed a violet tower glows among sharks and divers.

This is the most persuasive sheet in the set, because it frames architecture as one more presence inside an already busy ecosystem. The shipping lanes and the whale routes cross on the same plane, and the proposal quietly argues that a habitat here must negotiate with both.

A Column of Light at the Bottom of a Canyon

The title render, subtitled "A Beacon of Hope," places a slender capsule on a mound of coral between two rock walls. Rings of purple light coil up its height like a spring, and a lit band of compartments sits near the base. Smaller versions of the same column hang in the distance, suspended by trailing tendrils that read as much like jellyfish as like structure.

The column works as a marker rather than a dwelling. Its value is in announcing human presence softly, through light instead of mass, in a place where a whale passes overhead at the same scale as the tower itself.

A Dark Shell Riding the Surface

Above water, the project shifts register. A low, ribbed dome floats on a moonlit sea, its slit openings glowing, while long streaks of reflected light run back toward the viewer. Pink smudges of colour sit just beneath the surface along those streaks, suggesting the submerged parts of the system. A whale's fluke breaks the water nearby, keeping the animal in every scene.

The dome's profile is squat and hydrodynamic, closer to a shell than a building. It reads as something designed to sit with the waves rather than resist them, though the drawing leaves the mechanics of that relationship to the imagination.

Ribs, Rings and an Empty Interior

The section cuts through a capsule clad in a copper-toned skin, revealing a white interior with a curved central chamber and a single suspended fixture. Below it, splayed struts gather into a looped ring studded with lights, and that ring continues into the open water. A second underwater view shows the same language in bronze: a fan of curved ribs, a pendant at the centre, and long arms of tubing that stretch across a trench while a whale glides through the frame and a diver hangs in the shaft of light below.

These drawings are where the form is most confident and the program is most absent. We see how the vessel holds itself in the water column, but not how anyone would sleep, eat or move through it. Begoña Fernandez-Shaw, who judged the competition, put the tension plainly:

Beautiful presentation but the proposal is not developed but for its exterior form.Begoña Fernandez-Shaw, Principal Partner, Rojo/Fernandez-Shaw Architects, Spain

Why This Project Matters

Voice of the Sea makes a clear case that an ocean habitat should be legible to the creatures already living there. By placing whale routes, shipping lanes and depth on a single sheet, and by keeping a whale in nearly every image, the project shifts the question from how humans survive underwater to how they share it. That framing is worth borrowing by anyone working on marine architecture.

The project is also a useful lesson in where presentation ends and design begins. The renders are atmospheric and memorable, and the form is distinctive at every scale, yet the interior remains an outline. The next step for a proposal like this is to bring the same care given to light, silhouette and ecology into the rooms themselves, so the beacon becomes a place as well as a signal.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Drina Cortez

Competition and award

Shortlisted, EHC - Pacific

Jury

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

Location

Bermuda

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