One Life, One Love — the gathering on open water
Polen’s Notebook · My Graduation Project · A Future Ancestor Project
“A virtual structure. A media center, virtual residencies. No ego, yes to peace. Uniting the people of the planet, one big gathering platform. A twenty year old project, waiting to be realised.”
~ Polen Cerci
My architecture thesis, and the longest dream I have kept. A floating gathering place to unite the people of the planet, built for the ones who come after us.
by Future Ancestor · Polen Cerci
One Life, One Love is my graduation project. My architecture thesis, and the longest dream I have kept.
In my final year of architecture school, I drew a place that did not exist yet. Not a building. A gathering. I wanted a home for everyone at once, floating on open water, holding no flag and no single faith. The world felt divided then. It feels more divided now. So the drawing never left me.
At its heart sits a great glass media center, a dome resting on the sea. Four long arms reach out from it like open hands, one toward the mainland, the others toward the islands.
Along every arm float clusters of rooms, soft and round as bubbles. You walk out over the water to reach them. There is no back door, no hierarchy, no head of the table. Everyone arrives at the same center.
The arms hold the residencies. Glass domes lit from within, gardens under the shells, lounges that glow at dusk. People come from every corner of the planet and every belief, and for a season they live side by side.
The rule is simple, and it is the whole philosophy of the place. No ego. Yes to peace.
Inside the bubbles you find a rabbi and a monk, a scientist and a grandmother, a Sufi and a skeptic, sharing bread and argument and silence.
The architecture does the diplomacy. When the walls are transparent and the table is round, it is harder to make a stranger of anyone.
Beneath the vision is the discipline. I drew the bones of it in AutoCAD, every arm and every pod set out to scale, the geometry of coexistence made buildable.
A dream is only a wish until someone measures it.
A project like this would cost a hundred million dollars, and far more. When I drew it, I had no way to build it, only the conviction that it should exist.
Years after my thesis, I found The Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 by Patri Friedman with early backing from Peter Thiel, proposing permanent floating communities on the open sea. Something close to what I had already imagined, arriving years after I put mine on paper. It told me the dream was real, and that it was shared.
What was missing then was the means to begin. Perhaps now, with AI, One Life, One Love can finally find its way off the page and onto the water.
I think of this as a future ancestor project. I am building for the people who will inherit the earth after me, designing the room I want them to walk into. One life. One love. One planet, gathered.
One Life, One Love · a Future Ancestor project by Polen Cerci
Write to me
