xiangshawan desert

If we can imagine it, we can build it – the floating desert hotel
The Lotus Hotel in the Xiangshawan Desert, Mongolia

The Lotus Hotel in the Xiangshawan Desert, Mongolia

“Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. If you can dream it, you can make it so.”
– Belva Davis, Award-Winning Journalist

We are now living more and more in a world where, if we can imagine it, if we can visualise it, we can build or make it. The ‘floating’ hotel in the Xiangshawan desert in Mongolia uses a new technique (developed by Plat Architects) designed to work like a ship floating in the sand. Plat Architects explain it thus:

  • Due to the restriction by its special geography, we invented a new structural system that fix in fluid sand using only steel panels without the help of concrete or water. The panels and the supporting skeleton structures are pre-fabricated, and make the base of the building a large container for sand. Thus, the steel panel structure can function as a boat floating on desert that carries the building.
  • The materials from desert are used in interior design so that people get full experience of desert in Lotus Resort. For instance, through a series of experiments,  a wall-covering material is invented that is made of sand from local desert.

These are such exciting times in which we live; times that we can create a luxury resort in a place where 100 years ago it was too remote and dangerous for anyone to go. History 2.0, and the pursuit of new scientific processes, like cloning, is becoming reality. WGSN looks at current trends and forecasts where they may go in the future – that is what the History 2.0 document is about – and all of these innovations are exciting and have lots of potential for where they could go.

Things like 3D printers are making into reality what just a few decades ago would be thought of as science fiction. Why let our imaginations and brains run on separate plains? We need to totally revisit what is real, what can be made real and what should be made real (the last of these is perhaps the most difficult to approach, as the ethicality of innovation is something to seriously consider when we are able to create more and more outrageous things).

The floating desert hotel is just one way of visualising our dreams; dare to dream and who knows where you could go?