A bright yellow disc the size of a backyard swimming pool is floating up the Schuylkill River this week, and it’s about to change how Philadelphians experience the water.
FloatLab, a 75-foot-wide circular platform, arrived near the Platt Bridge on the morning of Wednesday, June 10, before a tugboat guided it to its permanent home at Bartram’s Garden, reports Cherise Lynch for NBC 10 Philadelphia.
The platform’s arrival caps a journey ten years in the making.
After launching from North Carolina on May 21, FloatLab made its way north by barge and tugboat, inching toward a city that has spent the last decade reimagining its riverfront.
Designed by artist J. Meejin Yoon and Höweler + Yoon Architecture in partnership with Bartram’s Garden and Mural Arts Philadelphia, the structure is being dubbed the first tide-responsive public space in the United States.
An innovative ballast system lets the platform rise and fall with the river’s tides, meaning the experience shifts with the water itself.
Beginning this fall, visitors to Bartram’s Garden and the Bartram’s Mile stretch of the Schuylkill River Trail will be able to meet the river at eye level, a vantage point most city dwellers never get.
Once open, FloatLab will be free to the public, hosting workshops, outdoor art programs, kayaking, fishing and other riverfront activities.
NBC 10 Philadelphia has the full story behind FloatLab’s decade-long journey north, the engineering that lets it move with the river, and what visitors can expect when its doors open this fall.
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