Finalist at Radical Innovation awards wants to build aquaponics hotel

Varinot & Varinot Architectes

The annual Radical Innovation Award competition always features elaborate and imaginative hotel designs, including water-powered resorts on mountaintops and rooms in flying glass pods. 

This year, one of the finalists created a hotel design centered on aquaponics — a system that combines raising fish and cultivating plants in water. Excretions from the fish can increase the toxicity of the water, but this water is fed to the plant system, where bacteria turn the by-products intro nutrients for the plants. The water is purified by the time it returns to the aquatic system at the end of the closed cycle. 

Varinot & Varinot Architectes, a firm based in France, wants to apply this closed loop model to hotels by recycling rainwater throughout the building. The circulation would provide water to aquariums, flowers, and vertical produce farms within the hotel.

Radical Innovation Award winners will be announced on October 3. In the meantime, take a look at some of the renderings for the Aquaponic Experience Hotel.