Matthew Butcher launches floating weather station on Essex's Thames Estuary

This floating weather station by Matthew Butcher has been cast adrift in the flood-prone Thames Estuary, and is intended as a critique on the current trend for floating architecture

Designed by Butcher , a lecturer at London architecture school the Bartlett , Flood House aims to monitor tide fluctuations in the seasonally flooded landscape of southern England where the River Thames meets the North Sea. The angular ply and weatherboard structure measures 5.5 metres by 7.5 metres and floats on three steel pontoons. Without a motor on board, it will be towed from site to site by a tugboat.

"Its design is reminiscent of some of the architecture – pillboxes , the bunkers, the fishing sheds – the kind of weird infrastructure that you get all along that coast," Butcher told Dezeen in an interview about floating architecture .