Lenka Petráková is a Slovak architect who designed a breathtaking floating ocean cleaning and research facility named 8th Continent as her thesis project back in 2017. Recently, her project started making rounds again after the Jacques Rougerie Foundation awarded the project the 2020 Grand Prix Award for Architecture and Innovation of the Sea.

According to the architect, the name 8th Continent comes from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is often nicknamed “The 8th Continent”. Lenka says that the object combines a research and education facility with an ocean plastic recycling center. “The project uses marine science and knowledge to showcase the increasingly troubling side of marine environments, not as a new phenomenon, but as the result of centuries of human – ocean interactions,” explains the architect. “This unique meeting platform should bring people to this distant environment and fight against the dilution that we cannot hurt the ocean by our action onshore.”