Helpful and considerate friends, knowing that I’m ageing rapidly and will be flung with force into that dark night soon, have been sending me information about potential retirement homes near and far. Personally I have my eye on the Poseidon Undersea Resort, imagined above, which will be 15 metres beneath the surface of the Pacific when it’s finished early next year.

It’s the brainchild of one L Bruce Jones, who evokes Jacques Cousteau many times on the resort’s website (which I must say is one of the swankiest pieces of real estate in cyberspace), but for some reason never once mentions “The Poseidon Adventure” starring Mr Ernest Borgnine.

The resort is off the shore of “Poseidon Mystery Island”, an entirely private isle with a 5,000-acre lagoon. It’s somewhere near Fiji, but that’s all they’re saying. It’s not even on any map, they add, and don’t be crankin’ up no Google Earth.

There will be 24 pressurised underwater suites that the tenants will get in and out of via an elevator. The surface of these units — now being built in Portland, Oregon — will be 70% clear acrylic so you can keep an eye out for mermaids, and when you don’t want the mermaids to see what you’re doing, you can cloud the windows with a special film. They don’t say which film, but it’s probably not “The Poseidon Adventure”.

You’ll be able to remotely feed the fish from your suite, and learn how to pilot a mini-submarine that’s capable of diving to 300 metres.

Above the water the resort will have another 28 suites, and on land, along the beach, 21 more.

This is touted as the world’s first underwater resort, and it’s going to have the world’s first revolving restaurant on the sea floor so the landlubbers can also have a look at the marine life, and the world’s first underwater wedding chapel.

I said “tenants”, but unfortunately for my retirement plans, this is only a hotel, so I’d be coughing up “rent” to the tune of $30,000 a week. (Talk to your CEO about renting the place for the next company junket: exclusive use for seven days at a mere $3 million!)

There’s an April 2008 update on this project here.

I like L Bruce Jones’ gusto and his unabashed self-confidence. He says his resort is small-scale, requiring “only” 4,000 guests a year, so it’s all very doable. Unlike, he says, the underwater cities that others are planning, like Panama 2000 and Dubai’s $1.5-billion Hydropolis, “if it ever gets built”.

Hmmm. Crescent Hydropolis Resorts Plc has actually already started building “the world’s first luxury underwater hotel” 20 metres below the briny waves lapping Dubai’s Jumeirah Beach. Guests will be transported by train through a tunnel to the hotel, where 220 suites sprawl across an area the size of London’s Hyde Park. There’ll be a ballroom, cosmetic-surgery clinic, a marine research lab, conference facilities, restaurant, cinema … the Michael Jackson Playhouse (I’m just guessing about that).

Designbuild-Network.com has the price tag at £300 million, which isn’t $1.5-billion, is it? It also says this one will open at the end of this year, so the race is on!

Joachim Hauser, the developer and designer of Hydropolis, who sounds a lot like Captain Nemo when he gets rambling about utilising the sea, worked for the German space agency, where he dreamed up the first space-tourism hotel. Obviously space tourism is going nowhere fast at $20 million per seat, so it’s into the drink with Joachim and the lusty spenders in the Dubai government.

As far as I can tell from the Net, Aqua Resort Panama 2000 — a 120-room underwater hotel with a theme park — remains dead in the water, so to speak. It does seem a little far-fetched for Panama.

Nothing is too far-fetched for Dubai, of course. Lydia recently sent me a snarkily jocular Powerpoint thingie she’d received about the emirate’s crazy architecture. Money grows on trees there as fast as they can plant them. We’ve all seen video of the Burj Al Arab Hotel sailing out into the gulf, with Federer and Agassi and/or Nadal playing tennis up on the helipad, but even a breathtaking creation like that will soon look downright common in Dubai.

Gush magazine and Born Rich and many, many other websites have had a field day with the 400-million-dirham (that’s $109-million) Time Residences, the planet’s first fully rotating tower powered by sunlight, something they have almost as much of there as they do oil.

The tallest tower, biggest mall and largest man-made island … now this: 200 apartments on 30 floors, rotating through 360 degrees over the course of a week — at five millimetres per second, using “21 electic kettles’ worth of solar power”. There’ll be a line painted down the building aligned with 12 o’clock markings on the ground, so that passers-by can set their watches by it. Due to open early in ‘09.

Time Residences, designed by Britain’s Glenn Howells Architects, is not to be confused with the 175-million-dirham Rotating Residence tower already under construction, which is going to have 72 residential units, with four rotating penthouses and a rotating villa with its own car lift.

If you’re not a swinger, reservations are now being taken for Ocean Heights and the doubled-up Park Towers, pictured here, which will overlook … well, everything, of course.

The 250-metre U-Bora Tower Complex will have office and retail space as well as residential, with, get this, 1,100m² offices below the 2,000m² offices. Seventy per cent of the office space will be in the top half of the tower! This sounds dangerous to me.

Work has commenced on the 170-metre Iris Bay, a commercial tower with “two identical, double-curved, pixelated shells that are rotated and cantilevered over the podium”, whatever that means. One side is a continuous vertical curve punctuated by balconies, the other all glass, everything hovering over a four-storey mall.

And this is the 22-storey O-14 Tower they started building in December. The sheath is a 40- centimetre-thick concrete shell perforated by more than 1,000 openings to create a lace-like effect and serve as a sunscreen that’s open to light, air and sightseeing. There’ll be metre of space between the shell and the building proper, designed for a cooling “chimney effect”.

Well, Singapore may not have an oil gusher on every street corner, but it’s got plenty of dough and it can’t possibly spend all of it propping up the murderous Burmese junta, so it’s going to build a “floating tower”. Stunning, wot?

According to a report by World Architecture News pointed out to me by Chris Frumplington, the money’s-no-problem Far East Organization has hired the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and Ole Scheeren to whip up this 36-storey apartment building, and don’t worry too much about the lobby.

Scotts Towers, so named because it will shroud Scotts Road in perpetual shadow, will be 153 metres tall and have 68 “high-end” (code for “forget about it”) apartment units. In authentic Southeast Asian fashion, no timeline is suggested for completion.

“The lifted apartment towers reduce the building’s footprint to a minimum,” Architecture News says. “The liberated ground level provides communal leisure activities embedded in the tropical landscape.”

So … there’ll be a playground for the kids directly below this thing.

I’m thinking I’ll get in touch with L Bruce Jones anyway and see if I can’t score a long-term deal at the Poseidon Resort, maybe a handyman’s flat or something. How much time would it take to scrape the odd barnacle off those pods?