This Sky-High Building Design Casually Hangs From An Asteroid
The latest high-rise design doesn’t just scrape the sky, it literally falls from it.
Living in a building that hangs from space might sound like science fiction; however a New York firm has published a design that explores that very concept. Appropriately labeled "speculative" on their website, Clouds Architecture Office has come up with a high-rise building that would hypothetically be suspended from an orbiting asteroid. Yes, really. For those instantly dreaming about living about the earth, the bottom would reach close enough to the ground for residents to parachute to the surface. The firm has proposed Dubai as a potential place to build the tower, citing that the city "has proven to be a specialist in tall building construction at one fifth the cost of New York City construction."
While suspending anything from any kind of celestial body piques a whole lot of interest, Clouds AO have cited recent missions from the European Space Agency that they say prove that "it's possible to rendezvous and land on a spinning comet." They also say that "NASA has scheduled an asteroid retrieval mission for 2021 which aims to prove the feasibility of capturing and relocating an asteroid."
According to their idea, if we could harness an asteroid and pull it into a geosynchronous equatorial orbit (a stable circular orbit that follows the Earth's rotation), steel cables could then be attached to the asteroid, and a tower suspended from them. The building would then hover in a figure-eight motion daily, moving between the northern and southern hemispheres. Business would be conducted on the lower levels, with the middle section classed as residential. As for what happens above that, "devotional activities are scattered along the highest reaches."
There are just a few points to be taken into account, unsurprisingly. The proposal includes transfer stations to load and unload people and goods, but how this could be done with a building moving literally at an astronomical pace is debatable. While infographics in the proposal show aeroplanes safely manoeuvring around the tower, having just one object moving through the air consistently with no vertical break would be sure to wreak havoc on global flight paths, let alone if more towers were built. Finally, if the tower is constantly in motion, what happens if a resident parachutes to earth for work and then forgets that they left their earphones at home? Are they left to face the rest of the day without jams?
The firm has also noted that "there is probably a tangible height limit beyond which people would not tolerate living due to the extreme conditions," meaning that it's pretty tough to be outside the troposphere without some kind of spacesuit. It doesn't really bother Clouds AO, though, as astronauts do it all the time "so perhaps it's not so bad?"
Even with those issues, the proposed idea is a maverick design that really pushes the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of architecture. It also demonstrates that new research inspires new technology which, in turn, changes the way we build our world. While the Analemma Tower might not be built in our lifetimes, its design goes to show that we'll always keep reaching for the stars.
Via: Dezeen. Images: Clouds Architecture Office.
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