You’re looking at that picture above and you’re thinking someone has gone a little wild with Photoshop.
We agree, it looks bonkers, but the futuristic skyscraper dubbed the “Analemma Tower” isn’t messing around with ordinary design constraints like being attached to the earth.
The building design means that it will hover above the ground because, and here we hand over to CNN, “it would be attached — wait for it — to an actual asteroid, in space, that is forcibly put into orbit around the Earth”.
And you thought our headline was cheeky.
The skyscraper is the brainchild of Clouds Architecture Office, so let’s get into the how and why:
The tower will be suspended via high-strength cabling from an asteroid and placed in “eccentric geosynchronous orbit”. In other words, it would be always moving — residents and visitors would take a daily journey between the northern and southern hemispheres with a prolonged visit over a main “home” point like New York City or Dubai (it’s always New York City or Dubai, isn’t it?)…
Analemma Tower’s designer Ostap Rudakevych told CNN that the tower could be made of durable and lightweight materials such as carbon fiber [sic] and aluminum.
Advances in cable engineering would be needed to achieve the cable strength required to support the structure. Power would come from space based solar panels that have a constant exposure to sunlight.
Water for the tower will be captured from clouds and rainwater and maintained in a semi-closed loop system.
As proposed the top of the tower sits at 32,000m and would be expected to reach speeds of 300mph as it travels through the sky.
I’m still scratching my head in wonderment here, given that questions like how television works still blow my mind, but this kind of design idea brings with it a whole set of problems.
How does one live or work on the tower, and then pop down to visit us mere mortals, for example:
Rudakevych said he envisions large passenger drones allowing people to move back and forth between the tower and earth’s surface along with cutting edge electro-magnetic elevators moving people throughout the this fantastic vision.
I really do wish these designers luck, because this would be one remarkable feat of human ingenuity, but at the moment it surely seems a little far-fetched?
Then again, stranger things have happened.
[source:cnn]
