| In 1989, the Takenaka Corporation
announced plans to build Tokyo Sky City 1000. The 1000 means
1,000 meters high, which is 3,281 feet high, not including the
foundational structure that would extend down another 200 feet
into the earth.
This megastructure would be 1,312 feet wide
at the bottom, tapering up to a final width of 525 feet wide
at the top. The entire complex would require 2,000 acres of
land.
It would contain everything that any city would
contain – residences, offices, retail space, hotels, schools,
theaters, (churches? – that would be interesting) parks and
roads – in 14 “plateaus”. Each plateau would be a multi-story
structure itself.
This city structure is designed to provide homes
for up to 36,000 people, but its daytime population would be
about 135,000 when workers from the surrounding area would be
present.
No one knows exactly how much a structure like
this would cost to build, but it would certainly be in the hundreds
of billions.
Why would anyone consider such a structure?
Who would want to live there?
The motivation for this particular structure
is that the lack of land for development in Tokyo.
The idea for this kind of structure is not new.
Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high structure back in 1956.
It would have contained 528 stories and had some resemblance
to the Price Tower in Bartlesville.
Another architect, Eugene Tsui, proposed a two-mile
high city in 1991. It was so massive that it would have had
a population of 1 million people. The diameter of the base of
this tower was to be 6,000 feet wide, containing 500 stories,
and nearly 5 million square feet of floor area.
Tsui’s reason for designing this structure were
mostly for ecology. His view is that the world does not have
enough land area to contain all of the development that will
occur over the next century. He reasons that if we can’t build
out, we must build up.
To design a structure so massive would be technologically
challenging.
All of the major systems that are required to
run a major city would be needed in this kind of structure as
well, but would have to be recreated in forms that were practical
in a vertical environment.
In fact, it would have to be designed much like
you would design an airplane, using aerodynamics to allow the
building to stand up against huge wind loads, and weight-reduction
techniques to reduce the weight of the structure.
Electricity would probably come from the skin
of the structure, which would be covered with photovoltaic cells.
Communications, such as telephone, internet,
and television, would all need to be wireless to avoid the weight
and space requirements for hundreds of miles of wiring.
Water would come from a combination of rainwater
collection and the treatment of wastewater. Water towers would
be required at many levels of the building in order to get workable
water pressures for faucets and fire protection systems.
New techniques for the treatment of sewage would
have to be developed.
Fire protection would be a serious consideration.
The structure would have to be designed to withstand a major
fire without a building collapse, and new fire-fighting techniques
would have to be developed.
Vehicular traffic of some kind would be needed,
both horizontal and vertical. Some of the elevators might have
to be large enough for semi-trucks or cargo containers to be
moved vertically through the building.
Both Tsui’s design and Tokyo’s Sky City include
the planting of trees to create park areas at each plateau.
This would require new nursery and forestry techniques, perhaps
even developing hybrids of trees and plants that can grow without
natural sunlight.
One of Tsui’s reasons for building this type
of structure is that he believes that it would be impossible
for the building to be harmed structurally by natural calamities
– but that was before 9/11. Now, protection from terrorist attacks
against structures like these would take on a whole new meeting.
Financing and insurance will be real challenges.
Construction of structures like these could not be phased as
the gradual development of a city normally would be. And what
company is large enough to insure a structure worth hundreds
of billions?
For now, Tsui’s two-mile high city and Tokyo’s
Sky City 1000 remain as an interesting concepts. It may well
take a hundred years for enough technology to be developed to
build structures like these.
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