Revolving Skyscrapers – Has the future finally arrived?
Some interesting, and potentially exciting, news from the world of architecture this week following the announcement of the construction of “the world’s first building in motion”. Italian architect David Fisher revealed his plans this past Tuesday to build an 80-story skyscraper in Dubai that would feature constantly revolving floors, resulting in a building structure that is constantly changing its shape. But it’s innovative features don’t end there.
Giant wind turbines will be installed in between each floor that, in conjunction with the installation of solar panels, are expected to not only generate enough electricity to power the whole building – including the movement of all the floors – but also enough electricity to power some of the surrounding buildings. The floors holding the penthouses will have the additional feature of allowing its occupants to control the rate of rotation by voice command, rotating their floor from one to three hours for a full rotation. Penthouse owners also get the unheard of luxury of using an elevator to bring their car up to their floor to park it (guess that’s one way to shorten the distance you’d have to walk to unload the groceries from your car).
Naturally, the building of such a unique building is bound to be unusual. Fisher’s plan for constructing these buildings (in addition to the one in Dubai, he has plans to build one in Moscow as well) is to use prefabricated components that would be shipped to the building site and then with the help of specialized cranes, hoisted up and rolled around the cement inner core using the very tracks the floor will rotate on. Using this approach, Fisher has calculated that he’d only need 80 technicians to work for 20 months to finish construction.
Of course, this design has created its own share of construction and design questions. One of the most common is how will they hook up the plumbing in a building that’s constantly moving. His reply was rather odd in that he said the pipes in question would be hooked up to the central core using attachments much like those used by military aircraft for in-flight refuelling. Given that for in-flight refueling to happen, the two planes have to remain stationary in relation to one another, am I the only one who finds this answer makes absolutely no sense?
I suppose it’s not surprising then to find out that he’s never designed a skyscraper before and additionally, there’s been some questions raised about some of the credentials Fisher lists in his profile. Yeah, that’s not exactly encouraging. Still, despite all this, he has managed to attract top talent in architecture and engineering to his project, not to mention financial backers, so there’s still a chance this could be built.
I guess for me in the end the only question I have is how come no one thought of incorporating this notion into the aesthetics of any science fiction work. I personally haven’t read or seen this in any science fiction novel or film, which honestly is where one would’ve imagined this idea would have first originated.
Ah well. Seeing how we still haven’t got our flying cars yet, I guess the prospect of revolving skyscrapers will have to do.
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