Thursday, June 26, 2008

Dynamic Architecture

While we're on this whole skyscraper kick, how about a wind-powered tower? David Fisher, a French architect, is in the approval stage for two towers—one in Moscow and one in Dubai—where each floor rotates independently of one another, driven by wind turbines fitted in between each floor (which also creates the electricity to power the building, and possibly other nearby buildings as well). And Fisher's buildings will be less expensive to build because the core is all that's built on-site. The rotating pieces will be built elsewhere in a modular fashion, attached to the core and sent up. They'll be built from the top down!

Fisher's company, the Rotating Tower Technology Company, has these two projects on display at its website, and the videos are really quite stunning.

Via The Guardian by way of io9.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

“From now on, buildings will have four dimensions, the fourth dimension is ‘Time' to become part of architecture,” Dr. Fisher added. “Buildings in motion will shape the sky line of our cities.

Let's hope I never have to work in one. The motion sickness would drive me mad!

Daniel said...

Nah, they'll rotate too slowly to be very noticeable.

Then again, the only experience I've had with such a structure is the restaurant atop the Reunion Tower in Dallas. I was only there for an hour—enough time for it to make a full rotation—and I didn't notice it. I do wonder, however, what the subtle effects of living in a rotating building might be.