Pawar’s Eco Skyscraper is a self-sufficient vertical city composed of two twisting towers linked by soaring sky bridges. The project’s mixed-use high-density program offers space for commercial areas, offices, and residences, while the tower’s rotating axis provides each unit with a rooftop terrace where food can be grown. The skyscraper harvests humidity to provide for its needs, and it would recycle waste water with a living machine system that includes live plants, trees, grasses and algae, fish, and other living creatures.
The walkways spanning the upper levels are studded with a massive set of wind turbines – not unlike the turbines spanning the Bahrain World Trade Center. The skyscraper supplements this wind energy with power produced from solar arrays, while passive design strategies reduce the building’s overall environmental footprint.
The building is designed to be constructed from modular units, which can be cheaply and efficiently constructed and then quickly assembled together on-site. According to pawar, “Eco Skyscraper is about rethinking the future: it is a profound challenge of survival, at the end of an era of cheap oil and materials to rethink and re-design how we produce and consume; to reshape how we live and work, or even to imagine the jobs that will be needed for transition”
+ Vikas Pawar
Where is this building located? The building has way to many facets and angles which is gonna make it real expensive to clean. “Eco Skyscraper is about rethinking the future: it is a profound challenge of survival, at the end of an era of cheap oil” yet I have no doubt this building is made of an abundance of various high tech materials. It’s size is not even merely sufficient to feed all it’s residents. Expensive costs just to build them self defeat the green benefits it describes. Chicago had plans to build the 2,000 foot tall (150 story) Chicago spire that also bends and twists. Only for the project to go into default and the project died. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chicago had a surplus of office space ready for occupancy, why do we need additional towers in the heart of Chicago or any city? I think the future of cities lies in smaller buildings (nothing more than 10 or 20 stories or less). Just look at the design of these new towers, you can see a uniform similarity of the them. After a while, it gets hard to tell one from another and there isn’t anything really special about any of them, no decoration or ornament or anything that makes us look impressive. When a hundred years we had beautiful buildings that were wonderful even with straight lines.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/20080630_Del_Prado.JPG
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/2008_05_07_-_Baltimore_-_Bank_of_America_1.JPG
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They forgot to include, “Eyesore” in the description.
I’d love to see the maths for this – It would be great if it worked, but it is hard to believe that those three turbines will generate enough power for a building this size.
Building integrated food on this scale is also something much talked about, but little acted on – the water and energy needs of that food also need adding in (e.g. if it is artificially lit then its going to take roughly three times the area of any food for solar panels to generate the light needed by that food)
what i think about these designs is that in cases like this, the only thing that the designer is concerned about is the ‘wow-factor’…photoshop it…put it on the calendars or wallpapers….please don’t build these…
I can’t believe people are complaining about the aesthetic. What this structure would be able to do rises to such a different level than how it looks, I don’t know how you could reduce it to its sheer appearance. Also, straight lines aren’t more efficient just because they’ve been done before and they haven’t been challenged. Triangles are the strongest structure- any three points are guaranteed to lay on the same plane, but the fourth is the one that can make a design unbalanced.
I think this is fabulous and major props for thinking outside the box. Best of luck for funding and setting the bar high for others to follow!