Crazy proposal exposes Central Park’s underground mountains and surrounds it with 1,000-foot glass walls

There are mountains to be found in New York City, if you know where to look. Designers Yitan Sun and Jianshu Wu have proposed a way to uncover these hidden landforms in <a href="http://www.evolo.us/competition/new-york-horizon/" target="_blank">New York Horizon</a>, an idea that excavates 1,000 feet down into <a href="http://inhabitat.com/tag/central-park" target="_blank">Central Park</a> and surrounds the four sides of the park with a subterranean, habitable mega-structure. The extraordinary but entirely unrealistic proposal was just crowned winner of <a href="http://www.evolo.us/competition" target="_blank">eVolo’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition</a>, an annual contest known for its futuristic and fanciful designs.

Sun and Wu’s motivation behind New York Horizon was to “make Central Park available to more people…to reverse the traditional relationship between landscape and architecture, in a way that every occupiable space has direct connection to nature.”

The proposal ironically compromises access and views to the nature by surrounding it with 1,000-foot-tall glass walls—no explanation is given to how non-tenants of the mega-structure would access and view the park.

New York Horizon diagram

They claim that excavation would allow for the construction of a 1,000-feet tall megastructure that wraps around the perimeter of the 1.3-square-mile park to offer a total floor area of 7 square miles.

New York Horizon rendering

New York Horizon site plan