Building from the ground up is so last century. Skyscrapers of the future could very well hang from an asteroid placed into orbit over Earth, suspended over a landscape their occupants parachute down to as part of their commute home. Sound bonkers? Wackadoo? Out of this world? Popular Mechanics uses these words and more, calling the "preposterous" artist impressions of just such a skyscraper a "crazy dream" founded in only some fact and a whole lot of fiction. It's unclear how seriously Clouds Architecture Office, which is proposing the idea, wants this to be taken, but the New York-based firm has named the building Analemma Tower and tells Dezeen it would command sky-high rent. In its proposal, CAO recommends constructing Analemma over Dubai, a "specialist" in tall building construction.
They say doing it there would drop costs by 80% as compared to New York City. But it would still pass over New York daily as it travels thousands of miles in a fixed figure-eight loop, reports the Telegraph. CAO explains "the tower would move at its slowest speed at the top and bottom of the figure eight allowing the possibility for the tower's occupants to interface with the planet’s surface at these points," one of which would be NYC. Hanging from a super-strong cable affixed to the asteroid, there'd be sleeping quarters two-thirds of the way up, an agricultural area, and offices at the bottom with vertigo-inducing views of the ever-moving landscape below. The building would be solar-powered, and water would be filtered, recycled, and replenished from captured rainwater and cloud condensate. "It taps into the desire for extreme height, seclusion, and constant mobility," the designers note. (This skyscraper is designed to move.)
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