Clouds Architecture Office, the same company coming up with the idea of Mars igloos and a floating cloud city, are again making headlines after coming up with an incredibly crazy design for a skyscraper. What if you had the choice of parachuting down to your home after a day’s work instead of getting stuck in the traffic?
Well, the suspended skyscraper Analemma will certainly give you that option, as it is proposed by the company to be placed on an orbiting asteroid and powered by space-based solar panels with mechanisms used to capture water in a semi-closed loop system that extracts moisture in clouds and rainwater.
Analemma might seem like an early April Fools’ Day joke, but the fact is that manipulating asteroids is no longer only science fiction’s domain. In 2015 the European Space Agency (ESA)’s landing of Rosetta proved that it is possible to rendezvous and land on a fast spinning comet. Even NASA has scheduled an asteroid retrieval mission in 2021 where they are looking to test the feasibility of relocating an asteroid.
But even if it isn’t realized, the idea is a fun thought to get the creative juices flowing. The company says on their website that the conceptual design will start with the release of a large orbiting asteroid in the figure-eight geosynchronous path moving between the northern and southern hemispheres on a fixed daily loop. The skyscraper will then be based on the asteroid suspended via a high-strength cable and would need the inhabitants to parachute down to work when it gets closest to midtown Manhattan on its orbit.
The tower would be prefabricated in Dubai and assembled above the earth. Dubai is chosen as it is
“a specialist in tall building construction at one-fifth the cost of New York City construction”.
The building design is split into four areas: prayer rooms starting at the top of the building, sleeping quarters at approximately two-thirds of the way up and the business activities at the lower end of the tower with the surface transfer points at the bottom, the places from where you would jump off using a parachute.
“Analemma Tower is a proposal for the world’s tallest building ever,” writes CAO. “Harnessing the power of planetary design thinking, it taps into the desire for extreme height, seclusion and constant mobility.”
“If the recent boom in residential towers proves that sales price per square foot rises with floor elevation, then Analemma Tower will command record prices, justifying its high cost of construction.”
A man can dream!