Tokyo Sky City

The Discovery Channel website has a great interactive feature about a theoretical "Sky City" proposed for Tokyo. The project is at gargantuan scale and changes the invisible dynamics of a city's relationship to the land around it. The project could also reduce the temperature of the city -- being a partial (and grand scale) solution to climate change adaptation. With people moving to the towers, the site notes, more vegitated spaces could exist around the structure (but what about historical districts and existing city structures? Demolish to preserve that which is yet to be planted?).

The structure would stand at about three times the height of the Eiffel tower and would have three enormous legs and two connecting platforms stretched between them. I imagine such a structure would change the entire landscape of architecture for the city and region of its context. (The site notes that engineers would have to find a way to stabilize Tokyo’s unstable soil before the structure could be built.)

Architecture in a city of the sky would change the relationship of architecture to the land, to standing on the Earth, and relationship and value of Earth topography in human life. Such changes also speak to the multiplicity in human civilization -- from Babylon to Athens to Rome to cave dwellings to Sky Scrapers to a climate-adapted future – Civilization is changing.

Visit the interactive feature now. Shall this challenge the human tie to the land, or bond us closer to it by way of sending us into the air?

(image from Discovery Channel website)