20151213 - skyscrapers

What skyscrapers might look like in the future

Bruce Sterling

 

Some among my readers may recall a dreadful incident, created by a dark genius of political theater, in September of 2001. This dismal act involved aircraft and skyscrapers. It so transfixed the public imagination that some feared skyscrapers would no longer be built.
Over a dozen years later, and we can see: quite the opposite came to pass. Skyscrapers multiplied in many locales never before graced with their presence. They showed impressive formal vitality, in a startling panoply of unheard-of shapes and stylings.
Today’s supertall structures, seen objectively, are risky, daring, even rather scary. Yet they inspire no apparent fear; the public greets them with kindness and complacency.
There are some complaints, of course, those standard complaints: the aggressive, thrusting showiness, the lack of a straightforward business model, the spoilt views of historic skylines. Identical things were said about the Eiffel Tower in the 1880s.
Old-fashioned complaints rarely pose big problems for innovators. Technologies in real trouble with society — nuclear power, for instance — are continually generating new, exciting complaints. Skyscrapers, even the tallest ones, are becoming urbane.
The newer ones have looser floor-plans, a wider variety of uses and users; more cozy creature-comforts, less of the boxy, steel-framed swaying and creaking. In short, they’re a modern case study in good old-fashioned technological advance. Novelty abounds in skyscraperdom today. New design methods, stronger materials, advances in building management, exotic fabrication methods, political smart-city initiatives — these promise a host of surprises.
So this is a fun time for skyscraper speculations. I may mention that, as I write, I just got through with a lively project for Arizona State University, involving a tower seventeen kilometers high. This would seem to be the tallest possible structure that is buildable with today’s methods and materials. This notion has been a pleasant locus for some Arthur C. Clarke-style aerospace engineering by us sci-fi writers. I can’t help but tell you that this imaginary edifice would weigh twelve million tons, and it would likely have to be extruded upward from the planet’s surface, from some desert test-bed… But never mind: that’s all science fiction.
Today’s supertalls may boggle the mind, but they are stunningly factual, immediately obvious, impossible to overlook. It’s their children, the unbuilt towers of futurity, that are surrounded by a dense, foggy haze of harbingers. Futurist scenarios can prove useful here. Scenarios cause loose ideas to separate and clump into trends.................................


 http://ideas.ted.com/what-skyscrapers-might-look-like-in-the-future/
 http://skyscrapersource.com/