Technology - Tokyo's Sky City: Extreme Engineering

In Japan, plans are on the table to build Sky City, the tallest structure on earth. The towering, vertical city will house more than 100,000 people. Sky City would be home to the worlds very first homesteaders in the sky. Extreme Engineering is the story of large-scale, 21st century construction projects. Building a new bridge or skyscraper, a tanker or a fighter jet involves ambitious designs, vast amounts on money and fraught tempers. Engineers, builders and architects attempt to deliver on time and to budget as the story and dramatic action arise from the project itself - a dream awaiting realisation. In the overcrowded city of Tokyo, architects and engineers are already brainstorming a city in the sky. This possible future city will be two-thirds of a mile high, or twice the height of the tallest existing skyscraper on Earth. Sky City 1000 is a visionary (i.e. not proposed/intended to be built) supertall skyscraper in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Japan announced in 1989 during the height of the Japanese asset price bubble. The plan consists of a building 1,000 metres (3,281 ft) tall and 400 m (1,312 ft) wide at the base, and a total floor area of 8 km2 (3.1 sq mi). The design, proposed in 1989 by Takenaka Corporation, would house between 35,000 and 36,000 full-time residents, as well as 100,000 workers. It comprises 14 concave dish-shaped Space Plateaus stacked one upon the other. The interior of the plateaus would contain greenspace, and on the edges, on the sides of the building, would be the apartments. Also included in the building would be offices, commercial facilities, schools, theatres, and other modern amenities. Since its announcement, it has garnered a lot of attention from the worlds architectural establishment, and was featured on Discovery Channels Extreme Engineering.. Land prices in Japan were the highest in the world at the time, and Kisho Kurokawa, one of Japans most famous architects, has said that staggeringly ambitious buildings employing highly sophisticated engineering are still cheap, because companies pay 90% of the cost for the land and only 10% for the building. Tokyos only fire helicopter has even been used in simulation tests to see what the danger would be if a fire were to break out in the building. Triple-decker high speed elevators which would be used in the building are also being designed in labs outside Tokyo. Although this project has gained more serious attention than many of its alternatives, it can be considered similar to projects as X-Seed 4000 and to ultra-high density, mixed use concepts such as Paolo Soleris Arcology and Le Corbusiers Ville Radieuse. If completed, the Sky City 1000 would be the tallest man-made structure in the world, edging out the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.