TIME: 2010
STATUS: Proposal & Fun
When skyscrapers are not solving urban high-density problems or improving land use efficiency, they are just lavish monuments, over consuming energy and resource, contributing to negative environmental issues. As the sea level keeps rising, Tuvalu will be the first country that sinks, Maldives, Hawaiian Islands, Kiribati, Peru, Tonga Islands will be the next, then the rest of lands. By then, skyscrapers eventually turn from landmarks to gravestones of human habitation of old days.
Spiral Ark is proposed for the new ocean world. Instead of standing still as old time skyscrapers do, Spiral Ark float in the ocean. It is inverted from water surface to bottom, where buoyancy and hydraulic pressure are major forces. The form is generated as a giant swirl, spinning driven by ocean currents. This structure provides a spiral railway running through top to bottom.
Spiral Ark is essentially a of strip city model: the spiral rolls an linear city with parallel strips of residential, production and public spaces. The giant void in the middle brings down natural day light as well as reserves land plants and continental ecosystem. As the last oasis of terrestrial civilization, each Spiral Ark serves an entire community, the homeland in the future water world.
