Sky City 1000 is a proposed skyscraper for the
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...
metropolitan area. It was announced in 1989 at the height of the
Japanese asset price bubble
The was an economic bubble in Japan from 1986 to 1991 in which real estate and stock market prices were greatly inflated. In early 1992, this price bubble burst and Japan's economy stagnated. The bubble was characterized by rapid acceleration ...
.
The proposal consists of a building tall and wide at the base, with a total floor area of .
[Sky City 1000 - Emporis](_blank)
/ref> The design, proposed in 1989 by the Takenaka Corporation
is one of five major general contractors in Japan. Takenaka provides architectural, engineering, and construction services and has its headquarters located in Chūō-ku, Osaka, Osaka Prefecture. Takenaka has eight domestic offices in Japan with ...
, would have housed between 35,000 and 36,000 full-time residents as well as 100,000 workers. It comprised 14 concave dish-shaped "Space Plateaus" stacked one upon the other. The interior of the plateaus would have contained greenspace, and the edges of the building would have contained apartments. The building would have also housed offices, commercial facilities, school
A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes compuls ...
s, theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...
s, and other modern amenities.
The Sky City was featured on Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel (known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery) is an American cable channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav. , Discovery Channe ...
's ''Extreme Engineering
''Extreme Engineering'' is a documentary television series that aired on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel. The program featured futuristic and ongoing engineering projects. After ending of season 3 it airs under the ''Build It Big ...
'' in 2003.
Land prices in Japan were the highest in the world at the time, but Kisho Kurokawa
(April 8, 1934 – October 12, 2007) was a leading Japanese architect and one of the founders of the Metabolist Movement.
Biography
Born in Kanie, Aichi, Kurokawa studied architecture at Kyoto University, graduating with a bachelor's d ...
, one of Japan's most famous architects, has said that staggeringly ambitious buildings employing highly sophisticated engineering are still cheap, because companies pay 90 percent of the cost for the land and only 10 percent for the building.Cities in the sky: New Scientist, October 2, 1993
/ref> Tokyo's only fire helicopter
Helitack crews are teams of Wildfire suppression, wildland firefighters who are transported by helicopter to wildfires. Helicopters provide rapid transport, enabling helitack crews to quickly respond and assess a wildfire situation. Helitack cr ...
has even been used in simulation tests to see what the danger would be if a fire were to break out in the building. To mitigate this, triple-decker high speed elevator
An elevator or lift is a wire rope, cable-assisted, hydraulic cylinder-assisted, or roller-track assisted machine that vertically transports people or freight between floors, levels, or deck (building), decks of a building, watercraft, ...
s were proposed and prototyped in labs outside Tokyo.
Although the Sky City gained more serious attention than many of its alternatives, it was never carried out, similarly to projects such as X-Seed 4000
The X-Seed 4000 was a concept megatall skyscraper. Its proposed height, sea-base, and 800-floor capacity could accommodate 500,000-1,000,000 inhabitants. This structure would be composed of over 3,000,000 tons of steel.
It was designed for T ...
and to ultra-high density
Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematical ...
, mixed use
Mixed-use is a kind of urban development, urban design, urban planning and/or a zoning type that blends multiple uses, such as residential, commercial, cultural, institutional, or entertainment, into one space, where those functions are to some ...
concepts such as Paolo Soleri
Paolo Soleri (21 June 1919 – 9 April 2013) was an Italian-born American architect. He established the educational Cosanti Foundation and Arcosanti. Soleri was a lecturer in the College of Architecture at Arizona State University and a National ...
's Arcology
Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology",. is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats.
The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who be ...
and Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...
's Ville Radieuse
Ville radieuse (, ''Radiant City'') was an unrealised urban design project designed by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1930. It constitutes one of the most influential and controversial urban design doctrines of European modernism.
Al ...
.
If completed, Sky City 1000 would be the tallest man-made structure in the world surpassing the Burj Khalifa
The Burj Khalifa (; ar, برج خليفة, , Khalifa Tower), known as the Burj Dubai prior to its inauguration in 2010, is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is known for being the world’s tallest building. With a total height ...
.
See also
*Bionic Tower
The Bionic Tower (Spanish: Torre Biónica; Chinese: 仿生塔) was an imagined vertical city, designed for human habitation by Spanish architects Eloy Celaya, María Rosa Cervera and Javier Gómez. It would have a main tower high, with 300 sto ...
*Madinat al-Hareer
Silk City (Arabic: مدينة الحرير ''romanized:'' Madinat al-Hareer) is a large infrastructure project in northern Kuwait which is currently under development (Phase I). The project will be built in individual phases. In May 2019, the Shei ...
*Sky Mile Tower
The is a vision skyscraper building in Tokyo, Japan.
The design of the tower is part of an initiative called Next Tokyo 2045 for research and developmental purposes and was made by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and Leslie E. Robertson Associ ...
References
{{supertall proposed skyscrapers
Proposed skyscrapers in Japan
Unbuilt buildings and structures in Japan
Skyscrapers in Tokyo
Unbuilt skyscrapers