These 3000 ft mobile tower-cranes toddle towards suburban communities where they proceed to drill deep footings at the center of their cores into the earth and outstretch their tripod legs over a 2000 ft radius of suburb. The crane tears out homes from their plots and shelves them in 60 floors of open floor plates. Breaking it up into five sub neighborhoods, commercial/public floors are packed full of the big box stores and strip malls that sustain residential communities. Each sub-neighborhood is an atrium space of houses connecting to a core with wide causeways planted as walking parks. A drill digs the core underground to extract geothermal energy and regulate the extraction and return of groundwater for. The crane’s legs unfold and pivot around the core to cultivate cleared land. Tilling, planting, watering, and harvesting are performed by the three revolving utility appendages. A wind turbine rotates to collect energy while the crane erects connecting thoroughfares to adjacent towers. The elevated links support public transit networks and allow the flow of people and goods. Each tower sustains 1200 single-family homes and 2.5 million sq ft of commercial/public space for some 5000 inhabitants. By radically retrofitting suburbs, the old methodology of horizontal sprawl is supplanted with a scheme of vertical-core sprawl freeing the suburbanite from the demands of automotive travel while maintaining the spatial desire for individual homes and returning the land to mother nature.
Radial Erect-Urbia: Elevated Geothermal Neighborhoods
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45 Comments to “Radial Erect-Urbia: Elevated Geothermal Neighborhoods”
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This design will revolutionize our urban society
This looks evil, like war of the worlds type stuff. This would be the opposite of what people want when they go to the suburbs
Creepy.. People buy houses to get some distance between their neighbors.. this is condo living right here…
This is great work! congratulations!
This is my favourite. Really powerfull proposal
Suburbs are creepy, this idea is innovative. I love the radial nature of the design. Great work!
Another cool dream! Kudos! Very Bladerunner. Most imaginative of the lot. I see it as more of a commentary. (Albeit- a wickedly bitter one.)
Wickedly powerful and clever.
Why is this a good thing? You’ve destroyed the appealing conditions of suburban life, kept box stores, and just added “green” ornamentation that could never work (your geothermal line would need to go miles into the ground). This just looks like an ant farm to me.
I think its a great idea, I think it would be poorly executed. I think people DO want suburban life, this may not be the answer people may need to start getting used to living closer to their neighbors be we are at such a huge number of people on a planet trying to sustain 6 billion instead of the 1 billion it can really sustain.. The issue I have with this is trying to relocate the homes, good luck, and everything else has ideas but not enough actually put into, ie how to get between structures. Good work though guys
Unless this is an idea for a new SciFi movie this is just ridiculous. I’m surprised the people aren’t wearing white jumpsuits and have barcodes tatooed to their heads. Talk about a sterility and lack of character. At least the current suburbs offer a selection of 5 shades of beige/white homes!
Appalling. I think this idea is a joke, intended to poke fun at the whole concept of Reburbia.
What use is a roof or siding on a house contained in a megastructure? Why keep a garage? If you can’t take your trees with you, what is the point? This is the heart of the joke… what use is it trying to maintain such appearances in a modern construction.
I’m still laughing…
It will take longer to build the megastructure than the typical life use of a house. The eyesore of the megastructure will have driven away the inhabitants.
The concept of stacking living spaces is much more easily achieved in condo towers, and clearly condos are more appealing. At what point do they fail to be homes and instead become sanitized cubes?
Thank you for illuminating the issue.
SimCity 2013 !
The missing link here is a cultural shift where people actually begin to understand how problematic low-density suburban residences are. Good luck convincing soccer mom Janes and car-polishing, barbecue-worshipping John Does that this is a solution. Other than that, it’s a very interesting and thought-provoking idea.
I can only assume that uprooting the whole house is a snide commentary on how redundant but culturally essential things like siding, garages and big yards (yes, with barbecue) are to the suburban lifestyle. Ease them into it
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!! ITS THE MATRIX!!!!!!!
Spot on Levi!!! LOL!
I can see some biomimmicry here – it looks a lot like a bacteriophage!
This proposal brings idea how to re-create once already taken land, but it does not bring the necessary change of the attitude towards suburbs and detached housing. Suburbia is just a waste of space and resources. It separates people suggesting that it is normal to live enclosed with the walls of own house and the construction of car.
There is missing centrality, walkability, and a real contact with “nature”.
Despite this project being a nice example to discuss about, I think that instead of looking into the unpredictable future, we should look at and consider the beauty, functionality and opportunities of “old” cities.
V. impractical and not at all innovative (except if the goal is irony), in my opinion.
The whole idea of suburbia is to have the ability to spread out horizontally – having a backyard, garden, treehouse – all of that Levitt-town, cookie-cutter goodness. Vertical infrastructure is a necessity of closely-spaced buildings in a city that has no room to grow except upwards. I don’t understand how this is an innovative idea.
And though there are a lot of “green” technologies thrown in the mix (wind power, geothermal power, etc.) I think it would take a lot of energy to cool and heat all of the residential and commercial components of this structure. INEFFICIENT. Also, the structure itself seems to be a great way to contaminate the very groundwater it is extracting.
Ok, I assume this one is a joke . . .
But just in case – it is totally unworkable.
It’s going to run on geothermal energy? so it can only root itself on sites with high geothermal activity, unless the drill is going to go massively deeper than any existing drilling technology that now exists.
It’s going to preserve the suburban homes, just stack them vertically instead of spread them out horizontally? So now it will take more energy to move people and material between homes than it did when they were arrayed horizontally. There are good reasons why you don’t see 60-story towers in the middle of 2-3 story suburban neighborhoods.
You’d be better off just giving everyone a voucher to use for moving to an urban area.
i think this is pretty clearly satire. the imagery is wonderful with the homes ripped from the earth and magically transformed into skyscrapers, but totally impossible.
makes one consider the impossibilities in trying to convert suburbia into something it is not.
yes!
suburbia(s?) deserved to be cleansed (and the suburbanites deserved to be jailed) in these machines.
*suburbia deserved to be cleaned off the earth (and suburbanites deserved to be jailed) by these machines*
I’m just wondering if any of these designers actually live in or researched vast swaths of the US where a lot of suburban sprawl is like the plains states, inland coastal areas, and California ? Does the concept of weather and environment/geography even matter ? Hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes would topple in hours most of these interesting designs, but these practical considerations don’t even come into play and that eliminates an awful lot of real estate where sprawl & freeways seem to be the problem. Sorry but I’m a native of Tornado Alley & grew up in coastal Houston, Tx. Some of these designs although beautiful and interesting seem to lack fundamental consideration of basic local elements and impact on design that farmers and ranchers use when they locate & build a barn etc…Hate to say it but reading some of the comments & seeing designs like these re-enforces a suspicion of elitism.
I concur with workingclass artist… However, as a model fantasy world, this is freaky fun! Beyond geographic and meteorological problems, there also lie problems with land ownership (what happens to the “reclaimed” lots, plats, utilities, etc.?) and simple solar access (where is the natural light on the interiors of these towers?). Real world obstacles, but uber-cool fantasy design…!
This is absolutely ludicrous, and appears to be solely a jab at suburbia without any redeeming value whatsoever. Were any engineers involved in the development of this fantasy? Current materials science has a hard time with permanent buildings 2,000 feet tall. The intersection of land which is good for agriculture and land with high geothermal power potential is incredibly small. I think we’ll see space elevators and fusion power before something like this comes to be.
This design is very poetic, and in this way is an interesting response to the challenge of ‘reburbia’, because the straight up answer is so intimidating. The structure and ethos of this design is beautifully ironic in the way it mimics industrial farm machinery by stripping the land. I can just imagine a group of designers sitting around talking about all the problems with suburbia; (such as Industrial food prodcution, detachment from place, rising levels of global consumption and waste…etc) and figuring they have no idea how to solve the problem in a series of (very) impressive and eyecatching images.
I think that the interest generated by ideas and brainstorming projects like this is vital to comming up with ideas which are EFFECTIVE, EFFICENT and INSPIRATIONAL to help improve the world we live in. But I have to agree with ‘workingclass artist’ that there is a ’suspicion of elitisim’ here. the best designs are not the ones with sexy pictures but the designs which improve the quality of their interaction with people and the environment. This requires the designer to submit to the messy requirements of human beings not a faceless malleable mob that live in easily discarded cardboard boxes.
I guess what I am trying to say is WHERE IS THE HUMAN ELEMENT HERE?
This proposal (and many others) are neither practical, nor realistic. It is irritating to have entered this competition and spent a lot of time working on it, only to see these sort of absurd designs win. While I give it props for creativity, suburban sprawl is a real problem that demands real solutions, not sci-fi fantasies. There are ways to think outside the box and still be practical, but after seeing some of the finalists I’ve lost a bit of respect for the competition.
Le Corbusier meets Ebenezer Howard. If you don’t get it (as many comments seem to suggest – google it or look them up on Wiki).
Charming and also alarming is the number of comments indicating shock at the idea of scaling up suburbia. It may not happen for a long time, but it is inevitable. Land is finite, folks – and people are not. While this is a fantastic version of scaling up, it will in some way happen at some point in the future (however far off). And don’t think suburbanites won’t go for it. They’d rather stick with their “own” socioeconomic peers vertically than dare mix in with “others” in a city. Have you been to suburbia lately? The wealthiest suburbs (by the beach, etc.) are dense. Homes are 5 feet apart. Oh, and just in case you still think they won’t go for it. Check out Irvine, California (the grandchild of Levittown) a master planned suburban city. They scrapped a planned single family tract in favor of high rise condos. In Irvine! The O.C.! Scaling up suburbia is the future. People can live anywhere. Food needs soil. Simple math after that.
Great (though scary) design concept! Glad I live in Portland!
THIS IS THE BEST DESIGN EVER AND WOULD WORK GREAT FOR INTERPLANETARY COLONIZATION, KIND OF SCARY THOUGH
FUND IT
My favorite proposal. Great images.
Behind its absurdity (which I truly appreciate) there are a lot of relevant issues and compelling ideas. Right on PieChart, clear Ebenezer Howard influences. Suburbia needs to consider a vertical push. Congrats.
Another satirical entry among the finalists. I actually thought this competition was meant to be serious. Obviously, I was wrong.
quite simply – this is visionary.
I hear all the people crying out ‘what about the human element?’ To me, this translates as the veiled equivalent of ‘what about all my existing privilege?’.
Perhaps true Humanity is only possible without privilege over others? and this sort of humanity is something we don’t even know the substance of yet?
In my darkest moments, i see that nothing is possible within what we are currently experiencing.
In my lightest moments, i see almost precisely these sorts of images; images of ingenuity and simplicity, flooding my mind with radical possibility.
This is ridiculous. despite the number of obvious technical flaws, who would want a 2 storey house ripped from its foundations and stacked in a tower? What about all the debris left behind? What about all the investment in municipal infrastructure?
The fact that it has created so many comments shows you that it’s a visonary project. When I look at the towers from far and all the land around it, it reminds me of Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of suburn living, the only difference this time is that we’re 6 billion people on the planet… You need these kind of ideas to push the envelope…
Congratulations on creating the one of the only projects that incorporates the given suburban landscape and proposes the integration of a new ordering system.
Given that any solution is, in part, flawed this project truly required the concept to follow a specific logic to the extreme. That was done beautifully.
A refreshing result in what seems to be a competition of tired ideas.
Someones been playing to much Sim City.
I don’t like the desing. I would not live in that city. The idea of redefining the structure is good but could be developed in a more «human friendly» way…
The return of Corbusier. Maybe the proposal should have been called “Corb: Redux” It didnt work in the 60s and 70s–it won’t create healthy, livable places for people. Want to get mugged in the atrium anyone?
Completely unfeasable from an engineering aspect and not cost competitive.
Modern McMansions could not handle being liftend from their foundations – they crumble into toothpicks. Modular and moble homes likely could, but you still would require a great deal gas/power/water dis- and re- connection.
This reminds me of the “Arcos” from the old sims games. Constructing a “super tower” with reasonable living space, geothermal water/power, green spaces, retail, food production, schools, etc. would be cheaper to just build from scratch (without the MASSIVE worries of transportability).
This is Sim City on Steroids, mobile home parks for the masses. One day we will have to build up and when you include Airship Ports on your towers I will definitely vote for your radial erect urbia.
Good use of creativity, but I have to agree with Elish, where is the human element in all of this? Your goal was to create high density housing yet also preserve green spaces, and you achieved that, you created an environmentally sustainable project. But I fear that all you had in mind, and you must not forget the social aspect to this as well.
WTF?
i like the 4 cables perfectly extracting a home with no foundation, ripping its infrastructural guts out of it, slamming it onto some sort of scaffolding or someone’s roof. i hope this is only a conceptual attempt at making a statement to building vertical versus horizontal. i like this in terms of ideal, not in terms of solution. but the good news is is that i dont need to get in the car to go to marshalls anymore. its now located above the melnicks house. i love that you placed home depot in this scheme. i hope they stocked extra rolls of duck tape and joint compound, because i think everyone’s walls just cracked a bit..
This is hilarious. Would like it better if the houses had shutters on them.
Also, could the open floor plate be encircled with picket fence?