Is This A Good Idea? A 2-Mile High Building?

September 09, 2009

Back in the early 1990s, the Taisei Corporation, a Japanese architectural and construction firm, came up with a startling plan for a building that would stand more than 2 miles tall. The X-Seed 4000 would stand 13,123 feet in height. That would be would be five times the stature of what is currently the world’s tallest building, the 2,600-foot Burj Dubai tower in Dubai. In fact, the X-Seed 4000 would be more than 700 feet taller than Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest point.

But the X-Seed 4000 wouldn’t just be tall. At the base, the tepee-like structure would be an astonishing 3.7 miles across, and its 800 floors would have enough room for between 500,000 and 1 million people to live and/or work. It would not so much be a building as a self-contained, man-made ecosystem. According to the Design Hotels Futureblog, it would be specially designed to protect its inhabitants from barometric and weather fluctuations along its massive elevation.

The biggest structure ever constructed would have some outsized advantages. If built in downtown Tokyo, it would maximize the value of some of the planet’s priciest real estate. The X-Seed 4000 would be solar-powered and self-sustainable energy-wise, so by my back-of-the-napkin estimate, it could reduce the city’s [energy?] consumption by as much as 8 percent. (That’s presuming that it replaces other housing, rather than adding to Tokyo’s population of 12 million.) People who lived and/or worked in X-Seed 4000 would be protected from Tokyo’s urban heat island and suffocating air pollution. And by reducing the number of automobiles in Tokyo, it might even help improve air quality for everyone else.

The downsides? The published estimated cost of building the X-Seed 4000 is from $300 billion to $900 billion, which would make it by far the single costliest construction project ever. (By comparison, China’s massive 50-year project to divert the waters of the Yangtze River to parched northern China will cost a mere $62 billion.) That’s assuming that something this size could be built from the sort of materials that we have available today. (More likely, it would have to be built out of incredibly strong and resilient carbon nanotubes or some other yet-to-be-invented material.) I haven’t seen any estimates for the X-Seed 4000’s weight, but it might be too heavy for Tokyo’s soil. (Some accounts have it being built on huge caissons sunk deep into Tokyo Bay.) There’s also the question of how such a massive structure would fare in an earthquake, since Tokyo has one of the world’s most unstable geologies.

Humans have been fascinated with erecting bigger and bigger structures since ancient times. The Babylonians probably thought they were living large by putting up Etemenanki, the seven-story ziggurat that some think was the inspiration for the Tower of Babel described in Genesis 11:1-9. Medieval Europeans erected Gothic cathedrals. Masonry construction generally limited builders to less than 10 stories until the late 1800s, when the advent of steel-and-concrete construction made possible the architectural behemoths of the 20th and early 21st centuries. (For more on that, check out “How Skyscrapers Work” from our sister site HowStuffWorks.com, and the Google preview of George Binder’s 2007 book, 101 of the World’s Tallest Buildings.)

In recent years, the never-ending contest to build the world’s biggest skyscraper has shifted from North America to Asia and the Middle East. As I mentioned previously, the current record-holder is Dubai’s Burj Dubai. A few years ago, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud announced plans to build a mile-high skyscraper in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which would have matched the stature of legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s never-built 1956 design for the Mile High Illinois. But the Saudi skyscraper subsequently was scaled back to 3,600 feet in height after soil tests at the site, and recently the entire project, renamed the Kingdom Tower, was put on hold due to the shaky economy.

As for the X-Seed 4000, the project has been on hold for nearly two decades, waiting for the right visionary to make it happen. Architectural Record reported in 2007 that, contrary to an Internet rumor, Taisei had no plans to begin construction any time soon. “(X-Seed) is on the shelf now,” Shohei Ogawa, a manager in the planning department of Taisei’s international division, told the publication. “It was our dream proposal for the technological advances we thought could happen in the future.”

But maybe the future is now. Should the Japanese build the 2-mile-high skyscraper? Or does the idea of it give you a nosebleed? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Paul O'Mahony (Cork, Ireland)]

What a tall question! Certainly provokes my thoughts over here in Cork Ireland where our tallest building is unoccupied due to a mismatch between property developers and the citizens.

But I'd love to see this idea built and made to work. It would be a feast for inventors.

However, the safety question has to be answered first: could it survive a very big earthquake? How to come up with that is surely the next challenge. Would it be peopled with early adopters and high-risk takers from all round the world?

On balance, I love the idea.

[MarkV]

I believe that you have completely glossed over the risks related to Godzilla, who lives in nearby Tokyo Bay, and will probably not like anybody muscling in on his/her/its 'biggest thing in the area' action.

I work in a renovated office building that extends out over Boston Harbor, and the building management is unable to cope with the sidewalks flooding when it rains ... a problem that it seems anyone could solve with twenty minutes and a Craftsman drill. Besides the technological challenges, we will need massive innovation in our building management skills to cope with maintaining such a structure.

[Patrick J. Kiger]

I understand your concerns about Godzilla...but think of how spectacular it will be when he/she/it knocks this building down. It'll be like a two-mile-high chew toy.

[skeptic]

Do they really need a 2-mile-high building in Tokyo? Why don't they just build an island in Tokyo Bay instead?

[Astroboy]

What happens if there's a fire at the top? How would you rescue people from that far up?

[jim wilson]

I would put a dozen fire stations and crews at various levels of the building.

[sasha]

would a building this big and tall have an effect on the weather? After all, mountains do.

[Morgan]

I think this is a fantastic idea. We need to challenge the limits of what mankind can achieve.

[Patriot]

I agree. We should build it here in the US, though. This is the greatest country in the world.

[C-Brix]

the exact weight of a "2 mile" tall structure would be to heavy for allot of places in the world, a smart place to build such a structure would be in the ocean. But then you must think of the disaster it could cause.. A building of such weight, if it ever where to fall would cause a earthquake like effect on land... and who knows how big of a title wave being built in sea....

In all... Save the HUGE buildings and construction projects for when we are ready to leave this planet at a moments notice....

In a few posts back someone said that mountains effect the weather, such a structure could effect the jet stream as well.. it's hard to compare pro's and con's with such a project but one thing is for sure.. if we are going to build something that could sustain one million people comfortably why not make something that can exist beyond this planet?

Personally, if I was in charge of any country I would be working on a way to get as much people off this planet as possible, more so then building a huge terrestrial building that would eat up allot of the resources we have available/ instead I would be using those resources to build a station able to comfortable hold allot of people in the vast reaches of this galaxy. The simplest of all reasons being, If an asteroid or commit nearly destroyed all life on earth once before there is a 50/50 chance that it will eventually happen again.. also we have to think about other space anomalies such as black holes, HUGE solar flairs, our sun dying out, our planet knocked of it's axes, and many other things that we have not discovered yet.... Truly it is inevitable for us to encounter such "apocalyptic" event. So why eat up what resources we have left for something that will do us no good in such a situation?

I say globally we spend more money and resources on figuring out a way off of this rock.. we are naturally one major disaster away from extinction... Believe it or not we can be considered a endangered species among the universe since this is the only planet out of billions that has human inhabitants.

Think About IT...

[generic viagra]

Ziggurats were built by the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians for local religions. Each ziggurat was part of a temple complex which included other buildings. The precursors of the ziggurat were raised platforms that date from the Ubaid period during the fourth millennium BC. The earliest ziggurats began near the end of the Early Dynastic Period. The latest Mesopotamian ziggurats date from the 6th century BC. Built in receding tiers upon a rectangular, oval, or square platform, the ziggurat was a pyramidal structure with a flat top. Sun-baked bricks made up the core of the ziggurat with facings of fired bricks on the outside.

[lots in costa rica]

I think this blog is pretty cool,it has a lot of good and interesting content about Is This A Good Idea? A 2-Mile High Building?,good for you I hope you can add more useful information and upgrade your site,I really like it

[Mandar]

It is a crazy idea to create such structures. Imagine the traffic jams this kinda population density will cause.