Cities in the sky – the dawn of space-age living

If your pulse starts racing when someone mentions Birmingham brutalism (top 10 here, if you’re interested, courtesy of dezeen), then we’d like to drastically up your thrill levels by introducing you to some space-age architecture that’s got everyone talking.

Those forward thinkers at ZN Era have presented their design for a two-ringed skyscraper called Downtown Circle, which would wrap around Dubai’s Burj Khalifa as “a continuous metropolis”.

The 550-metre-tall ‘SkyRing’ (you heard it here first, because we just made it up) would be mixed use, comprising offices, houses, apartments and research centres.

A green layer would be sandwiched between the two rings, which the studio refers to as the building’s ‘green lung’.  The ZN Era grand design is truly visionary: “In order to give back to the natural environment, the plan includes proposed areas for rainwater harvesting and solar power,” the studio told dezeen. 

“As an integral part of the urban ecosystem, the design also stores carbon and filters pollutants from the air, in addition to providing sanctuaries for wild plants and food production.”

Great, but where’s the space cruiser docking bay? No need… Yet! For right now, the proposal includes a fleet of pods that will glide along the entire outer ring of Downtown Circle for the convenience of frustrated astronauts.

The project is a fascinating response to the population explosion in urban areas, and ZN Era aren’t the only studios solving the problem of “how to build densely while retaining liveability.”

 Back in July, US-based Morphosis was rumoured to be behind the design for a superstructure that’s – wait for it – 170km long, 500m tall and 200m wide. Able to house a whopping nine million people, The Line is Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s shot at a radical change in his country’s urban planning. He hopes the building will “create a model for nature preservation and enhanced human liveability.”

Across the pond, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels of BIG studios is master planning a city called Telosa for entrepreneur Marc Lore. Telosa, which is set to be built “from scratch” in the US desert, already has its own website here.

Tom Ravenscroft reports that the city would be built on an unoccupied 150,000-acre site, somewhere in the western United States (exact location to be determined).

“Our vision is to create a new city in America that sets a global standard for urban living, expands human potential and becomes a blueprint for future generations,” Telosa said in a statement.

Shades of Milton Keynes, anyone? Well, let’s not dwell on that. The game-changer this time is that, being built within a COP 26 headspace, Telosa has the potential to be the most sustainable city in the world. And unique in a good way.

Just one of Lore’s many Telosa brainwaves is to set up a community endowment with the land the city is built on. This is with an eye that any increase in land value would fund the city’s development, thereby improving residents’ welfare.

If the dawn of space-age cities start planning for the wellbeing of their residents in such meaningful and ingenious ways, we may well beat the climate crisis yet.