Sky City 1000
Sky City 1000 was a hypothetical architectural project that was envisioned to be built in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It was announced in 1989 at the height of the Japanese asset price bubble.
| Sky City 1000 | |
|---|---|
スカイシティー1000 | |
 Proposed Rendering of the megatall Sky City 1000 | |
| General information | |
| Status | Never built |
| Type | Hotel, office, residential |
| Location | Tokyo, Japan |
| Height | |
| Roof | 1,000 m (3,300 ft) |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | 202[1] |
| Floor area | 8 km2 |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Takenaka Corporation |
The plan consisted of a building 1,000 m (3,281 ft) tall and 400 m (1,312 ft) wide at the base, with a total floor area of 8 km2 (3.1 sq mi).[2] The design, proposed in 1989 by the Takenaka Corporation, would house between 35,000[2][3] and 36,000[4] 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 on the edges, on the sides of the building, would have been the apartments. Also included in the building was offices, commercial facilities, schools, theatres, and other modern amenities.[2]
Since its announcement, it was featured on Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering in 2003.
Land prices in Japan were the highest in the world at the time, and Kisho Kurokawa, one of Japan's most famous architects, has said that staggeringly ambitious buildings employing highly sophisticated engineering are still cheap, because companies pay 90 per cent of the cost for the land and only 10 per cent for the building.[5] Tokyo's only fire helicopter has even been used in simulation tests to see what the danger would be if a fire were to break out in the building.[2] Triple-decker high speed elevators which would be used in the building are also being designed in labs outside Tokyo.[2]
Although this project has gained more serious attention than many of its alternatives, it can be considered similar to projects such as X-Seed 4000 and to ultra-high density, mixed use concepts such as Paolo Soleri's Arcology and Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse.
If completed, Sky City 1000 would have been the tallest man-made structure in the world, edging out the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.