Big Buildings

There are two major buildings being talked about at the moment that deserve a mention. I advocate big buildings. They reduce sprawl and make better use of resources, especially in domestic housing. However, two buildings now on the drawing board, one a serious reality and the other a vision of a future, have caught my eye and have probably caught the eye of most of the construction industry.

The Crystal Island.

The first is of course a Foster building. The Crystal Island (below) is a building planned for Russia and is to all intents and purposes a town in one building, providing all the aspects of a town, from shops to services. In fact if the commissioners of this building had any sense, they would classify it as a town and collect local taxes to maintain it.

The Xceed.

The second building I want to mention is the Xceed, a building being discussed in Japan. This building even dwarfs the Crystal Island. It will cost between $300 and $900 billion and will house between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people. It is the size of a mountain (see below).

This building is impressive and really scares me (in a good way). I love the idea of enclosing a city into a structure. However, besides the cost both the Xceed and the Crystal Island run contrary to the idea of disaster proof buildings. Large buildings drain a lot of energy and raw materials, and shouldn't be encouraged over a certain size. Secondly the buildings physical integrity can only take it so far over a point where the buildings will collapse under their own weight. A lot of architects and engineers believe that they can build large buildings whilst maintaining integrity during earthquakes or impacts. But the fact is they can't. The physical restrains will mean that structural integrity will only last so long before major engineering repairs would need to be carried out. Within a capitalist economy it would not be possible to build a building that would be so economically as well as structurally unstable. It would be like the very large engineering projects of the past. The Titanic; the SS Great Britain the giant cargo ship built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which killed Brunel and never made a fully laden voyage before heading for the scrap yard to be dismantled. Or the Channel Tunnel, straddling the UK and France, under the English Channel, which only started making a profit this year, a full 20 years to begin to make money for the owners. Large engineering projects within a free market economy need to be limited in size to make them financially viable, and with very large buildings, they need to be limited in size to offset the physical restrains of materials and the way they cope (or not) with natural stresses.

Nanotubes are of course lauded as the answer. But this technology is expensive and unproven and I doubt would be able to be used in a large construction like the Xceed idea. I believe that town and city sized buildings have a natural social and structural limit, and that once this limit is discovered (because we don't know what it is yet), then we can begin to experiment. Experimenting with peoples lives and the economies that build large buildings, is not the way to go. Besides earthquakes, high impacts in wars or from asteroid strikes, would utterly destroy the building and if those two things don't do it then economics will. A neglected super sized building is just as dangerous as one threatened by earthquakes - if not more so.