4 Buildings Too Awesome to Be Real (For Now)

[Music] as the number of people in the world keeps growing so do our cities according to the UN just over half of the world's population about 54% lives in an urban area and that number is expected to climb to 66 percent by 2050 that raises a lot of questions the least of which is where we're going to put all those people well in recent years engineers and architects have been trying to design an answer to that and along the way they've gotten more and more ambitious designing bigger taller more self-sustaining buildings that can house more people some of these structures reach straight for the sky others try to stay more in tune with the environment around them and some of them draw on ingenious feats of physics all of these structures are technically possible to build but most of them never will be largely because of the cost involved still these mega structures challenge the very limits of how high we can build as well as where we can build and how engineering can help tame the forces of nature it presents some pretty brilliant ideas about how the cities of the future might look check hago is no stranger to tall buildings of the ten tallest buildings in the u.s. Chicago is home to four and it could have been home to one that was taller than them all in 2005 plans were introduced to build the Chicago spire at 610 metres tall it would have been the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere beating up the Willis Tower also in Chicago and one World Trade Center in New York City the real genius of the buildings design wasn't in how tall it was it was also and how it was going to beat the wind despite being called the Windy City Chicago isn't the windiest city in the u.s. in fact it isn't even in the top 20 the wind's coming off of Lake Michigan could still cause serious problems for a building that's more than a third of a mile tall here the main challenge is a phenomenon called vortex shedding when wind hits a tall flat rectangular shape like a skyscraper it separates into two powerful gusts with one rushing along either side these gusts move around the structure and then turn back on themselves creating huge whirlpools of air these eddies end up pulling the building back and forth causing a lot of stress on the structure which is why the Chicago's fire wasn't designed to be a rectangle instead it's a helix the designers have described their building as resembling a spiral of smoke rising above the Chicago River but really it looks more like a screw or a giant drill bit when the wind hits a helical structure like this the wind gets caught in its grooves and curved surfaces creating a whole lot of mini vortices instead of one huge vortex on each side the design wouldn't have totally solved the wind problem so it also included twelve concrete walls around the base to provide more stability unfortunately we may never get to see the Chicago spire IRL lands for the tower were scrapped in 2014 after years of delays and major financial problems of course a helix isn't the only way to combat the wind take the knock yield tower a proposed skyscraper in Dubai at 1,000 meters tall and located right on a major waterfront the Nakheel would have definitely faced high wind speeds I'd rather than trying to direct the wind around the building or break it up into lots of little vortices the designers came up with a different plan just let it flow right through they did this by incorporating vertical slots that ran the length of the tower and by making the building hollow in the middle basically created four separate towers standing in a circle like an extremely tall donut caught up into quarters with this design wind could blow from almost any direction and simply flow straight through we're added stability each of the towers was also connected to the others by way of sky bridges which had the bonus of making it easier to get from one tower to the other without having to go off with the Potter construction began on the naki Laur in 2008 but it stopped after a national debt crisis hit Dubai the following year jumping across the world to Jakarta the capital of Indonesia there's another proposed mega tower the Jakarta signature tower Jakarta has some issues with wind - when you're dealing with mega structures almost every building does but Indonesia also has a much more pressing issue earthquakes Indonesia is located in the so called Ring of Fire a string of volcanoes and highly seismic areas that surround the Pacific Ocean to make sure this 610 metre tall building could withstand earthquakes the designers had to build in quite a few safety features for starters its foundation is made up of a series of concrete cylinders called Tyl each pile is at least 1.8 meters in diameter and driven down into the ground up to 90 meters d more strikingly the signature tower would also have a kind of exoskeleton an external frame constructed around the central core of the building made up of vertical super columns and horizontal braces called belt trusses if the core of the building were to tilt as it wouldn't an earthquake then it would push on some of these external supports while pulling on others combined forces of tension and compression competing against each other would end up cancelling each other out so the core would stabilize again construction hasn't begun on the signature tower yet but developers say they're planning to have it completed by the early 2020s also located along the Ring of Fire is another proposed Tower the sky mild tower in Tokyo the name of the building says it all if it were built it would be just over a mile tall 1,700 meters to be exact that's twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai since it's located on the Ring of Fire the design of the sky mile Tower definitely has to account for earthquakes but that isn't the only problem the city of Tokyo is only 44 meters above sea level and as in many coastal cities engineers have to keep in mind how their designs will weather events like floods and tsunamis as well as the inevitable rise in sea level that comes with climate change so when a kind of counterintuitive move designers have proposed building sky mile tower on the water itself right across the mouth of Tokyo Bay it will be constructed in a chain of artificial hexagonal islands anywhere between five hundred feet to five thousand feet wide these six-sided structures would act as breakers allowing large waves to crash and dissipate against them rather than against the side of the building and by situating the tower complex across the mouth of the bay itself engineers hope that the whole system of buildings would help protect Tokyo from the increased risk of typhoons storm surges and other severe weather that come with global warming now because the sky mile Tower is so tall the designers also ran into another problem how do you pump the water that people need to shower and drink and do all those other human things all the way at the top of the tower guide models designers came up with a pretty revolutionary answer you don't instead residents would get their water from cloud harvesting this might sound like something out of science fiction but the idea is actually pretty simple you probably already know the clouds are made up of tiny water droplets suspended in the air in order to catch those droplets all you need is a net with small enough holes something like a strong fabric mesh when the wind blows clouds or fog through the mesh water droplets get trapped rolled down into a trough at the bottom and voila a captured cloud guy miles plans cost for water collection sites on every few floors where the captured water would be treated then it would be delivered to the lower floors using gravity eliminating the need for pumps but as cool as this tower sounds it will probably be a while if ever before we see a mile-high skyscraper in Tokyo the design for the tower and surrounding islands was proposed in 2015 and a lot more testing and planning would need to be done before any construction could start but even then no money has ever been devoted to the project that is many mega-structure projects that have been drawn up are mostly useful as proposals as exercises to get people thinking about the engineering challenges of the future and how we can design new ways to overcome them sure you might envision a time long from now when you're living above it all drinking cloud harvested water and sleeping safe and the knowledge that no natural disaster could ever take away your house if anyone can make that happen its engineers but for now it's a dream one that like many of these mega structures is too awesome to be real this episode of scishow was brought to you by our patrons on patreon thank you so much to all those people who pay for this so that other people who can't pay don't have to if you want to support us by paying you can go to patreon.com/scishow if you want to support us by watching that is also fantastic you can go to youtube.com/scishow to subscribe [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 632,384

Rating: 4.9141803 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, building, future, jakarta, sky mile, chicago spire, chicago, signature building, architecture, cloud harvesting, vortex shedding, wind, ring of fire, skyscrapers

Id: zTeaEU6hgCE

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2017