This proposed building design for Roosevelt Island would become the tallest in the city (and country)…by over 1,000 feet!
French design firm Rescubika works to integrate creative eco-friendly building designs into major cities in order to show how all aspects of urban environments can help combat climate change…and the latest city they have their eye on is NYC.
Rescubika recently released a design proposal for a 2,418-foot tall office building to take over Roosevelt Island. With the tallest building in the U.S. currently One World Trade at 1,776 feet (according to Skyscraper Center), this would undoubtedly become the new tallest building in the city and the entire country.
The design almost resembles a giant, tree-covered cruise ship with one giant tower, and would take up at half of Roosevelt Island, from the Queensboro Bridge all the way to the south tip of the island.
They call it “Mandragore,” after the mythical mandrake plant which has an anthropomorphic look and is known as a magical plant in many folklore stories. The building itself is described as “an evocation of human silhouette, a body movement that is synonymous with life. The symbolic of the body confronts us with our own destiny, the one who reminds us that we must preserve our environment in order to live in symbiosis with nature.”
But it’s not just the look of it that’s notable. The tower is meant to serve as a “carbon sink,” removing CO2 from the atmosphere to help combat the greenhouse effect.
It would serve as an office building, 160 floors tall, and would include:
- 36 wind turbines
- 8300 shrubs
- 1600 trees
- 258 square feet of plant walls
- 75 square feet of photovoltaic facades
More about how it would function is described by the firm here:
It’s a network of buried pipes that works like an air-to-ground interchange. Used for building air renewal, this exchanger relies on the differential between air temperatures captured outside the building (ambient air) and ground temperature which tends to become constant when sufficient depth is reached. The air flowing through these pipes will capture hot-weather frigories and calories in cold weather and thus help refresh or warm new air in a building.
Of course, though is just a proposal for which there are no plans to follow through, it definitely offers a creative reimagining for a more eco-friendly city.
It’s also reminiscent of this beautiful butterfly sanctuary facade proposed for a Nolita building last year…
featured image source: Facebook/ Rescubika