RADIAL ERECT-URBIA: ELEVATED GEOTHERMAL NEIGHBORHOODS

RADIAL ERECT-URBIA: ELEVATED GEOTHERMAL NEIGHBORHOODS Designed By: Michael Hughes, Damon Wake

These 3000 ft mobile tower-cranes toddle towards suburban communities where they proceed to drill deep footings at the center of their cores into the earth and outstretch their tripod legs over a 2000 ft radius of suburb. The crane tears out homes from their plots and shelves them in 60 floors of open floor plates. Breaking it up into five sub neighborhoods, commercial/public floors are packed full of the big box stores and strip malls that sustain residential communities. Each sub-neighborhood is an atrium space of houses connecting to a core with wide causeways planted as walking parks. A drill digs the core underground to extract geothermal energy and regulate the extraction and return of groundwater for. The crane’s legs unfold and pivot around the core to cultivate cleared land. Tilling, planting, watering, and harvesting are performed by the three revolving utility appendages. A wind turbine rotates to collect energy while the crane erects connecting thoroughfares to adjacent towers. The elevated links support public transit networks and allow the flow of people and goods. Each tower sustains 1200 single-family homes and 2.5 million sq ft of commercial/public space for some 5000 inhabitants. By radically retrofitting suburbs, the old methodology of horizontal sprawl is supplanted with a scheme of vertical-core sprawl freeing the suburbanite from the demands of automotive travel while maintaining the spatial desire for individual homes and returning the land to mother nature.