Pulp Science: Five Future Cityscapes

Maybe Robert Anton Wilson’s predictions regarding life longevity pills will come true in time for us to be around for another 100 years. If so, we’ll be seeing a dramatic change in the way our habitat changes in response to population, energy consumption, and climate change.

Here are five of the wildest contenders for future skylines…

1. The Lilypad Floating Ecopolis

Belgian designer Vincent Callebaut calls the auto-sufficient amphibious city Lilypad a “floating ecopolis for climate refugees”. The floating structure is “directly inspired by the highly ribbed leaf of the great lilypad of Amazonia Victoria Regia increased 250 times.”

Sure, whatever. Looks cool. And considering there probably won’t be much land left in our future waterworld, the Lilypad seems practical to me.

2. The Superstar

Okay, wow – I know. This looks like a frakkin’ cylon baseship. It’s actually a floating, self-powered, self-regulated, self-contained metropolis designed by Beijing-based MAD designs.

Here’s how they describe it (warning—slight utopian creep factor):

“It can land at every corner of the world… It’s self-sustaining: it grows its own food, requires no resources from the host city, and recycles all of its waste; it’s a living place, with authentic Chinese nature, health resorts, sports facilities and drinking water lakes; and it’s a travelling Olympic party, that can journey to the host city every four years. There’s even a digital cemetery, to remember the dead. The Superstar is a dream that’s home to 15,000 people: there is no hierarchy, no hyponymy, but a fusion of technology and nature, future and humanity.”

No, I don’t know what they mean by digital cemetery, but I’m sure they mean well.

3. NYC’s Dragonfly

Here’s another totally rad work of beauty from the architects at Vincent Callebaut. Standing almost 2,000 feet tall with 132 floors, the Dragonfly is a vertical farm structure designed to contain residential, office, farming, and research spaces, with solar and wind power supplying the energy. The concept is to have the Dragonfly seated on Roosevelt Island. I’m not so sure this is for everybody and probably won’t meet serious consideration to be built – which blows. I’d love to see a skyline with wild green vertical farms like this one.

4. Tornado Tower

This gravity-defying concept building from Swedish architecture firm Visiondivision gets a mention because of its resemblance to the Galactic Senate from Star Wars: Episode 2. “Look ma, that’s where Palpatine works!”

5. San Fran, 2018

Here’s a look at what San Francisco may look like in 2018, according to IwamotoScott Architecture, who won the City of the Future contest last year. It conjures up “wild hallucinations of a city run by geothermal power and tapping water from the city’s ubiquitous fog.” Trippy. I wonder if flower-child aliens from across the galaxy will be converging on Haight/Ashbury by then?