Before Alatau existed, someone had to imagine its skyline. SOM got the call.
Kazakhstan is building a new city from scratch across 88,000 hectares outside Almaty, and at its center will stand two towers that haven’t been built yet for people who haven’t moved there yet, anchoring a district designed to become an international hub for a region most of the world couldn’t place on a map.
There’s something almost mythological about it.
The taller of the two reaches 272 meters, stepped and wedge-shaped, glazed and terraced at every level, with a central atrium that pulls daylight down into the building’s interior like a controlled wound in the facade.
Its form borrows from the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains nearby: stratified, ancient, indifferent to human scale. The 80-meter hotel beside it follows the same logic. Below both, a three-story podium fans out into retail, culture, and public life.
SOM describes translating “valleys, glaciers, and stratified terrain” into architecture. Which is another way of saying: the land told us what to build.
Once complete, the skyscraper will be the tallest structure in the region. For now it exists only in renders, hovering above empty steppe, waiting for a city to grow up around it.
After decades of sitting quietly in space, the Moon is suddenly the talk of the town again, with NASA, private industry, even entrepreneurs and artists talking about visiting it in the near future.
Ideas and aspirations are fine, but plans and designs for those visits are more impressive, especially when award-winning architecture firms get involved.
Skidmore Owings, and Merrill (SOM), one of the biggest and most influential architecture firms in the world has released plans for the European Space Agency, along with engineering university MIT. Their Moon Village consists of inflatable habitats and a system of energy capture and production to create a permanent home on the lunar surface.
Five decades after humans first set foot on the Moon, a new initiative is underway to bring us back—and this time, the aspiration is to settle there on a permanent basis. Today, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has released a design for the “Moon Village,” a concept presented by ESA Director General Jan Woerner for the first full-time human habitat on the lunar surface. With ESA and MIT, SOM is master planning, designing, and engineering the settlement. -SOM
This design, along with NASA’s commitment to another moon mission, makes us excited for a colony that would permanently call the moon home. And aside from being just a fun headline, the SOM design represents some serious engineering and planning efforts, with some of the brightest minds in the world at MIT at work.
The master plan envisions a Moon Village sited on the rim of Shackleton Crater in the south polar region, on the “peaks of eternal light” which receive near-continuous daylight throughout the lunar year. This strategic location supports the goal of a self-sufficient settlement. Sunlight can be harnessed for energy, while in-situ resources can be used to generate consumables and other life-sustaining elements. Frozen volatiles and water stored in the permanently shadowed craters near the South Pole would be extracted to create breathable air and rocket propellant for transportation and industrial activities. The settlement would be clustered and expanded along strategic sites, rich in resources and scientific interest.
After decades of sitting quietly in space, the Moon is suddenly the talk of the town again, with NASA, private industry, even entrepreneurs and artists talking about visiting it in the near future.
Ideas and aspirations are fine, but plans and designs for those visits are more impressive, especially when award-winning architecture firms get involved.
Skidmore Owings, and Merrill (SOM), one of the biggest and most influential architecture firms in the world has released plans for the European Space Agency, along with engineering university MIT. Their Moon Village consists of inflatable habitats and a system of energy capture and production to create a permanent home on the lunar surface.
Five decades after humans first set foot on the Moon, a new initiative is underway to bring us back—and this time, the aspiration is to settle there on a permanent basis. Today, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has released a design for the “Moon Village,” a concept presented by ESA Director General Jan Woerner for the first full-time human habitat on the lunar surface. With ESA and MIT, SOM is master planning, designing, and engineering the settlement. -SOM
This design, along with NASA’s commitment to another moon mission, makes us excited for a colony that would permanently call the moon home. And aside from being just a fun headline, the SOM design represents some serious engineering and planning efforts, with some of the brightest minds in the world at MIT at work.
“The project presents a completely new challenge for the field of architectural design,” said Design Partner Colin Koop. “The Moon Village must be able to sustain human life in an otherwise uninhabitable setting. We have to consider problems that no one would think about on Earth, like radiation protection, pressure differentials, and how to provide breathable air.”
I’m a fan of bold architectural plans. There are enough generic glossy boxes in the world, and when something new (and remarkable) is proposed, I tend to like it. So when Skidmore, Owings and Merrill put out their plans for a giant moveable ring that hovers over Grand Central Station in NYC, I grinned. While it could be perceived as whimsical, I think its appropriately new, exciting, and bold.
For half a century, Midtown East was the epicenter of New York. As the city made the transition from manufacturing economy to service economy after World War II, the neighborhood’s glitzy mid-century towers and broad boulevards became synonymous with the city’s image as an economic powerhouse. The crown jewel, of course, was Grand Central Station.
But Midtown East has faltered over the past two decades. Its aging office buildings can’t compete with newer towers downtown, and there’s very little in the way of pedestrian infrastructure to pull in foot traffic after 7 p.m. 750,000 people still pass through Grand Central each day–but few hang around in the area. According to the Department of City Planning, the area is in danger of becoming an auxiliary neighborhood to Times Square, full of hotels and chain restaurants. Which would suck, given the bombastic, elegant style it once stood for. It’s still the home of the Chrysler Building, after all.
With that in mind, the city is proposing a sweeping rezoning plan designed to bring new commercial towers and renewed pedestrian activity to the area. And to generate conversation, the Municipal Art Society of New York invited three firms that build frequently in the city–SOM, Foster + Partners, and WXY Architecture–to imagine what the rezoning plan could do for Grand Central itself.
As is usually the case with public-facing architecture events, the craziest proposal is garnering the most attention. While Foster + Partners and WXY proposed a series of incremental changes, including creating a massive pedestrian greenway on Vanderbilt avenue, SOM went all out, dropping a glimmering, O-shaped bomb on the proceedings. Their scheme would install a circular pedestrian deck far above the surrounding buildings, suspended between two new commercial towers. The deck would be open 24/7 and rival the Empire State Building for views. Below it, plenty of POPS (privately-owned public spaces) would add green space at ground level.
Here’s the kicker: it moves. Suspended like a crown above the neoclassical facade of Grand Central, the circular tubing would move upwards to give visitors varying views. “This grand public space moves vertically, bringing people from the cornice of Grand Central to the pinnacle of New York City’s skyline,” explains SOM partner Roger Duffy. Details on the structure are hazy, but renderings imply that two massive trusses would support the donut-shaped platform, hooked into vertical notches–not unlike some window-washing mechanisms.
The plan should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, since the idea was to drum up public support for the rezoning, not to kick off the design process. “There’s nothing like it in the world!” raved one blogger, who is only half right. Structurally, there is very little else like it. Architecturally, there’s plenty of stuff like it: Olafur Eliasson’s ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum viewing platform. The London Eye. Even Foster + Partner’s forthcoming Apple Computer headquarters.
Which is absolutely fine–no one has a trademark out on outlandish donut-shaped buildings. And it would certainly be fun to take a ride in this thing. But I can’t help wonder about how the deck reconciles what’s happening on the ground level, which is the real problem the city needs to tackle. It’s a bit like an actual donut: saccharine, overwhelming, and nutritionally suspect.
