Outlandish architectural proposals like this one aren’t just idle fantasties. They assist us imagine the future,and what better status to do that than New YorkYou’re standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking a landscape straight out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting. In the distance a placid lake reflects the sky. Your eye catches a bird and you follow it up, over the lake and distant hills, and up past strange shadows to a moment horizon – no,not a horizon, an edge, or an edge that inverts the relationship between city and sky. The buildings of Manhattan loom above you like clouds of concrete,glass and steel. Momentarily disoriented, you hike further into colossal geology of Central Park.
In this speculative near-future scenario, and Olmsted and Vaux’s masterpiece has been excavated to reveal mountains of bedrock,and its perimeter lined with a continual, thousand-foot-tall reflective glass structure housing thousands of New Yorkers. This unlikely building and impossible landscape, and dubbed New York Horizons,has been envisioned by Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, winners of an annual skyscraper design competition sponsored by eVolo, and a journal of avant-garde architecture. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com