| Shape-Shifting Building Generates It's Own Electricity |
| Written by Hank Green | ||
| Wednesday, 18 October 2006 | ||
This is one of the oddest concept buildings I have ever seen. Every one of its six stories is designed to slowly spin in the wind independently of all the other stories. So the building will, as the wind blows, slowly change shape, the view from each room will frequently change, and the power of the wind will be converted to electricity by generators in the base of the building. Via TreeHugger
Comments
(4)
Dead link
written by Dave , October 18, 2006
Would it move.
written by rob , October 18, 2006
The correct link is:
http://www.walrus.com/~ddprod/...ape.html The active surface area looks pretty small, so I should think that you would need a pretty strong wind to rotate each section, unless they were just empty shells. You could move from floor, to floor, by having a central elevator, that locked into each floor, and rotated to the correct orientation. A pretty idea, but not very practical, probably designed on a computer, by someone with no actual practical engineering experience.
Motion-Sickness Lawsuit?
written by Matt , October 19, 2006
I'm thinking you don't want to build one of these on the Gulf Coast.
Can you imagine coming home from a hard night of partying to find the room really IS spinning? I'll leave it to you folks to come up with references to Dramamine (tm) and "tragic" news stories. God, I love this story! 
I'd be more concerned about the plumbing
written by Webster , November 25, 2007
Sewer pipes centripetal force = clean up on aisle 5.
It's possible that the whole building has a non-rotating core where the kitchen and bathrooms are and each floor uses a brush-style system to keep the power (ahem) flowing. | ||
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I'm curious how much wind would be needed to shift the floor of a building. Is this just an artist's concept? Or has real engineering been done around this?