Bigger is better. That’s the logic our species seems
to function on, whether it’s the Saudi Royal family and their
kilometer-high Kingdom Tower or China trying to build a dam so big it
will literally slow the rotation of the Earth. But it’s one thing to
dream big and quite another to invest in superstructures so massive they
defy all sense, logic, and reason. We told you recently about some
architectural wonders deemed too impractical to ever build. Here are
some projects even less practical that they haven’t quite given up on
yet.
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The Chinese Supercity Bigger Than Many Countries
With a land surface area of 790 square kilometers (305 mi2) and a
metropolitan area population of over 20 million, New York is considered
one of the largest cities on Earth. Jing-Jin-Ji in China laughs in the
face of such paltry numbers. A planned project to link Beijing, Tianjin,
and Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji is a play on their Chinese names) into one giant
megacity, it would house approximately 130 million people and be bigger
than nearly half the world’s countries.
Everything about the project is enormous. At an estimated size of
212,000 square kilometers (82,000 mi2), Jing-Jin-Ji will be about the
size of Kansas. Or, to put it another way, it will cover a larger
surface area and house more people than Austria and Greece combined. It
will also require an unprecedented amount of planning. President Xi
Jinping has declared that each city within Jing-Jin-Ji will have a
special role, with Beijing becoming its cultural and tech district,
while Tianjin will be devoted to manufacturing. Hebei will hoover up the
remaining smaller industries. High-speed rail networks are already being
built to link each of these parts of the supercity in under an hour.
Although it sounds like science fiction, Jing-Jin-Ji is well on its way
to becoming fact. Work started in 2013. By 2020, the high-speed railways
should already be in place. How far this behemoth will grow beyond that
point is anybody’s guess. |
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The San Francisco–Los Angeles Hyperloop
Before he became famous for trying to single-handedly conquer space,
billionaire CEO Elon Musk was making waves with his proposal for a “hyperloop.”
A system of pressurized tubes that would propel commuters between San
Francisco and Los Angeles at super-high speeds, the idea was initially
dismissed as impossible. Reality would beg to differ. In May 2015, a
Californian transportation company received the go-ahead to start
building the world’s first hyperloop test track.
Although it’s in its early days yet, the goal is absolutely to get a
track installed between the two cities in the near future. The company
has already reached a deal with landowners along Interstate 5 to start
construction, and successful tests could result in the thing actually
being built. That would revolutionize travel. Moving at just under the
speed of sound, the hyperloop would be able to get you from Los Angeles
to San Francisco in 35 minutes. For our European readers, that’s like
getting from Prague to Strasbourg in less time than your lunch normally
takes. Construction on the test track begins in 2016. If it receives the
go-ahead, the LA-SF hyperloop could be ready by as early as 2025. |
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Nicaragua’s Continent-Slicing Canal
At 77 kilometers (48 mi) long, the Panama Canal remains one of the
greatest engineering feats of all time. Yet the continent-cutting canal
could be about to lose its crown. In 2014, work began to build a canal
three times longer than Panama’s and over twice as deep. Costing around
$50 billion, the project would see workers construct a waterway that
would slice Nicaragua in half.
The brainchild of Chinese telecom billionaire Wang Jing, the Nicaragua
Canal will require the removal of more than 4.5 billion cubic meters
(160 billion ft3) of earth. As The Guardian put it, that’s enough to
“bury the entire island of Manhattan up to the 21st floor of the Empire
State Building.” It will also completely upend the Central American
nation’s ecosystem. Plans show the canal bulldozing through four
separate nature parks, as well across the largest freshwater lake in the
region, Lake Nicaragua. Since the lake’s natural depth of 14 meters (45
ft) is only half what’s needed, this will involve dynamiting the lakebed
until a 100-kilometer (65 mi) channel can be carved through it.
Insane as this is, there’s another, even crazier aspect to the canal. No
one wants it. The Chinese government is worried it will strain relations
with the US, Nicaraguans are worried it’ll destroy their country, and
shipping companies are worried it’ll be ill suited to their needs. Yet
it’s going ahead. The most optimistic projections claim the first ship
could cross the canal by 2019. |
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Tunisia’s Gigantic Solar Farm
The amount of energy the Sun pumps into the Sahara is beyond
comprehension. Harnessing a mere 0.3 percent of it would be enough to
power Europe for an entire year. Energy company Nur Power is suggesting
we do just that. In a proposal put forward at the end of 2014, they
outlined plans to build a 100-square-kilometer (40 mi2) solar farm in
Tunisia by 2018.
The plan involves scattering thousands of computer-controlled solar
cells across an area of land roughly three times the size of Macau.
These cells would then be used to superheat a central tower, creating
steam that would spin a turbine, generating electricity. This would then
be run through a 450-kilometer (280 mi) underwater cable to a substation
in Italy and, from there, away into Europe. According to The Independent
newspaper, the farm could power up to 2.5 million homes in Britain
alone.
Although it sounds like high fantasy, the plan is already underway. The
British government has expressed interest, and Nur Power is hoping to
get more countries onboard. However, with the security situation in
Tunisia being what it is, it could be a while yet before construction
actually begins. |
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The Netherlands’ Artificial Mountain
With its liberal sex and drug laws, long life expectancy, and excellent
beer, it can be tempting to think the Netherlands has it all. Dutch
journalist Thijs Zonneveld disagrees. In 2011, he declared the one thing
his low-lying country needed was a mountain. And he was going to make it
his life’s mission to ensure it got one.
It helped that the Netherlands is no stranger to absurd engineering
projects. The province of Flevoland, near Amsterdam, was created in 1932
when Cornelis Lely drained part of the Zuiderzee, expanding the country
by several thousand square kilometres. Compared to this and other insane
land reclamation projects previously undertaken by the Dutch, a mountain
would be easy.
Although it was proposed mainly as a joke, Zonneveld’s idea caught the
public’s imagination—so much so that the journalist decided to really do
it.
While construction has still to start as of mid-2015, Zonneveld is
committed fully to the project. His official website for the mountain
claims his team has spoken with thousands of companies, recruited
financiers, and found planning permission. They say they even came close
to building a prototype earlier this year. He maintains that his
mountain will be built sometime in the decade.
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Saudi Arabia’s Monster Hotels At Mecca
For the past few years, Saudi Arabia has been busy turning the ancient
city of Mecca into the Las Vegas of the Middle East. The pinnacle of
this transformation may well be the upcoming Abraj Kudai. Technically a
luxury, five-star hotel that will loom over the holy city, the Abraj
Kudai is so big that it more resembles a vertical city-state, where
every citizen will be a guaranteed millionaire.
It will stand 45 stories tall, and everything about the hotel screams
obscene wealth. The top floor will house one of the largest Islamic
domes in the world, surrounded by four helipads for the ultra-rich to
land on. At least five floors will be reserved for the exclusive use of
the Al-Saud royal family. The rest of the building, meanwhile, will
contain around 10,000 bedrooms and over 70 high-class restaurants. Far
below, on the ground floors, a vast shopping mall will vie for space
with a conference center and a lavish ballroom. Supposedly designed to
resemble a “traditional desert fortress,” this monster of a building
will cost at least £2.3 billion.
Although the Abraj Kudai will be the biggest hotel in the world when it
opens in 2017, it pales in comparison to other Mecca projects. A
collection of gigantic hotels in the west of the city known as the Jabal
Omar development is intended to house 100,000 pilgrims, while the Grand
Mosque is to be upgraded to house seven million people at any one time.
Ironically, this would stretch so far back that many worshipers wouldn’t
even be able to see the Kaaba they’d come all this way to worship.
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China’s Vertical Mega City
Now let’s set our sights beyond that one large hotel. Imagine standing
at the base of a building so massive, so self-contained, and so teeming
with life that it truly qualified as a city. Right now, preparations are
underway for constructing such a sci-fi marvel in the Chinese city of
Shenzhen, a booming metropolis on the Pearl River Delta.
Known as Cloud Citizen, the finished building would comprise three
interlocking towers, the tallest only a few hundred feet shorter than
Dubai’s monstrous Burj Khalifa. At around 2 square kilometers (1 mi2),
its surface area would be only slightly smaller than all of Monaco. But
it’s what’s inside that would really shake urban design up. Rather than
just being a supermassive office block, Cloud Citizen is designed to
operate as a self-contained city-within-a-city.
Alongside homes and offices, the superstructure would contain farms,
parkland, food production centers, and the means to harvest rainwater.
It would also power itself using a combination of wind, solar, and
algae, effectively allowing it to exist separately from Shenzhen proper.
Impressively for such an urban building, the focus would be on green
spaces and parkland, with commuters encouraged to walk to work through
high-altitude sky parks.
Although there are no concrete plans to start construction yet, Cloud
Citizen is being taken seriously by the local government. It recently
won a city-sponsored design competition, and officials are taking an
interest in seeing the project realized.
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India’s Gigantic Smart Cities
It sounds like a Silicon Valley dream: a city where everything is
connected to the Internet and a central command center digitally links
every citizen. Yet this idle daydream may soon be a reality and not in
California. Known as Dholera, it’s one of the Indian government’s
enormous new infrastructure projects that could be ready within a
decade.
Part of the phenomenally ambitious Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, a
$90 billion scheme to link the two most important cities on the
subcontinent, Dholera would be the jewel in the project’s crown. Built
from scratch on reclaimed land, it would be big, powerful, and
stunningly high-tech. Digital crowd and traffic control would aim for no
jams, no pollution, no mobs of people lining up at terminals, no dirt,
and no littering. Every house would be wired up to the Internet, a
stunning achievement in a country where, in 2013, only 3 percent of
homes had any Internet access.
Dholera’s other draw is its size. Designed to cope with India’s
ever-expanding population, the city would be twice as big as Mumbai, or
roughly three times the size of Malta. Even more impressively, Dholera
is just the tip of the iceberg. If the project comes off (and the
government is pushing ahead, despite serious setbacks), there are plans
to build another 23 smart cities just as impressive across the region. |
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Azerbaijan’s Artificial Archipelago
In China and India, they build new supercities. In the Netherlands, they
build new mountains. In Azerbaijan, they build new countries.
In the waters off the coast of Baku, on the Caspian Sea, whole
mountains’ worth of rocks are being poured in to create a new
archipelago. Known as the Khazar Islands, the new land will be like a
country within its own right. Consisting of 55 separate islands, the
archipelago will have its own airport, yacht club, Formula One track,
and an 800,000-strong population crammed into its thousands of apartment
blocks. More impressive still, the largest island will also be home to
Azerbaijan Tower, predicted to be possibly the tallest building on
Earth. In 2013, it was estimated to cost $100 billion, significantly
higher than the country’s entire GDP.
The idea came to billionaire businessman Ibrahim Ibrahimov on a flight
back from Dubai in 2010. Lacking a notebook, he drew his designs on some
tissue paper and told architects to build them exactly as he’d drawn
them. Crazily, they agreed. At time of writing, the Khazar Islands are
well underway, with at least one mountain already leveled to provide
rocks for their foundations.
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