14 DAY TRIAL // eVolo Magazine has recently announced the winners of its 2014 Skyscraper Competition, and the project that environmentalists are bound to find especially interesting is the one that was awarded third place.
On its website, eVolo Magazine details that this project is dubbed Propagate Skyscraper and is the brainchild of YuHao Liu and Rui Wu from Canada.
These two technology enthusiasts envision the creation of a skyscraper that not only sucks air pollution out of the air, but also uses it to develop and grow.
Otherwise put, YuHao Liu and Rui Wu's concept building would feed on air pollution and, the more greenhouse gas emissions it would feast on, the bigger it would get.
The brainiacs behind Propagate Skyscraper explain that the idea is to create a material that captures the carbon dioxide floating about in its proximity and turns it into a usable building material.
In time, this technology could make it possible to grow a building around a given scaffold, YuHao Liu and Rui Wu detail their vision.
As explained on eVolo Magazine's website, “We hypothesized a material capable of assimilating carbon dioxide as a means to self-propagate.”
Furthermore, “Employing such a material allows air capture of carbon dioxide and the resultant production of a solid construction material capable of supporting load.”
Interestingly enough, this self-propagating skyscraper would only rely on the scaffold to provide it with an underlying structure and with the base materials it would need in order to be able to grow.
The exact shape it would take, on the other hand, would rely solely on environmental factors, i.e. the weather conditions that it would be exposed to during certain periods of time and carbon dioxide availability.
“By constructing a simple vertical grid scaffold as a framework, we are given control to the extent and underlying structure of the skyscraper,” YuHao Liu and Rui Wu explain.
“Required ingredients for material propagation are supplied through the scaffold, while its actual pattern of growth is defined by environmental factors such as wind, weather, and the saturation of carbon dioxide within the immediate atmosphere,” they go on to detail.
The technology aficionados behind this project stress the fact that the material the skyscraper would create by harvesting carbon dioxide and use to self-propagate would be capable to sustain loads. Thus, buildings obtained in this innovative manner could well serve as clusters of habitation spaces.
Apart from being quite interesting to look at, such skyscrapers would also surely be more environmentally-friendly than the ones major urban areas presently accommodate for.