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No city’s skyline is quite as iconic as New York City’s. Visitors can’t help but look up at its towering skyscrapers, including One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building, that rise thousands of feet in the air. But now, there’s an idea for a building that could rival them.
Paris-based studio Rescubika just released a design for what would be the tallest building in the country at 2,418 feet tall—with one major eco-friendly angle: It would also reduce carbon in NYC’s atmosphere.
The design resembles a gigantic, plant-filled cruise ship that would have nearly 23,000 square feet of solar panels, 36 wind turbines. The living, organic matter covering the structure would help trap carbon.
This would be the world’s tallest “carbon sink”—a building to help tackle the greenhouse effect, by absorbing more CO2 than it releases. The pie-in-the-sky, 160-story structure would be (at least partly) powered by energy from its wind turbines and solar panels.
Rescubika imagines that the building would take up half of Roosevelt Island, from the Queensboro Bridge down to the southern tip of the island.
They call the building “Mandragore” after the mythical and magical mandrake plant from many folktales. It is described by its architects as “an evocation of human silhouette, a body movement that is synonymous with life. The symbolic of the body confronts us with our own destiny, the one who reminds us that we must preserve our environment in order to live in symbiosis with nature.”
New York, like many large cities around the world, has many current reminders of its need to lessen its carbon footprint, like the Climate Clock that recently popped up in Union Square. It has also enacted the Climate Mobilization Act, pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
Not surprisingly, eco-conscious buildings like this one could be the future of New York architecture.
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