Throughout history, countries have built many structures such as towers and colosseums for various reasons such as art, defense and tourism, and they continue to do so today.
Although there are thousands of towers that fascinate us with their ostentation today, Tokyo Babel Tower, designed as the largest tower in history, cannot be built yet. So why wasn’t it built? What makes this building so special? Let’s find answers to these questions.
Tokyo Tower of Babel is a hyperstructure designed at a height of 10 km. For this reason, it has the title of the largest building designed by humanity.
The designer of this huge building is Professor Toshio Ojima from Waseda University.
The name of the tower alludes to the desire to ascend to heaven, like the Biblical Tower of Babel.
The tower has approximately 1969 floors.
The closest building in height to the Tokyo Tower of Babel is the X-Seed 4000, which is only 4000 meters high. This building, on the other hand, has 800 floors and has not yet been built like the Tokyo Tower of Babel.
The logarithmic design of the structure, its cone shape, wide base and tapering tops make it strong enough to withstand any force.
Tokyo Tower of Babel is also an example of archology* because the project focuses on biodiversity conservation.
*Arcology, a combination of the English words “architecture” and “ecology”, is a set of architectural design principles for large buildings amid extremely high population density.
Tokyo’s growth in design is split into eight different generations. Generations begin with the 1880s and continue into the distant future. The tower is designed in such a way that in the eighth generation all residents of the area will begin to live in a single megastructure similar to Tokyo’s Tower of Babel. Its purpose was to reduce the negative environmental impacts of urban growth.
The structure was designed to be located inside the Yamanote Line, one of Tokyo’s busiest lines that opened in 1885.
The design of the tower is divided into zones and facilities as follows.
mega build; It brings together all of the city’s government, business and leisure facilities in one large building. Thus, they aimed to reduce the heat island effect, which occurs due to the reduction of land areas, the heat retention of the structures used in the buildings, and the reduction of trees.
In 1994, after the economic problems in Japan, the “Japanese Hyperbuilding Study Group” was formed to continue researching hyperstructures such as the Tokyo Tower of Babel.
However, frequent changes in government and constant earthquakes caused this working group to disintegrate.
The reasons why the Tokyo Tower of Babel could not be built:
- Being an excessively costly project ($25 trillion)
- The need for a large plot due to its nature
- It has to be built in a place with a restricted flight zone in order not to cause plane crashes.
- Since 30 million people will live in it, the potential death toll in natural disasters is too high.
- The fact that harsh weather conditions can affect people due to altitude