By Mike Chino www.inhabitat.com
It’s been just three months since the Burj Khalifa took the title of “world’s tallest building”, and already the shifting sands of Dubai have spawned a successor! A paragon of modern architecture, the iconic ICARUS tower is currently soaring towards the sky to become the next “World’s Tallest Building”. Designed by Daedalus Architects, the timeless skyscraper blends seamlessly into its surrounding environment and harnesses a nearly inexhaustible resource to provide for 100% of it’s energy needs: human labor.
An unforgettable structure sure to inspire emotion, the ICARUS tower is currently aiming for LEED Platinum certification. The entire surface of the building’s envelope is decked out in a new breed of hyper-efficient solar cells and the roof features a sophisticated rainwater catchment system that will harvest water from the region’s frequent downpours.
The skyscraper is expected to create thousands of new construction jobs, many of which will continue as indentured employment opportunities in the building’s engine room. The skyscraper’s on-site power plant is powered a sophisticated system of levers, pulleys and counterbalances that produce enough human-generated kinetic energy to illuminate the structure’s 100,000,000 LEDs.
Celebrated lead architect Howard Roark describes the structure as “a pearl shining amid the desert sands… a diamond in the rough.” When questioned about the building’s inspiration he states: “Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the people! Your own work, not any possible object of your charity. I’ll be glad if men who need it find a better method of living in the house I built, but that’s not the motive of my work, nor my reason, nor my reward! My reward, my purpose, my life, is the work itself – my work done my way! Nothing else matters to me!”
