Ultra Self Sustaining FSMA Tower by Dave Edwards

Aug 02

Extreme Architecture, Green Architecture, Photos Add comments

Algae would produce energy and clean water for a conceptual skyscraper proposed for London by British architect Dave Edwards. The outer skin of the skyscraper is imagined as a green wall used for food and improving air quality, with algae absorbing CO2 emissions and also harvested as bio-methane to provide heat and power. Waste biomass would be used to feed the building’s skin while waste water would be sent through the algae to be recycled.

Here’s some more text from Edwards:

The project re-imagines the tall building not as a singular edifice to one commonly corporate programme but as an ecology of different interdependent programmes. Layered together in a matrix similar to the conventional city, in this manner the urbanism of the city is not left at street level but brought into the sky via informal encounter and diversity of uses and users within the tower.

This project is not singular. It proposes the City of London as being re-colonised by people living as well as working within the Square Mile. The green beacons act as garden squares around which new urban diversity is created and new populations and new economies occur. The tower has not completely removed the programmes that are currently planned for this part of the city, but hybridised them and woven them with new programmatic insertions aimed at creating this more normal urban diversity found elsewhere in the city. The tower is sited between the city banks and the Bank of England, at a point of urban confluence but also symbolically positioned in the centre of the city.