Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition
Vincent Barué
France
Live in a tower if you want to! Simply push one button to look beyond the horizon, watch the sun rising, admire your town’s aerial view. See without being seen with a complete view range of 360 degrees. Live the tower without the disadvantages, the price, the fears and dangers.
Plugged in the city, the virtual towers are integrated in difficult landscapes and urban fabrics, without constituting a mask for the buildings neighborhood and the roadway systems. Fine and svelte, they are almost imperceptible and do not fear the bad weather. Structurally, the virtual towers make use of the innumerable court yards of buildings as potential supports. These “urban periscopes” drawn up above the obstacles, offer the inhabitants a dominant panoramic sight of their city and their district, a pricey and rare privilege. Heights are variable and adapted to each place, the towers support chains of cameras laid out to sweep 360°. These new eyes of the neighborhoods exist as virtual windows.
The townsmen wishing to benefit from it , chose the orientation and the height of their apartment view. Indeed, each one of their windows can be replaced by a LED screen reconstituting the field of view of one of many cameras.
These “LED window screens” restore a quasi real and psychologically beneficial luminosity for the individuals. The height of the cameras guaranteed to benefit from the solar luminosity, from dusk until dawn. Moreover, LED are ecological and affordable because they diffuse neither UV nor infra-reds and can be recycled to 98 percent. Their energy consumption is minimal and they have exceptional life-span.
This concept of “virtual towers” can obviously be applied to a wide variety of scenarios, which would benefit from the feeling of freedom that comes with the new view.
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