10 Extreme Structures We Might See in the Future

In 2023, Saudi Arabia unveiled plans for the Mukaab (“cube” in Arabic) in Riyadh, which will be the largest inner city building in the world, capable of enclosing 20 Empire State Buildings within its walls. It will showcase the latest digital and holographic technology, providing a breathtaking visual experience of the interior. The region has already seen some of the world’s most daring and futuristic architecture. Dubai has its Burj Khalifa and the Museum of the Future with its groundbreaking curve shape.

Architecture is pushing the limits of creativity and technology. It is rapidly evolving to confront modern challenges, foremost of which is sustainability in the face of the worsening climate crisis. Mind-blowing ideas are already on the table to address this and other issues, giving us a glimpse of what structures might look like in the future. The Mukaab and Burj Khalifa are just the beginning. More fantastic forms and functions are taking shape in the minds of visionary architects and engineers. This list looks at ten of them.

Related: Ten Eerily Prescient Past Predictions About Life in the Future

10 Floating Megacity

The world has to face the fact that rising sea levels brought on by climate change will severely affect two out of five people on the planet who live within 60 miles (100 km) of coastal areas. Adapting to water instead of struggling against it is behind the concept of sustainable floating cities producing their own food, energy, and freshwater with fully integrated zero-waste closed-loop (recyclable) systems.

The engineering challenges are daunting but surmountable. The city’s stability, mooring, and resiliency against waves and storms should be the first priority. Innovative anchoring systems and dynamic positioning technologies are now being developed. With their experience in working with the sea, the Dutch are at the forefront of making this concept come true. Architect Koen Olthuis is developing a floating city for the Maldives, which is one country most vulnerable to rising seas. His city will be divided into floating segments in imitation of the coral reefs surrounding the area.

Building on this idea, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels conceives of floating modules, each 4.9 acres (2 hectares) in size, anchored to the seabed, which can be detached in case of storms and moved to calmer waters. This is the basis for the world’s first prototype sustainable floating city to be built near Busan, South Korea. Called Oceanix Busan, it will initially be a community of 12,000 people featuring low-rise buildings on each modular platform and vibrant public spaces. Interconnected food, water, and energy systems are all closed-loop, and the city can sustain itself 100%. It can expand organically as the need arises and can accommodate 100,000 residents.^[1]

9 Levitating Houses

Filipina architect Lira Luis grew up in a village prone to flooding whenever typhoon season arrived, like many other places in the Philippines. Working on a project involving magnets underwater gave her the idea of harnessing magnetic levitation to keep houses above water. Magnetic levitation is already being used for trains, so why not buildings? Luis built a small-scale model weighing 13 ounces. (368.5 g), which she was able to float 1.5 inches (3.81 cm) from the ground. The next problem is to scale up the dimensions, which skeptics deem impractical.

Whichever way Luis’s experiments go, she is in good company, detractors notwithstanding. The technology firm Arx Pax, led by Greg Henderson, also dreams of levitating buildings and has already produced levitating hoverboards capable of carrying a person. Arx Pax’s Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) may one day be integrated into structural design to make buildings disaster-proof.

Since lifting houses via magnets might prove complex and expensive and will likely take decades to realize, inventor Shoichi Sakamoto has devised an airlift system to “levitate” houses in earthquake-prone Japan. Within 0.5 to 1 second of detecting a tremor, air from a storage tank fills an expandable, sliding air chamber beneath the house, lifting it from its foundations and off the moving ground. This simple system will have to stand in until MFA actually allows us to literally rise above floods and earthquakes.^[2]

8 Flying Houses

In the future, many people might opt to escape rising seas, earthquakes, landslides, and other land-based disasters by leaving the ground altogether and having their homes in the sky. It had already been demonstrated that the premise of Pixar’s animated film Up, a house carried airborne by balloons, is quite possible. But instead of hundreds of balloons, European tech company TELE2 relied on just one big hot-air balloon to carry a prototype tiny home made of wood and successfully flew it over Lithuania. Primitive as it seems, it is just part of a growing trend in airborne architecture.

Architect Chris Lawson envisions flying houses will take on the overall shape and configurations of today’s drones, only 10 times bigger with giant propellers to generate the continuous airflow to keep it up in the air.

In 2012, Swiss designer Timon Sager developed a different concept with his Wolke 7, a twin-hulled airship carrying a gondola/house with multiple decks, clear glass viewing windows, and modern accommodations. The two hulls are separated by rigid structures and have propellers underneath to steer the house. Whatever the final form an airborne house takes, it will be a stunning experience of life in the clouds.^[3]

7 Climate Control Tower

We are now living in an era of abnormal climate and erratic weather patterns. A design team from South Korea has presented the idea of building climate control towers (CCTs), which are primarily cloud-making structures to alleviate the worst effects of the climate crisis. CCTs will be built above the sea to effectively use marine resources.

Powered by solar panels, a CCT produces heat that is transferred to a high-temperature pressure tank in a cloud generator. The heat turns water extracted from the sea into water vapor, which then passes through a wind pressure generator. The resulting clouds are sprayed into a membrane around the tower and stored there. The CCT laboratory receives meteorological information from satellites and transmits it to the control ring around the membrane. It calculates variables like wind direction, speed, and distance, and when conditions are right, it rotates and contracts to release the clouds through an outlet in the middle of the membrane and sends them to the target area.

Hopefully, CCTs can create rainfall in places threatened by drought and desertification, preserve ecosystems, and create forests.^[3]

6 Ice-Making Skyscraper

The Arctic is melting. That is the hard truth, and humans are scrambling for ideas to stop or at least delay doomsday. Chinese architects propose an underwater “skyscraper” with mechanisms that freeze seawater to restore the ice caps. By lowering the ocean’s salinity in a process called reverse osmosis, it is easier to freeze the water. Reverse osmosis is already being used in desalination plants that turn seawater into drinking water.

The proposed structure will have a long tube reaching into the ocean depths to suck in the seawater and fiłter it with a semipermeable membrane that allows water molecules in but not salt and organic substances. From the reverse osmosis plant, it is then frozen into hexagonal ice floes in layers 16 feet (5 meters) thick. The floes are then set adrift as underwater robots push them together, their hexagonal shapes making assembly easier.

The ice-making building will be powered by solar and wind energy. The wind turbine and the domed control room are equipped with solar cells and sit above the water. The several floors underwater will have an observatory and laboratories. Illuminated tentacles keep away marine animals, making the whole structure resemble a giant jellyfish.^[5]

5 Artificial Mountain

We love mountains. From pyramids to ziggurats, humans have created small-scale replicas of these natural wonders. Legend has it that Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for his queen, who missed the hills and valleys of her homeland so much. The modern industrialized world has made artificial mountains out of slag heaps, but these really are just small hills.

In 2009, German architect Jakob Tigges proposed to build a 3,281-foot (1,000-meter) high mountain on the site of Berlin’s Templelhof Airport. The Berg will be the highest artificial mountain in the world, a natural habitat for surrounding wildlife and, at the same time, a recreational area for city residents. Its peak will be covered with snow from September to March. Unfortunately, this project has been shelved, and Tigges’ vision must remain a fantasy indefinitely.

But mountains offer much more than just a spectacular view. They are rain-making machines. Mountains cause moisture-heavy air to rise until it can no longer hold the weight and dump it as condensed precipitation. The United Arab Emirates wants to take advantage of this rain-making feature and, in 2016, offered a $400,000 grant to the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research (USNCA) to study the feasibility of building an artificial mountain in the country.

This kind of weather modification can be tricky and depends on several variables. The location, width, and height of the mountain must be carefully considered to determine the ideal climate. Whether or not the UAE pushes through with the project, designers and planners will undoubtedly return to the idea of a manmade mountain again and again, and we just might see one somewhere in the world in the near future. ^[6]

4 Atlantic Tunnel

In 1895, an article titled “Un Express de l’avenir” (An Express of the Future) and credited to Jules Verne appeared in the Strand Magazine, proposing a tunnel beneath the Atlantic to bridge the 3,106-mile (5,000-km) gap between Europe and North America. From this first moment the idea was broached, other visionaries have dreamed of linking the two continents via an undersea tunnel.

With the advances in engineering technology, a transatlantic tunnel may not remain a science-fiction fantasy for long. The Channel Tunnel proved the feasibility of building a more ambitious and complex railway system under the ocean. The transatlantic tunnel can be assembled with 54,000 prefabricated tubular pieces and stabilized by tethering cables anchored to the seabed. It will float approximately 50 meters beneath the surface using the technology employed by submarines for buoyancy.

The tubular pieces will be made of two layers of steel separated by foam to protect the tunnel from high pressures, strong currents, and collisions. It is estimated that one million tons of steel will be needed, the entire world’s annual production. A frictionless Magnetic Levitation (Maglev) train will whisk passengers through the vacuum tunnel from New York to London and vice-versa in just 54 minutes.

While not impossible, a transatlantic tunnel poses challenging issues of safety and cost. It will take a stupefying $12 trillion to build, a sum that will have an impact on how much people will have to pay to cross the Atlantic in record time.^[7]

3 Tree Skyscrapers

What if the building you are working or living in is actually alive? No, it’s not some high-tech AI, but manipulation of nature through genetic modification. Andrii Lesyuk was a new architectural graduate when his father told him about the paulownia, a genus of angiosperm trees and one of the fastest-growing hardwood trees in the world, which can grow up to 16 feet (5 meters) per year and as high as 98 feet (30 meters).

Called the “aluminum of timber,” it is naturally resistant to fire, salt water, termites, decay, and rot. “I began thinking that if we could accelerate the growth of these trees, they could reach an even greater height, and we could mold them into any shape,” said Lesyuk. “With the help of special guideway systems, we can even grow a skyscraper.” If scientists can genetically engineer a tree to grow 30-40 times faster than a paulownia, it will take 15 years to grow a skyscraper.

As conceptualized by Lesyuk and his team of fellow Ukrainian architects, The Living Skyscraper will consist of trees whose growth and shape are controlled to provide the framework for a high-rise structure. Envisioned for Manhattan, it will be, aside from Central Park, an oasis of green in the middle of the concrete jungle.

The skyscraper tree will be a separate living organism with its own root system, irrigation, and maintenance mechanisms. Fast-growing, tall deciduous trees will be planted in groups on specially prepared soil. As they grow, they will form the unique shape of the skyscraper, with the trunks providing the structural strength while the branches form the rest of the structural elements. They can even spread out to create separate biomorphic structures or connect existing buildings longer than a city block.^[8]

2 Oceanscrapers

What are we to do with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, two areas of spinning, non-biodegradable debris in the ocean so large they are dubbed the Seventh Continent? Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut proposes recycling the plastics to build a series of underwater eco-villages or “oceanscrapers” that can each house 20,000 people called Aequorea after the bioluminescent jellyfish species it resembles.

An oceanscraper will spiral down 250 floors from mangrove forests on the water’s surface to the seabed. Besides living space, Aequorea will provide offices, hotels, sports venues, and other amenities of living on land. Aquaponic farms will provide food, seawater will be desalinated for drinking, and light will come via bioluminescence, like an actual aequorea. Also, like its namesake, the oceanscraper’s twisting form, highly resistant to hydrostatic pressure, will stabilize it against strong currents and storms in conjunction with ballasts in the double shell.

The structures will be 3D printed using algoplast, a mixture of algae and garbage from the Great Patch. Hopefully, all 27 million tons of the waste will be recycled this way. From there, an Aequorea continues to self-build the way a seashell does — through natural calcification by fixing the calcium carbonate in the water, forming an external skeleton.^[9]

1 Inverted Skyscraper

An upside-down skyscraper not only sounds insane, it is insane. But tell that to Dubai, which has already built some of the most daring structures humans have ever seen. But the Burj Khalifa is peanuts compared to Dubai’s proposed Analemma Tower, which will dangle upside down from an asteroid above the city.

This plan, part of a trend to wean people away from ground-based living, involves capturing an asteroid and placing it in orbit just above the Earth’s surface. Strong cables will suspend the skyscraper and have it hover in the skies. This also allows the building to traverse the planet, floating over different cities in the course of a day. Analemma will be 105,000 feet (32,000 meters) high, dwarfing the Burj Khalifa. Residents of its block of apartments access the building by drone. Solar panels will provide energy, and water can be obtained from surrounding clouds.

Analemma will travel in an eccentric geosynchronous orbit between the northern and southern hemispheres on a daily loop while tracing a figure eight, slowing down at the top and bottom of the eight. The proposed orbit is calibrated so the slowest part of the tower’s trajectory occurs over New York, allowing the occupants to spend a little more time visiting the city.^[10]