Floating City: Rethinking the Z-axis

Type: eVolo Competition 2015
Description: Futuristic Nazareth - Rethinking the Skyscraper
Location: Nazareth, Palestine
Year: January, 2015

Team: Hania Halabi, Issam Saba
Visualisation: Anas Yacoub

Nazareth is one of the largest Palestinian cities that are still under Israeli occupation today. It lies within the green line, with an area of 14.12 km² and a population of 210,000. As is the case of many other Palestinian cities, Nazareth has been rapidly growing in the last few decades, and is facing a lot of urbanization challenges due to political, economic and social factors. In areas of dense urban fabric, skyscrapers provide a solution for the lack of horizontal spaces, nonetheless they limit thinking the capacity that the z-axis of any city may hold.

Concept:

This proposal for eVolo competition 2015, attempts to combine a solution for Nazareth's dense urban fabric with a futuristic vision that entails a new technology emerging from the sciences of gravitropism and magnetics. The project thus provides a contradictory provocative image of an occupied city functioning under a high-tech system that rethinks the z-axis and its potential capacity in today's contemporary cities on one hand, but also allows a new form of human movement, using aircrafts, which were first experimentally launched as "The Martin Jetpacks" on the other. 

While Gravity plays a fundamental role in the forms and events that can be created on Earth, this proposal wishes to question the possibility of creating a new life through an invert technology that refuses gravity; and forms a new layer of living in the sky where events are freed from material and gravitational constraints. Thus, the suggested system contains cubic buildings which hold magnets within, with the help of which they generate magnetic fields to repulse the earth's field and this allows them to float. However due to environmental factors such as the wind, a cable system as proposed is necessary to prevent the cubes from moving.