Skyscrapers elevators
History of New York City is History of skyscrapers and all skyscrapers use elevators as vertical transportation tool to move people up and down inside of buildings. Elevator allows people to live and work at tall buildings. Today, architects explore more diverse functions of elevator such as building slab itself as an elevator which creates whole different experience both in space and time. What if we follow that logic and expand the role of elevator to urban scale? One area of city’s existing fabric (single block, multiple blocks) could move up and down.
For Example, during the normal daily hours the city remains as it is. During the night time, the fabric could be lifted up from ground level to the sky and allow people to experience the city from a totally different level. After the fabric lifted up, the empty area underneath could be filled with the new raised public platform from underground which contains diverse public function within it. The new public platform and the existing fabric are lifted up by the hydraulic lift under the ground. The existing raised fabric and new artificial public platform are connected by the peripheral structural system and also served as freight elevator duct. Therefore, the structural system and freight elevators create a layer of screen between the urban fabric outside and new public area inside.
The new public ground and elevated existing fabric are two gigantic slabs and in-between the two slabs are a public urban space surrounded by the structural curtain and freight elevators. The space is a semi-closed area and the lifted existing fabric above serve as urban canopy and freight elevators and structural system serve as a screen which makes soft boundary between inside public space and outside tall and busy city.
The space allows visitors to come and go freely from all directions from street level. Visitors also could experience the public space inside and take the freight elevators on the periphery up to the sky level which is lifted existing city fabric. It is a both familiar and strange place at the top. It is familiar because it is the existing city they came to the place before and it is also strange because visitors are located at a completely different level and they could observe and walk on top of the city’s skyline.
The project gives each piece of urban land a double faces. It is an urban fabric as it is and also it is become an urban void and complete public area surrounded by city’s tall buildings. People could experience two extreme conditions at a single location in different time and different space. Also, the verticality of New York City is no longer viewed and experienced by people from the ground level. It is a new vertical infrastructural system which allow people experience the city in a three dimensional way.
