Architects from leading French construction company OXO have presented a plan for erecting a futuristic city in the Sahara - one of the most uninviting places to live on Earth.
The architects strongly believe that their project will transform some of the most lifeless corners of the largest desert into desirable places to live. It's to be sustained on the basis of renewable resources. Electricity will be obtained from the sunlight that's widely abundant in the Sahara, while water will be stored and processed from rain.
The concept envisions a 1476 ft (450 m)-tall tower, with 8 400 000 sq ft of floor area. Project designer is French-Moroccan architect Manal Rachdi. "We tried to think of a concept which enables us to create not a building but a vertical city in the desert, " said Rachdi.
"It's a place which is hostile and where it's difficult to live, so we created this tower including a kind of protective shell, " stated the architect when revealing his project.
The project calls for offices to take up 20% of the area of the futuristic city, with the rest taken up by a hotel and 600 residential units. The idea is to make a city out of a tower. The goal is to have a building that combines different elements, including housing units in immediate proximity to the offices.
"There is a museum, a meteorological observatory on the Sahara, there are libraries, gyms, pools. The idea was really to offer a sufficient number of programs to be able to remain self-sufficient and not to have to rely on other buildings or have to create new ones, " added Rachdi.
Sahara is one of the least densely populated territories in the world. It is home primarily to nomads, who never stay in one spot for too long. Temperatures during the summer go as high as 120°F (48 °C). The project has gotten a green light. Architects expect work on the tower to begin in 2025 and continue for 5 decades afterward.
