The Floating Tower, a project aimed at saving Belarusian swamps, has got a honourable mention in the 2019 Skyscraper Competition organized by eVolo, an architecture and design journal focused on technological advances, sustainability, and innovative design for the 21st century.
The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.
This time, the jury has selected 3 winners and 27 honourable mentions from 478 projects received.
Young Belarusian architects (Piotr Yurchanka, Alexey Kunko, Vladislav Sidorenko, Dmitry Tkachuk) submitted their project for the competition.
According to them in the mid 20th century, the total area of swamps in Belarus was 2,940 thousand hectares (14.2% of the entire territory of the country); after 60 years, the area of swamps on the territory of Belarus has decreased by 3.5 times. The drainage, led to irreversible consequences, such as fires, drought, soil degradation and the complete destruction of certain types of animals and plants not only in Belarus, but also in all Eastern Europe.
“Humanity dreams to visit Mars. What for? Pretty soon we will make the desert “Mars” on our planet with our own hands…,” the authors fear.
The Floating Tower consists of two spheres united by a system of cables. The upper sphere, which is responsible for the movement (flight) of the whole structure, is a high-tech balloon, covered with membrane fabric outside, which accumulates condensate. The surface area of the sphere, which is covered with such a cloth, is more than 7000m2. That allows us to collect thousands of liters of water per day. The lower sphere is a reservoir for the accumulation of this water and irrigation of future swamps. The accumulated water from the upper sphere moves to the lower one by means of a special system of pumps and cables. Moreover, there are research centers, classrooms and facilities for short-term stay of people insideThe Floating Tower in the upper and lower parts of the sphere.
“We will be able to restore thousands of hectares of soil, we will be able to extinguish the most large-scale forest fires, fight droughts and floods all over the planet!” the architects believe.
