With his “Espiral 3500” project, the Spanish architect Javier López-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar, 24, is designing a 193-metre high skyscraper that includes a mini-city in its own right.
Urban areas are constantly expanding. But how far will they go? What if the future consisted of vertical buildings? To avoid saturating the urban centres, a 24-year-old Spanish architect, Javier López-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar had the ingenious idea of elevating the city and fit it into a skyscraper.
His “Espiral 3500” project, which recently won an award in the Skyscraper 2017 competition, is a 193-metre high tower, almost as high as the World Trade Center, which will offer its future inhabitants a complete urban ecosystem.
Like on the ground, the structure is strewn with streets, staircases, housing, but also public parks, collaborative gardens, a shopping centre and even a beach … Everything “spread out in height” thanks to a central structure in the form of a spiral to which the various modules cling.
“I use a spiral system in which public areas (i.e. the different types of street) form rings that are supported on a structural element. The areas intended for private use cling directly to this structure,” explains Javier López. “This ‘inverted street’ system allows for immediate public-private links, while providing for sufficient dissociation to give the desired privacy.”
Liveable megacities
In total, the route open to the public would extend over 1,700 metres. The objective, according to the architect, is to save the “most valuable property” in town: the land. “Verticality makes it possible to reproduce and extend everything that happens at ground level,” he explains.
Planned for construction in the “La Abufera” nature park near Valencia, a seaside area heavily populated in the summer, Espiral 3500 is only a demonstration project for the time being but, by concentrating a mini-city in its own right in a single building, this structure could make megacities more liveable in the future.
Tags: Espiral 3500, Javier López-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar, skyscraper, Skyscraper 2017, Valencia
