architecture

Thursday, January 3, 2008

The Elevator Tower

[Images: Mitsubishi's new elevator testing tower in Japan].

Mitsubishi has opened a "test tower," built for experimental new elevator designs and technologies. It's "the world's tallest elevator testing tower" – and it's a functionalist monolith, standing at 567 feet.
It's just one gigantic elevator shaft.
The building will be used "to conduct research into high-speed elevators to serve the next generation of super-tall buildings," including stress tests on "new drives, gears, cables and other lift systems."
I see at least one scene from Mission Impossible IV being filmed here – there's some sort of world-destroying nuclear device hidden above that vertical maze of moving platforms and our hero's got to find it... Or perhaps some future game world called Batman: Japan, in which the Caped Crusader lives and works entirely in various locations throughout the Japanese archipelago, burning incense and punching through Cor-Ten steel blocks in an underlit dōjō near the sea. One night he follows a lone criminal back to what looks like a vertical fortress... only it's not a fortress: it's this weird experimental elevator complex looming over him in the darkness.
He enters.
He hears machines.
Hijinks ensue.

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