Look out DOM (e) residence and 18.36.54 House, there's a new conceptual bit of architecture in town, and this one not only boasts the requisite avant garde punctuation, but also the ability to clean urban air and look every bit like a tower coated in mechanized cobwebs. Chang-Yeob Lee, a graduate of London's Royal College of Art, dreamed up Synth[e]tech[e]cology to transfigure London's BT Tower, currently used for telecommunications, into a "pollution-harvesting" skyscraper, with lots of silvery webbing to suck up air schmutz and perhaps give Londoners with respiratory problems a bit of a, err, breather.
Inside the tower, Lee proposes a research facility dedicated to maximizing the efficiency of the structure, which would not only clean the air, but actually use the refuse as fuel. The proposal insists that the high-rise could actually create methanol—"the simplest, safest and easiest to store and transport liquid oxygenated hydrocarbon"—from car fumes. According to the diagram (below, bottom image): "With about 150 tonnes of CO2 per year emitted from road traffic around Marylabone Road, nearly 100 tonnes of Methanol can be produced."
If it's all it claims to be, Synth[e]tech[e]cology could very well be the most eco-positive building/tangled jumble of fiber optic cables/architecture dissertation project there ever was, though, true, it all seems to be the brand of fantastic that's doomed to exist in rendering only.
· Synth[e]tech[e]cology by Chang-Yeob Lee [Dezeen]
· All Architectural Craziness posts [Curbed National]