Skyscraper hanging off an asteroid is the wild residential design that could come true

By
Emily Power
May 22, 2024

When money is no object, the imagination can run wild. And none more so than in the case of this skyscraper, designed to hang off an asteroid over one of the biggest cities in the world.

That’s correct. It would be the world’s tallest building, and hard to picture it not also being the most expensive.

An architecture firm in the US has a blueprint for a tower to hang upside down, suspended from an asteroid, over New York City.

Analemma Tower by Cloud AO - the future of how we could live. Photo: Cloud Architecture Office

Analemma Tower, as it is dubbed, is the vision of dynamic firm Clouds Architecture Office, based in Manhattan, which explains it has developed the concept based on “principles of a conventional space elevator”.

The rock would orbit at 50,000km, high above the International Space Station, and the spire of the tower would hit 32,000 metres, a long way above the clouds and where planes cruise.

The man-made asteroid would be directed into space, with cables from which to dangle the skyscraper over its final destination – Manhattan. The building itself would be completed in Dubai, where the skill and technology is available at a cheaper rate than in the US, and transported to the place where it would become a jaw-dropping feature of the skyline.

The asteroid holding the suspended tower would hover 50,000km above sea level. Photo: Cloud Architecture Office

“By placing a large asteroid into orbit over earth, a high strength cable can be lowered towards the surface of earth from which a super tall tower can be suspended,” the project brief on the Clouds AO website explains.

“Since this new tower typology is suspended in the air, it can be constructed anywhere in the world and transported to its final location. The proposal calls for Analemma to be constructed over Dubai, which has proven to be a specialist in tall building construction at one fifth the cost of New York City construction.”

Analemma Tower would the world's tallest building, reaching above where planes fly. Photo: Cloud Architecture Office

The designers – a project team including Ostap Rudakevych, Masayuki Sono, Kevin Huang – reveal in the explanatory brief how they see a typical day unfolding for someone living in Analemma.

The “lower end” of the tower is for business, and sleeping quarters are two-thirds of the way up, and the top portion is dedicated to activities.

A view of Analemma Tower from the streets of Manhattan. Photo: Cloud Architecture Office

The trajectory of man-made design – to go as high as possible and live at loftier levels, as demonstrated by contemporary demand for high-rise rise apartments – compelled the architects to flesh out the idea.

“Applying market trading forecasting methods, we can infer that human structures will reach higher and higher, that we are in the process of dislodging ourselves from the planet’s surface,” they say.

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