Imagining 432 Park As a Giant Drone Control Terminal
Yesterday 6sqft brought you the winning design from Evolo’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition, a proposal to dig down below Central Park, exposing the bedrock beneath and thereby freeing up space to build a horizontal skyscraper around its entire perimeter. The second-place entry is more traditional in the sense that it builds up, but it’s more outside-the-box when it comes to function.
Titled The Hive, the project reimagines 432 Park Avenue, the city’s tallest and most expensive residential building, as “a vertical control terminal for advanced flying drones that will provide personal and commercial services to residents of New York City.” By covering its facade in docking and charging stations, the building gets its hive-like appearance with the drones buzzing around like bees.
The modules would fit nine different types of drones based on the shape and size of their landing fixtures, creating a rhythmic pattern. They’re organized between overlapping exterior and interior layers as a way to maximize surface area and create different environments for larger and smaller drones. In order to make the horizontal landings safe, the platforms with docked drones could be flipped vertically to be parallel with the facade. This movement creates an animated building, as do the flickering lights of the battery stations behind each module, which also help with navigation and display the occupancy percentage.
The designers, Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, and Chengda Zhu, see the Hive as a way to re-shape current air-zoning regulations at a time when more and more companies (Amazon and Walmart to name a couple) are moving towards high-speed drone delivery. A centralized control station, they believe, will appeal to legislative officials who seek to regulate drone traffic. And by choosing “an alternative asset argument for the usage of the land on 432 Park Avenue,” they avoid current FAA no-fly zones.
Learn more about the proposal on Evolo.
Images via Evolo
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