An award-winning design for Manhattan envisions a hive-like tower for unmanned aerial drones. The building would allow drones to dock legally, away from no-fly zones.
The Hive skyscraper concept
was created by American designers for eVolo Magazine’s annualSkyscraper Competition.
A jury for the architecture magazine chose three winners from 489 entries. They were looking for designs that took novel approaches and challenged how we understand vertical architecture.
Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, and Chengda Zhu imagined The Hive as an alternative to432 Park Avenue, a super-tall residential tower in Manhattan that topped out at well over 1,300 feet.
The Hive
In their version, a centralized control terminal hosts docking and charging stations for both personal and commercial delivery drones.
The building’s location would not only “gather the commercial power of Manhattan,” the designers wrote in their project description, but stand “away from the no-fly-zones set by the FAA.”
Modules dotting the façade could fit nine different drone types, giving the skyscraper exterior an animated appearance as the drones come and go.
Despite this imaginative drone-accommodating design, first place in the competition went to New York Horizon, which proposes turning Central Park into a canyon surrounded by a “hybrid multi-functional mega structure.” I had a visceral reaction to the mock-up.
New York Magazine wondered if it was the best or worst idea ever. In my view, it’s terrifying.
Third place went to a really neat sustainable data center design to house servers in Iceland. Looking like something straight out of Star Wars, the Data Skyscraper would take advantage of cold temperatures and be powered by renewable energy.
Between the growing need for data storage and our passion for drones, we’re going to need room to house all that tech. Here’s hoping the plans we actually do pick won’t come back to sting us.
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