Design Department

The world’s tallest elevator testing tower has just opened in Inazawa City, Japan, and is named Solae. Why would you build a tower just to test elevators? Because the world’s tallest buildings (including Taipei 101, which I rode in last year) have a need to install elevators that take you from floor 1 to floor “high” really fast. Solae will be used by Mitsubishi to test their latest drives, gears and cables in a controlled environment instead of say, a mall in downtown Tokyo. If Mitsubishi can lift me 100 stories in a minute, they can figure out a way to build a better looking Galant. [BBC]

Moscow’s rapidly growing skyline will soon feature an eye-popping new addition: Crystal Island, which will be the world’s biggest building when completed. Sir Norman Foster’s mountainous 27 million square feet spiraling “city within a building” will cost $4 billion and it is scheduled to be built within next 5 years.

The Crystal Island will be Lord Foster’s second large scale project in the Russian capital, and his third new building design that resembles a volcano (we’re talking about his two mountainous buildings in Astana, Kazakstan). Although many people are calling this design the ‘Christmas Tree’ of Moscow – we can’t help but be reminded of the utopian and also rather volcanic X-Seed 4000 design for Tokyo. Unlike that pipe-dream project, however, Foster has a track record of getting buildings built, so the likelihood is high that we will see this striking structure towering over the Kremlin within 5 years time.