Chase Tower (Chicago)

In Tokyo, monuments on the drawing boards include Taisei Corporation's 4,000-meter cone-shaped building known as X-SEED4000. Its base would be six kilometers wide and it would sit above the ocean, housing 500,000 people. The reason for the name X-SEED is that, though shaped like Mount Fuji, the monument's height would exceed that of Mount Fuji by several hundred meters, so residents could enjoy looking down on the mountain. Shimizu Corporation is proposing a far more modest 800-meter skyscraper (almost twice the height of the Sears Tower in Chicago), on pillars above a city. Kajima Corporation is pursuing a stacked structure, a so-called Dynamic Intelligent Building, which consists of several fifty-story structures piled on top of one another. Ohbayashi Corporation, for its part, has announced plans for the 2,100-meter Aeropolis 2001, whose shadow will darken the environs of Tokyo. While these companies have put their plans on hold due to the bursting of the Bubble, their concepts are dear to the Construction Ministry's heart, and as we have seen in the case of Nagara Dam, once a concept, always a concept ...»