The Elevator Tower

[Images: Mitsubishi's new elevator testing tower in Japan].

Mitsubishi has opened a "test tower," built for experimental new elevator designs and technologies. It's "the world's tallest elevator testing tower" – and it's a functionalist monolith, standing at 567 feet.
It's just one gigantic elevator shaft.
The building will be used "to conduct research into high-speed elevators to serve the next generation of super-tall buildings," including stress tests on "new drives, gears, cables and other lift systems."
I see at least one scene from Mission Impossible IV being filmed here – there's some sort of world-destroying nuclear device hidden above that vertical maze of moving platforms and our hero's got to find it... Or perhaps some future game world called Batman: Japan, in which the Caped Crusader lives and works entirely in various locations throughout the Japanese archipelago, burning incense and punching through Cor-Ten steel blocks in an underlit dōjō near the sea. One night he follows a lone criminal back to what looks like a vertical fortress... only it's not a fortress: it's this weird experimental elevator complex looming over him in the darkness.
He enters.
He hears machines.
Hijinks ensue.

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Blogger m said...

It's interesting that there is a building for the sole purpose of circulation (vertical circulation in this case). Usually circulation is a mode of connecting purpose/program space. In this case, there is no purpose in the traditional sense, no destination. Just perfecting the art and science of movement.

January 03, 2008 3:26 PM  
Blogger Yanuly Sanson said...

I'd rather see a piped transportation chamber, moving not only vertically, but horizontally as well. I'd be more fun.

January 03, 2008 3:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's a 100' tall toilet testing tower at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.

January 03, 2008 5:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love this thing. It looks so elegant and lovely. Far much more so than most skyscrapers in the world.

January 04, 2008 9:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice writing.
Especially the Hijinks... :)

January 05, 2008 10:56 PM  
Blogger Peter Hoh said...

Geoff, are you thinking of a vertical version of the great door chase scene that takes place near the end of Monsters Inc? That movie had great art direction.

January 06, 2008 4:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It looks like something that belongs in the elevator-centric novel The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead -- a truly "pure" elevator shaft.

January 06, 2008 8:38 PM  
Blogger Geoff Manaugh said...

Peter, I've never seen Monsters, Inc, actually; I'll have to add it to my Netflix! Happy new year, by the way.

January 06, 2008 10:02 PM  
Blogger Peter Hoh said...

Geoff, something else to look at -- soon, before the video is dropped from the site.

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S77294.shtml?cat=69

click on the show
Sunday, Dec. 30, 2007: Unusual Houses III

You want to watch the Fantasy Apartments clip
as well as the Tiny House clip.

January 08, 2008 4:23 AM  

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