NEWSFLASH: The world is rapidly urbanizing. Cities are growing more dense. There is a swell of new supertalls in our skylines, and along with, elevators that get super-high, super-fast. These include an upcoming Guangzhou skyscraper’s 45-mile-per-house lift that CNN promises will feel like “riding a train into the sky.” Yawn. Like we ain’t been to the top of a building before. (We party in the Boom Boom Room. C’mon.) But one truly impressive new development is MULTI, an elevator system recently proposed by German manufacturer ThyssenKrupp to take us somewhere we’ve never been before: sideways. The scheme is not as much like the fictional magic elevator in one lesser-known “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” sequel as it is an internal urban infrastructure, a vertical and horizontal metro system. Rather than feeling like you’re riding a train into the sky, as in the case of Guangzhou, you’ll be doing a hop-on, hop-off to your next business meeting. “Operating on the basic premise of a circular system, such as a paternoster, MULTI consists of various cabins running in a loop at a targeted speed of 5 m/s,” according to the product’s release, “enabling passengers to have near-constant access ...
NEWSFLASH: The world is rapidly urbanizing. Cities are growing more dense. There is a swell of new supertalls in our skylines, and along with, elevators that get super-high, super-fast. These include an upcoming Guangzhou skyscraper’s 45-mile-per-house lift that CNN promises will feel like “riding a train into the sky.” Yawn. Like we ain’t been to the top of a building before. (We party in the Boom Boom Room. C’mon.) But one truly impressive new development is MULTI, an elevator system recently proposed by German manufacturer ThyssenKrupp to take us somewhere we’ve never been before: sideways. The scheme is not as much like the fictional magic elevator in one lesser-known “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” sequel as it is an internal urban infrastructure, a vertical and horizontal metro system. Rather than feeling like you’re riding a train into the sky, as in the case of Guangzhou, you’ll be doing a hop-on, hop-off to your next business meeting. “Operating on the basic premise of a circular system, such as a paternoster, MULTI consists of various cabins running in a loop at a targeted speed of 5 m/s,” according to the product’s release, “enabling passengers to have near-constant access ...