Imagine riding an elevator inside your own apartment building, going straight up through a pyramid so tall it disappears into the clouds. It’s not a movie scene. It is a real design by Shimizu Corporation, a long-established Tokyo-based construction company. According to The Guardian's report on Tokyo's unbuilt megaprojects, Shimizu unveiled its “Mega-City Pyramid” concept in 2004, and the drawings are still circulating today, more than two decades later. It was never built, and there is a specific scientific reason for this.
All of this began with a movie scene
The idea did not come from a boardroom. According to company lore, in 1982, a Shimizu employee watched the premiere of "Blade Runner," which features two giant pyramid-shaped towers looming over a futuristic Los Angeles. The idea reportedly developed over a decade, and by October 1992, Shimizu representatives were filing international patents for a pyramid city of their own.
The numbers are almost hard to believe
According to The Guardian's report on Tokyo's unbuilt megaprojects, Shimizu’s plan calls for a structure roughly 2,000 meters tall over Tokyo Bay, designed to house up to a million people, close to the population of San Jose, California The exact height is 2,004 meters (6,575 feet) according to Shimizu’s own technical specifications, about two and a half times taller than today’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
