Perhaps no other recent architectural project asserts Fuller's idea of synergy more than Peter Testa's Carbon Tower a hugely ambitious project based on advanced textile technology. The building’s structure consists of forty helical bands of carbon fiber, hundreds of feet long, winding in both directions around the cylindrical volume.
Instead of relying on a rigid internal core and a series of columns for stability, these thin bands, each a foot wide and an inch thick, run continuously from the bottom to the top of the building and take the entire vertical compressive load. This approach requires a break from the tradition of 'reductionism', and an almost complete abandonment of the principles of hierarchies in building systems.
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