History of The Tower
A lot of you have asked about the backstory of the Tower: how long it took to build, and what prompted its construction in the first place. Since the world of The Thousandth Floor isn’t a dystopian world—plenty of people live outside the Tower, in rural or suburban areas, or normal non-vertical cities (just wait till book 2!!)—the reason wasn’t that New Yorkers had to build a Tower, it’s that they chose to, as an investment in their future.
The concept is called vertical urbanization: the idea that cities of the future will grow upward rather than outward. As a self-contained city, complete with apartments and schools and hospitals and shopping and even parks, the Tower is an extreme version of vertical urbanization. But it’s not that far off! Already some of the supertowers in Asia and in the Middle East are starting to include features like this—interior parks, retail areas, even helipads so that you can land there straight from the airport. Maybe a thousand-story Tower won’t seem so crazy in a hundred years…
The Thousandth Floor takes place in 2118, twenty years after the completion of the New York Tower (which residents call simply “the Tower”). Avery’s dad Pierson Fuller had proposed the project years ago, but it took a while for him to convince people–and then finally, in 2095, New Yorkers finally voted in favor of construction in a citywide referendum. If you live in New York, you can imagine how many people still protested the decision 🙂 The construction was an enormous project—it took almost three years, with residents of Manhattan displaced to the suburbs as huge prefabricated floors, elevators, and steel beams were assembled into the greatest structure on earth. Now, everyone who lives in the Tower is so used to the ease and convenience that they can’t imagine going back to the way things were before. And since the Fullers planned the whole thing, it should be no surprise that they live on the thousandth floor, literally on top of the world…
By 2118, the Tower is far from the world’s only supertower. Fuller Investments, the company that financed and operates the original construction project, has opened several more towers around the world—in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Quito. The Dubai Tower will be the next to open, and they’re in talks with Paris as well, hoping to build something there…
My incredibly talented friend Lauren, who is an architect in New York City, sketched these amazing floor plans for the Fullers’ apartment and for the Tower’s glossy brochure.*
Wouldn’t it be fun to get to bid on an apartment like this?
(If you’re interested in vertical urbanism, here’s some cool reading about it!
http://du.gensler.com/vol6/shanghai-tower/#/vertical-urbanism)
*These images were preliminary concept sketches just for fun and are not intended for commercial use.