Beyond skyscrapers: the speculative engineering of cities that could encompass entire worlds

Cultures · Published 1 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: While the Burj Khalifa is a megaproject, a true megastructure is something far more radical. From floating sky-cities to rings encircling stars, these are not just large buildings, but self-supporting frameworks designed to house entire civilizations and harness the raw energy of suns.

In architectural theory, a megastructure is more than just a tall building; it is a massive, self-supporting construct. The concept was popularized in the 1960s, envisioning a future where entire cities could be encased within a single, interconnected building. In 1968, Ralph Wilcoxen proposed a specific vision: a structural framework into which rooms or houses could be installed, uninstalled, and replaced, allowing the architecture to adapt to the changing wishes of its residents.

These designs often move beyond the realm of current industrial technology into the territory of speculative engineering. While modern megaprojects like the Zuiderzee Works or the Burj Khalifa are massive, they are limited by terrestrial constraints. True megastructures, however, can scale to astronomical proportions. These include Dyson spheres—masses of orbiting objects designed to surround a star to capture its full solar energy—or the Alderson disk, a structure with a thickness of several thousand kilometers and a radius reaching the orbit of Mars or Jupiter.

The scale of these ideas ranges from the planetary to the stellar. Concepts like the 'Cloud Nine' sphere proposed by Buckminster Fuller suggest habitats floating in the sky, while others, like the Shkadov thruster, aim to move entire stars through space. Whether it is a 'space elevator' extending beyond geostationary altitude or a 'Ringworld' rotating to create artificial gravity, megastructures represent the ultimate intersection of human ambition and the limits of physics.

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