Cape Town’s new tallest building, Portside, currently under construction, will be the first significant high-rise in Cape Town since Safmarine House in 1993. At 139 meters the new building is marginally lower than the first approved tower which was approved at 147,6 meters above mean sea level (inclusive of ‘features’). Portside is intended to ‘key into’ into an existing and emerging cluster of tall buildings in this precinct of the Central City.
To celebrate our excitement of this new addition to our skyline, and as part of the end of our Month of Design for 2012, we are organizing a tour of the construction site of the building on 29 September, at 10AM. There are only 15 places available, so follow the easy Your City Idea steps and book your place.
Your City Idea is aimed at using various offline and online opportunities given to citizens a voice on urban issues, and to crowdsource ideas for the urban future of our cities.
Follow these three easy steps to book your place:
1. Like Future Cape Town on Facebook:
2. Share your Your City Idea, to the question below, in the comments section, using words, links, pictures or other :
Share your most daring, boldest idea for a new skyscraper in Cape Town. Where would it be? How tall? Think big!
3. Once step 1 and 2 are complete, mail media(at)futurecapetown(dot)com to with your details so that we can send you the meeting place, secret code and other details.
Transplant the SA Green Building Council from Rondebosch to a tall, sleek, and GREEN rated skyscraper in town!
Good idea, see you tomorrow at 10AM.
Have yet to see that building. Who will pay for this? 🙂
Redevelop Robben Island.
Imagine if the whole of Robben Island can be redeveloped into a luxury holiday resort. Not only for the rich and famous, but also for the local people of Cape Town/SA and can include a theme/waterpark, shops, adventure activities, museum, restaurants, etc.. The resort should also feature a modern, tall building to display the forward-thinking and innovative people of SA, while paying the important tribute to the history, etc..
Building can be 200m high.
Good idea, see you tomorrow at 10AM.
Ah, that is going to be a tricky Heritage issue, but no reasons we can’t dream and try to develop Robben Island.
A 300m tall building (excluding the antenna) with deep blue glass until the final floors on the 2 taller sections of the building where it becomes a blue similar to that of our beautiful clear skies after the Cape Doctor has blown, with a large car park on the sides of the building with gardens on the two lower sections and around the base of the building with two fountains or pools of water. The building stands on the intersection of two main roads. Made this scratch model using a 3D modeling program 🙂
Good idea, see you tomorrow at 10AM.
Why blue glass? Recently saw a building in Johannesburg, under construction with blue glass and it can look quite tacky. Car parks! No! 🙂
Skyscraper encased in Solar Glass Window Panels – effectively a giant urban vertical solar farm. Must have curves and colour. Nothing square. Nothing Grey.
Good idea, see you tomorrow at 10AM.
How do we achieve the “not grey” effect when using solar glass?
Why stick to one tower? Build the two towers on top of the podiums at the intersection of Strand Street and Adderley, as was once punted. This intersection is arguably the most vibrant in the city. Two skyscrapers atop the podiums (one at least the height of Portside) would elegantly frame this grand entrance to the city, greeting throngs of visitors arriving daily by car and by train.
The ground floors of these buildings will have triple-volume ceilings, free public wifi, vertical bicycle storage for office workers and will provide public thoroughfare to St. George’s beyond. The two buildings will offer mixed use retail, office, hotel- and apartment residential and will accommodate a variety of uses, with foot traffic at all hours: students, shoppers, office workers, executives and the public will interact with the same space.
At least one of the tops of the towers will be accessible to the public as a viewing deck, with benches and coin-operated telescopes, and a stall selling samoosas and boerie rolls (or bagels with salmon and scrambled egg if that’s your vibe). The rooftop space at podium height (3rd floor) will taken up by public gardens, seamlessly flowing into retail mall space connected by sky bridges to adjacent buildings.
This project should be a jewel in Cape Town’s crown, it should be felt to belong to all of Cape Town. It should have buy-in from the City and from the public (from all economic groups). Most importantly, it should be a space that makes us remember we live in Cape Town, the most goddamn awesome city in the world…
Good idea, see you tomorrow at 10AM.
I can see the vision, but what about the approach on Strand/Adderley, the roads, horrible cycle lanes, the underground pathways. How do we fix this to support two towers?
A skyscraper should be built at the Waterfront that overlooks the ocean and part of the coastline. It should be 180 metres tall and should be completely glass on the outside, if possible.
Good idea, see you tomorrow at 10AM.
Why only glass?
A skyscraper, not scraping the sky, but on it’s side. Hovering above the N1 and N2, these buildings fill in the dead space directly above Cape Town’s high speed motorways, continuously growing out from the CBD, towards the flats of the sprawling city. Employees of Cape Town’s existing vertical office parks, who drive in from the suburbs everyday, can now access these commercial nodes from closer to home. One can move through these buildings, stretching for tens of kilometers, in personal pods that travel at 300km/h in vacuum tubes. With the construction of these ultra long building, Cape Town’s existing skyscrapers are demolished, replaced by six storey mixed use buildings, creating a more diverse, walkable, human scale city.