Tower of Atmosphere

A second Studio One project mining science fiction to imagine California's future. London's great industrial expositions gave the public its first taste of shopping inside a single vast hall — and the revolutions that followed sent the planet's carbon dioxide climbing for a century. Tower of Atmosphere answers that history with a building that captures the atmosphere in order to manufacture one: a geothermal carbon-capture complex where people don't really shop, but come to experience the atmosphere of shopping, conjured out of captured CO2.

London's great industrial expositions first gave the public the experience of shopping inside a single vast hall — the ancestor of the shopping mall. But the industrial revolutions that followed sent the planet's carbon dioxide climbing, year on year, for more than a century.

Two later shifts answer that history at once. On one side, cleaner ways of making things — 3D printing above all — have hollowed out the traditional mall. On the other, machines have grown far better at pulling carbon dioxide back out of the air. This project sits at their intersection: a complex that captures the atmosphere in order to manufacture an atmosphere. Here people don't really shop — they come to experience the atmosphere of shopping, a mood conjured, quite literally, out of captured CO2.

Geothermal & the Climeworks cycle

The tower runs on California's geothermal energy. Underground water, rising under its own heat and pressure, spins the turbines that generate the building's power — including the power for its Climeworks carbon-capture system. Climeworks pulls air through ducts with banks of electric fans, drawing it over a sorbent laced with granules that chemically bind to CO2; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas, with custom software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle.

Coso Hot Springs

Coso Hot Springs makes an ideal site — geothermally rich, and barely populated. The result is a hybrid of air, water and steam that becomes, in effect, an archive of brands. The carbon-sequestering machinery sits side by side with other technologies that can feed on the site's surplus heat, water, steam and power — everything from the strictly practical, like server farms, to the indulgent, like a spa.

An archive of brands

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A scene from the future

“What is there to see out here in the desert?” the daughter complained, with a trace of adolescent rebellion. Her father drove his antique Porsche with a smile, the electric motor's hum all but lost beneath the recorded growl of an air-cooled flat-six — gasoline engines had been against regulation for more than twenty years. “Well,” he said, “this is the last time.”

Soon a tower crept above the horizon, its surface glistening with pipes, wrapped in clouds of steam. “What is it?” she asked. “This is the project I worked on, decades ago,” he said proudly. “The machines look old-fashioned, but they really do still work.” The car pulled itself into a parking space, and they walked into the lobby. “I don't see what a building like this has to do with shopping,” she said. “It looks like a factory.” He only smiled, and held the elevator door.

The buttons surprised her: brand logos, no numbers. “When I stepped in, this elevator began scanning my shopping history,” he said. “In a few seconds the building can rebuild tens of thousands of the scenes I once shopped in.” He pressed Dior. “The steam the machines make can even reproduce the weather of the exact day I bought something.” They rose to the 73rd floor and stepped into a flawless 2018 Dior flagship — even the surrounding streets had been simulated.

“Do you know that forty years ago today, I got engaged to your mother? She chose this Dior suit for me herself. I was so heavy back then I had to try on a few before one fit.” His words came slower now. She seemed to understand, and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Then today I'll choose your suit for you, in her place.” Outside, a fine rain began to fall. She watched her father slowly put on a suit much like the one from forty years before — like the young man he had once been, standing beside his wife.