Travel + Leisure: PHOTOS: Where To Visit The Future

Zooming around with jet packs and living in rocket-shaped buildings seemed our destiny during the space-obsessed 1950s and ’60s. Now, with civilian space travel now nearly a reality, how do today’s starry-eyed architects see the future?

Well, it turns out a survey of morphing city skylines reveals abstract structures inspired by nature or cultural symbols and engineered to reach higher, glow brighter, curve and swoop.

These futuristic buildings are not only visually arresting, they offer novel solutions to the challenges that lie ahead, such as harvesting water from clouds (as Dubai’s vertigo-inducing, 2,716.5-feet-high Burj Khalifa does), creating high-rise rooftop forests, and offering perks like charging stations for electric cars. These buildings give us a glimpse of what our future holds — for the moment, at least. If only someone could get to work on those jet packs.

–Emma Sloley

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• Tjuvholmen Icon Building, Oslo

  Renzo Piano designed this arts and culture center which debuted in 2012 along a disused harbor southwest of Oslo’s city center. Bridges link three buildings—a museum, office space, and culture center—across canals formed from reclaimed land, and a sculpture park gently slopes toward the sea. The entire project is developed along a new promenade that starts at Aker Brygge and ends on the sea at a floating dock, providing unbroken visual contact with the water. It looks, from above, like a docked spaceship, with a curved roof that dips down to meet the parklands.

  emPhoto: Nic Lehoux/em

• Museum of Old And New Art, Tasmania, Australia

  Unlike most of the cool buildings on our list, this one hides largely out of sight. Entrepreneur and art collector David Walsh commissioned Melbourne architect Nonda Katsalidis to create a three-level structure in the cliffs around the Berriedale peninsula near Hobart. Part of the rationale for building so much of the museum underground was to preserve the two historically significant Roy Grounds Modernist houses on the property. But Walsh has also commented that he wanted a museum that “could sneak up on visitors rather than broadcast its presence.” The subterranean areas have no windows, and visitors descend a staircase, then work their way back toward the surface. Ingenious and unsettling, the physical setup is a logical precursor to viewing the avant-garde art, much of which concerns itself with themes of death and sex.

  emPhoto: Leigh Carmichael | MONA/em

• Palazzo Lombardia, Milan

  Milan’s Garibaldi-Repubblica district got an infusion of 21st-century cool when this ecofriendly curvilinear office tower was completed in 2011. Designed by Pei Cobb Freed Partners, the 525-foot-high building connects light-filled office space with outdoor areas. The largest of the public spaces, Piazza Città di Lombardia, is covered by a roof composed of transparent “pillows” made from ETFE film (a fluorine based plastic), while other high tech/environmentally sensitive features include green roofs, active climate walls—two layers of separated glass containing rotating vertical blades to provide shade while maximizing transparency—and a geothermal heating system.

  emPhoto: Fernando Guerra I FG + SG/em

• Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas

  Opened in December 2012, this 180,000-square-foot facility, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, is itself a feat of scientific ingenuity. His firm Morphosis Architects set a goal of creating an attractive urban environment that also adheres to green principles. Hence features like a 54-foot, continuous-flow escalator contained in a glass-enclosed, tubelike structure that extends outside the building—along with landscaping (courtesy of Talley Associates) that includes a roofscape planted with drought-tolerant species, an interactive water feature, and a “Leap Frog Forest” of glowing amphibians.

  emPhoto: Mark Knight Photography/em

• Galaxy Soho Building, Beijing

  Given China’s reputation for bold and speedy construction, it’s no surprise that 2012 marked the arrival of this cool new building in the capital city of Beijing. Designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid—the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize—this 18-story office, retail, and entertainment complex consists of four domed structures connected by bridges and platforms, crafted from aluminum, stone, glass and stainless steel. Inspired by nature, the flowing lines and organic forms create a lusciously harmonious effect.

  emPhoto: Hufton + Crow/em

• The Crystal, London

  This dynamic, low-rise glass building—touted as one of the world’s greenest at its 2012 unveiling—hosts the largest exhibition on urban sustainability. Set in the Royal Victoria Docks, the heart of London’s new Green Enterprise District, the building is inspired by crystalline forms, a reference both to “a multi-faceted urban world” and the Crystal Palace built for London’s Great Exhibition in 1851, which showcased the latest technology from the Industrial Revolution. The Crystal’s present-day innovations include rainwater harvesting, black water treatment, solar heating, and charging stations for electric cars.

  emPhoto:Courtesy of Siemens AG, Munich/Berlin/em

• Burj Khalifa, Dubai

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  The world’s tallest building opened in early 2010 and remains one of the most talked-about structures. Why? Not only is the Burj Khalifa the world’s tallest building (2,716.5 feet), it’s also the tallest free-standing structure, with the highest number of stories, the highest occupied floor, the highest outdoor observation deck, and an elevator with the longest travel distance in the world. Then there’s the show-stopping architecture: a tower comprising three elements arranged around a central core, inspired by the spider lily and courtesy of Skidmore, Owings Merrill with consulting designer Adrian Smith. A Y-shaped floor plan shows off views of the Persian Gulf, and when seen from above, the building echoes the onion dome motif prevalent in Islamic architecture.

  emPhoto: David Kukin/em

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Travel + Leisure: PHOTOS: Where To Visit The Future