Ambitious plans construct Sky City in China, designed to be the highest skyscraper in the world and built in just 90 days, stalled at the outset over 2 years ago, leading to an unusual array of impromptu and informal adaptive reuses within and around the void dug for the tower, including an extensive fish farming operation.

In the absence of other uses, the local community has found new functions for the apparently abandoned 280,000-square-foot foundation, while the ceremonial groundbreaking marker (below) increasingly resembles the tombstone for a deceased architectural dream (rather than the herald of a record-breaking construction project). According to local source Xiaoxiang Chen Bao, one entrepreneurial farmer has invested a significant sum into his fish farm, set in the expansive rainwater-filled void (effectively an artificial lake) formed by deeply excavated sections of foundation, while others are using areas of land on all sides to grow crops or dry grain.

The tower was to stand 2,750 feet high in Changsha and its smaller sibling (Mini Sky City) has already been successfully built to 57 stories in just 19 days using innovations in prefabrication to rapidly speed up the process (time-lapse sequence shown below). Manufacturing many sections off-site, the development company was able to save significantly on costs but also to assemble the structure and facade in record time.

Permitting issues and safety concerns have held back the larger structure, however, and resulted in a number of locals turning the land toward other productive purposes. It is unclear at this time whether any of the issues are tied to the initial and smaller project.

Billionaire Zhang Yue, the man behind both projects, claims that their plans will eventually go forward, but there is no official word from the local or national Chinese government to confirm his assertions as yet, nor any construction activity on or around the site to support such claims His company, Broad Sustainable Building, aims to revolutionize safe and speedy skyscraper construction, using both buildings as examples of their capabilities … or perhaps just the one should the latter be permanently abandoned.

Founded by futurists to engage in truly long-term thinking, the Long Now Foundation is best known to many for Long Bets or its recent placement of a Rosetta Disk on a comet, but the organization has an array of amazing projects designed to last hundreds of generations, including a 10,000 Year Clock. Something to consider before we go any further: civilization as we know it is arguably only around 5,000 years old – we are talking here about an technologically sophisticated endeavor aiming to span (and keep track of) twice that period of time.

Designers and builders are used to thinking in terms of decades, perhaps even centuries, but are rarely called upon to consider millennia in their plans and calculations. In the case of the 10,000 Year Clock, environment is critical – in addition to robust materials and geological stability, predictable temperatures and relative isolation are key ingredients in siting the mechanism. Towering 500 feet vertically and with gears weighing up to 1,000 pounds each, the first clock is being built high and dry inside a West Texas mountain on property owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Another is planned for Nevada – both are sited to avoid excessive rain or freeze-and-thaw cycles that could damage it over time.

In the conceptual design stage of the project, polymath inventor Danny Hillis said of his aspirations: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.” Indeed, the experience of the clock has even more unique twists than initially envisioned: each time it chimes the sound is unique – with 3.5 million melodies in store, it will not repeat itself for the next ten thousand years.

Located in a separate space from the clock’s inner workings, the face of the clock “displays the natural cycles of astronomical time, the pace of the stars and the planets, and the galactic time of the Earth’s procession.” Prototype parts of the clock are on display in some places, like the Long Now’s bar and event space in San Francisco known as The Interval, where this author recently saw Kevin Kelly, board member of Long Now and founding editor of Wired, speak about his book and history with the organization.

Perhaps most impressive of all: the clock can keep itself going for the entirety of is planned existence. While it will not display the time unless wound it will continue to keep track, using the sun and stars for guidance and temperature differentials for power. “Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. The differential power is transmitted to the interior of the Clock by long metal rods. As long as the sun shines and night comes, the Clock can keep time itself, without human help. But it can’t ring its chimes for long by itself, or show the time it knows, so it needs human visitors.”

While this kind of working technology over such a long time period has almost no precedent, there are many examples of things surviving for such long periods – human-made ceramics have lasted up to 17,000 years along with other artifacts. The biggest worries? Some moving parts will not shift for generations, so making them able to work after a millennium without motion may be tricky. And then there are human visitors, well known for vandalizing and stealing from historical sites over time – we may, once again, be our own worst enemies.

As shown in the video above, “This system will be suspended 400ft down in the 500ft deep shaft that was carved using a raise bore drill last year. The large structural elements and gears are made from marine grade 316 stainless steel, most smaller pins and rollers are titanium, and the bearings are all made from an industrial ceramic. The entire system uses no lubrication, but the first tests have shown that over 93% of the energy put into the system, comes back out to go to the Clock.”

Floodwaters rise, drench homes, then recede, leaving disaster in their wake – a temporary change renders many structures permanently uninhabitable. But what if houses could ride out the storms, rising with the tides, then settling back down to the ground when the water is gone?

Based on the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Morphosis (along with Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation) has designs for new adaptive architecture, while the Buoyant Foundation Project proposes a system for retrofitting existing homes. The latter organization, founded by Elizabeth Fenuta (Alumni of University of Waterloo, School of Architecture) grew out of its creator’s Master of Architecture thesis project. Each approach would allow structures to do lift off the ground in an emergency and uses regional shotgun-style dwellings as their baseline typology.

BFP outlines a process that involves attaching buoyancy blocks below the home, connecting them to the sub-frame, and installing four corner guideposts to keep the building in place along horizontal axes while allowing it to lift (and settle) vertically on demand.

Connections to utilities (gas, water, power and so forth) would be either severable or extendable, so they could detach and reattach or simply expand and contract as needed. In plan, nothing changes – in elevation, predictable but periodic disasters are accommodated.