Technology Ahead: Solar City Tower proposed for 2016 Rio Olympics

Apart from the usual athletes wanting to smash prior world records, with key players including Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, there now seems to be a new trend emerging into the Olympics where actual countries are competing not for a medal, but in fact for the greenest most environmentally friendly way of hosting the games.

This year’s Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver boasted a variety of green initiatives, including Canada’s biggest “living roof.” London looks set to outdo Vancouver in 2012, but Rio is looking to up the ante again and be the first zero-carbon footprint games when it hosts the Summer Olympics in 2016. To help the city achieve this goal Swiss-based RAFAA Architecture and Design has proposed a Solar City Tower which features an eye-catching energy-generating waterfall.

The tower is adorned with solar panels that produce energy for the whole Olympic village by day, with surplus energy used to pump seawater into a tower. Then the water can be released to drive turbines and generate electricity at night. On special occasions the water can also be pumped over the edges of the building to create what the architects call an “urban waterfall”. This would be a symbol of the forces of nature, while at the same time acting as “the representation of a collective awareness of the city towards its great surrounding landscape”.

And so the green race lives on, but I can’t help but think that this waterfall is a little bit inapropriate coming from a country where over 30% of the country’s population lives below the poverty line – I mean surely that money would be better spent elsewhere?