I'm taking about a gigantic building that serves all the needs of small city, about a thousand inhabitants. People must be able to work, sleep, eat, play, and go to school all with out leaving the building.
Is such a thing possible with our current tech level?
Upon thorough inspection, I have...
Up to what scale do you want this thing to be self-sustained, let's say after everyone has settled in? Wastwater treatment? Energy? Food supplies? Money?
@BryanMcClure That makes it's a trivial architecture task, and your question becomes a bit boring. Adding a church and stadium is also a simple matter of adding more concrete.
Arcologies are unheard of in real life since they are more expensive to build and run than conventional architecture (particularly since the idea of recycling outputs to become inputs is still not perfected in real life). The other issue is that since the building is fixed in size, it isn't going to be quickly adaptable to changing needs of the inhabitants.
It's not an example of what you're looking for, but note that over 20,000 people work in the Pentagon. Obviously they don't live there, and I don't know what it has in the way of shopping or sports, but I think it demonstrates that it's pretty easy (in terms of existing tech, not in terms of cost) to put more-or-less continuous roofing over a heck of a lot of people and call it a single building. Of course the Pentagon does have unroofed areas within it, but that's because humans like light, not because it's an engineering impossibility :-)
Do you need farming & food production & water collecton/recycling covered as well inside this building? A lot of answers are presently throwing out city situations which rely on food and water from elsewhere.
Discussion on question by Bryan McClu…
Discussion on question by Bryan McClu…