Troll Island

In 2100, Troll, Antarctica, is home to the continent’s first large urban settlement. A zeppelin flying low over the new megacity allows visitors to view its massive structures, outlined in relief against the backdrop of a harsh, frozen landscape. The city’s built environment is largely composed of vast concrete dome buildings, each of which is almost on the scale of a city neighborhood. The buildings are sealed against the elements, internally organized around a cavernous common central space, and shaped both to harness and deflect the area’s strong winds.

Strong and persistent winds from the northeast have dictated orienting the street grid to the northwest and the same orientation also influences how these objects relate to the environment and to one another. Buildings are tilted as if bent by the wind, their widest face oriented toward the northeast in order to gather as much sun as possible and provide natural illumination for their central public spaces.

This sunlight is also trapped to help minimize the heating load and to capture ice melt1 during the warmer months. The relentless winds are channeled into turbines at the tops of the domes, providing some of the city’s energy. The grid into which the clusters of megastructures are arranged is skewed, with a slight offset to break up the constant airflow and avoid long corridors where already-strong winds could pick up too much speed.

Because the weather so often makes ordinary transportation difficult, Troll’s inhabitants use tread-based machines like snowmobiles or hovercrafts to travel short distances, since these are well-suited to Troll’s ever-changing low-traction surface. Troll is also closely linked with São Paulo, its sister city in South America. During the winter, polar nights2 drive some of Troll’s residents to take three-month work shifts in Brazil, where they harvest and produce medicinal extracts, use aquaponics to grow food and farm fish, or work toward restoring the rainforest to aid in the now-global carbon sequestration effort.

Extreme weather events have become much more common across the Southern Hemisphere, and 2100 Troll is a frozen oasis. Each megastructure’s central courtyard is unique—a range that includes parks, urban farms, playing fields, meadows, forests, lakes, and public squares—amenities that can be shared by all city-dwellers. The buildings are organized in rings, with surrounding ramped circulation providing access to cultural, commercial, and civic spaces adjacent to it at lower levels.

Upper floors are served by elevators and reserved mainly for housing and offices. Dispersed among these neighborhood-scale buildings and on the edge of the city are high rise towers, also with wind-energy-generating equipment at the top. This arrangement reduces the likelihood of the lower structures being engulfed in shadow for much of the day because of the year-round low angle of the sun in this part of the world. Off in the distance, among the hills surrounding the city, another type of wind energy-generating device is visible, composed of cascading metal structures descending along the steep cliff faces.