spbr arquitetos

A perfect, stainless-steel circle built in the middle room represents the thin layer of human life on Earth. Its thickness is based on the inhabitable realm of the planet, a shallow zone given by the topographical difference of 5,098 meters between the highest and the lowest human settlements. Against the diameter of the Earth, at a scale of 1:5,000,000, the surface that humans occupy is only 1mm thick. This fine and fragile line is the field we can live in, the evidence of a project under construction for thousands of years, the very confirmation of modernity. Mirroring the planet’s surface at 37,786 km above sea level, another line, the so-called Clarke Orbit, maintains any object in its orbit aligned to any fixed location on Earth. It is in this zone that this project imagines the possibility of geostationary satellights artificial sources of light powerful enough to light entire cities. Taking São Paulo as a case-study, a pair of satellights of 250 megawatts orbiting on Clark, would bring light to 21 million people, replacing millions of light bulbs, thousands of kilometers of cables, and hundreds of thousands of light poles.