New York Post

‘DALI’ GREEN GIANT

Surreal eco-tower pitch on Roosevelt I.

- By KATE SHEEHY ksheehy@nypost.com

An air-scrubbing high-rise behemoth that looks straight out of a sci-fi flick has been proposed for the middle of Roosevelt Island.

The tree-studded, 2,400-foottall building is designed to loosely resemble a mandrake plant — with a base like a cruise ship morphing into a gleaming, twisty tower à la surrealist Salvador Dali — and would take over much of the East River isle off Manhattan.

The residentia­l proposal, by French architectu­re firm Rescubika, was posted on the Web site designboom as part of a “city of tomorrow’’ feature.

The pie-in-the-sky project is all about going green, with its architects telling The Post on Monday, “This project is able to absorb a large amount of carbon and is therefore less polluting for the ecosystem.”

Calling the building “the world’s largest carbon-sink tower,’’ the firm says the developmen­t — featuring 1,600 trees, more than 80,000 feet of plant walls and 8,300 shrubs — would “absorb carbon circulatin­g in the biosphere.”

“This carbon is then trapped in living matter and subsequent­ly more or less sustainabl­y sequestere­d in organic matter,” the firm said.

The specially designed ecosite also would reduce carbon emissions through a network of buried pipes to capture and circulate hot and cold air from the developmen­t as needed, as well as by having residents work in a home office in every apartment instead of using transit.

There would be 160 floors to the structure — which would be at least partly fueled by energy from 36 wind turbines and nearly 3,000 feet of solar panels.

The Mediterran­ean mandrake plant was used as a design inspiratio­n because “like [it], the project is an evocation of the human figure, of a bodily movement that is synonymous with life,’’ Rescubika said.

The building proposal is just theory at this point.

The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporatio­n, which was created by New York state in 1984 to oversee the planning, developmen­t and operation of the unique land mass, did not respond to a request for comment from The Post on Monday.

The island is owned by the city and leased to the state.

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