Shadowless Skyscraper Designed By London Architect

To achieve the shadowless effect, the architects designed a pair of buildings thatwork in tandem. One of the buildings works like a giant curved mirror, the glass surface of which reflects sunlight down onto the shadow cast by the other building. Because of the specific shape of the curved building, the reflected light is capable of following the shadow as it moves throughout the day.No shade here"The relationship between the sun andshadow is the relationship between the two buildings," NBBJ’s design director Christian Coop toldWired.NBBJ used the design software Rhinoceros to generate several blueprints that would maximize thereflection of sunlight. With each building iteration, the design team would tweak the requirements until the software produced a building that made structural sense. The design they finally settled on reduces shade by up to 60 percent.If a giant building reflecting sunlightonto the streetsbelow conjures images of magnifying glasses and fried ants, don't worry — the light is diffuse, and not capable of burning passersby. As Wiredpoints out, this is not the first time mirrors have been used to reflect the sun in a design capacity. A townin Norway studded its surrounding mountains with 56-foot light reflectors that shed sunlight where the mountains usually cast shadows. Last year, a New York-based architecture firm created a skyscraper conceptthat shielded workers inside from the sun using hundreds of retractable umbrellas.Designs like NBBJ's are likely to increase in popularity, especially given that more skyscrapers were built in 2014 than in any previous year.