During an era of rapid urbanization, the humble lift is getting a high-tech upgrade ?Ping.?
After the familiar sound and sight of an elevator door sliding open, I step out into what could loosely be called a room, surrounded by jagged walls of limestone with mossy lichen inching up from the floor and water slowly dripping from the ceiling.
Living walls may be very of the moment for corporate lobbies, but seeing as I?m 350 meters (about 1,148 feet) underground?inside a former limestone mine about an hour outside of Helsinki, Finland?I?m pretty sure this wasn?t the work of an inspired interior designer. The water, I later learn, is from a reservoir a few hundred meters away.
I?m at Tytyri, an underground testing facility run by Kone, one of the big four firms in the multibillion-dollar global elevator market. In mankind?s continued quest to build skyward, this Finnish company figured out that the best way to test elevator technology was to go down, carving out a more cost-effective series of 11 test tracks, or shafts, from an abandoned section of a mine. The longest test shaft inside this high-rise laboratory can send elevator cabs at speeds up to 90 kilometers (or about 55 miles) an hour. London?s Shard, the tallest skyscraper in western Europe, tops out at 310 meters.

Kone
The visitor elevator at Tytyri.

?This is the Area 51 of the industry,? says Tomio Pihkala, the company?s chief technology officer. He?ll later say that the decade-old...