A graduate from the Innovation Design Engineering masters program at London’s Royal College of Art has recently designed a bicycle that allows users to vertically scale buildings. Elena Larriba, a Spanish architect and designer based in London, created “Vycle” to promote ?urban vertical movement.” She came up with the concept based on some of the changes she observed in the city, which has slowly gone from a low-rise, low-density urban grain to a high-rise, high-density metropolis. Among other things, this population influx means that urban users (and human beings in general) need to find new and sustainable forms of vertical circulation. Larriba aims to provide people with a way to reach higher floors other than via stairwells and elevators ? both of which are costly design constraints that take up a lot of a building’s usable floor area.
Larriba has discovered a kind of “gap” in vertical transportation between stairs and elevators, and that’s exactly where Vycle comes in. Larriba compares commuter methods within urban centers like walking, cycling, and driving to vertical movement within buildings, but correctly notes that there is no corresponding mode of transport for the bicycle. Additionally, it would be beneficial to retrain people who live in cities to start using their bodies again when going from point A to point B, and Vycle aims to get people from low to high floors using nothing but their own strength and a bike....