Touch the Sky

You're probably too young to remember what life was like before 'sliced bread' was invented, and we had to make do with regular 'bread'. Those were dark days. Sandwiches took weeks to construct, sometimes even months. Bread had to be eaten in miserable clumps, wet from all the tears rolling down your dough-covered cheeks. Bakers were hated by all, and rightly so.

Then one day, everything changed. Someone invented 'slicing', mixed it with the invention of 'bread', and created sliced bread! An idea so amazing every future idea would be judged against it.

Point is, sometimes it takes the combination of two great ideas to finish a wonderful one. Like the skyscraper! Tall buildings had been around for ages, but it was the invention of the elevator in the 19th century that took them to truly awesome heights. Thanks to the ol' uppity-box, we can't get enough of scraping the sky with our industrial might. Indeed, the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is over two thousand and seven hundred feet tall! What better way to celebrate such architectural awesomeness than building a skyscraper in Minecraft?

Well, ace builder Ryer actually came up with a better way – by combining the ideas of 'skycrapers' and 'weeks', and sharing a new, stunning skyscraper build every day for seven days as part of his own Skyscraper week!

“Quite a long time ago, I had seen a video on YouTube of someone who had done a small recreation of the Shimizu Megacity Pyramid,” explains Ryer to us, when we ask how he discovered Minecraft. “Back in those days, I had never seen something like that in a game, and I wanted to do something similar.

“So I bought the game and started making things. Those early projects started out small and I can’t for the life of me remember what they were. All I knew was that I wanted to make something like that eventually. I ended up starting to make skyscrapers, and I found them really fun to build, so I kept doing it.”

Just putting together one steel monolith of a skyscraper would be enough for most people. What possessed Ryer to shoot for an entire weeks worth of towering builds? “Skyscraper week is an old idea of mine, dating probably all the way back to the middle of 2015. I was never able to create enough towers to do it until recently however. I had joined, and now co-own a server called Architects MC and most of these skyscrapers came from a city we are making on there called Clermont.”

“Lots of the skyscrapers that aren’t a direct replica do have inspiration rooted in some real building somewhere,” explains Ryer. “For my M-Tower I had looked to the monolithic, massive nature of the Goldin Finance 117 tower in Tianjin, China.

“I loved how that skyscraper seemed so dominating, and had such a simple form. Some other buildings I make just come straight out of my head, with little inspiration rooted in real life.”