You've Heard of Skyscrapers. But What About a 'Depthscraper'?

No, not deathscraper, although that's what this reverse-skyscraper would become if you stumbled into it at night.

This hallucination of architecture was featured in the November 1931 issue of Popular Mechanics, a periodical that gets it right on a lot of things but seems to have whiffed here. As the article explains, Japanese engineers wanted to find a way to mitigate the damage caused by the country's frequent earthquakes. They no doubt were scrambling for new ideas after 1923's Great Kantō earthquake, an 8.3 temblor that killed up to 140,000 people and destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama.

The resulting concept for a "depthscraper" describes a 35-story cylindrical antitower made from a steel frame and "armored concrete" for safety and, presumably, to keep out the worms. A single story protrudes from the earth, and it is here you can embark on elevators down to your underground lair (although I would prefer to BASE jump).