The company unveiled a functioning MULTI system at ThyssenKrupp’s 807-foot-tall concrete test tower, which has been a proving ground for the system over the past two-and-a-half years. The result is an elevator utilizing the same magnetic technology that moves Japan’s bullet trains. In this model, elevator cars—not unlike train cars—move along magnetic tracks, uninhibited by traditional cables. Linear motors and a multiple-level brake system replace cables. Cabs are able to change direction from vertical to horizontal thanks to a rotating “exchanger.”

“We’ve been waiting for these developments for a while,” says Roger Soto, a design principal with the global architecture firm HOK. Soto led the design of the Capital Market Authority Tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which includes another ThyssenKrupp elevator innovation. When the 1,260-foot tower opens in 2018, it’ll utilize the company’s TWIN elevator system, in which two elevator cabs travel independently—one above the other—in the same shaft.

The elevator is “pretty critical” to skyscraper design, Soto explains, as it makes up the building’s core. But the current cable system takes up more space the higher you go. For the CMA Tower, the TWIN allowed HOK to build taller on a smaller floor plate: “The TWIN system allowed us to actually pack the elevators into the core in a way that made the tower more efficient and economical,” Soto explains.

The horizontal movement “is something I’m still trying to get my head around,” he says. “But I think the elevator can free us from certain constraints we have right now, and allow us to innovate in the way we conceive of towers.”

At the MULTI unveiling event, Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, spoke to the shifting trends already happening in skyscraper design. For one, most of the innovation has moved out of North American cities like Chicago and New York, and is happening across Asia and the Middle East. (The world’s tallest tower, Burj Khalifa, opened in 2010 and extends 2,717 feet in Dubai.)

We’re also using these towers differently. Instead of office towers built to symbolize a single company—the Chrysler and Sears towers, for example—they are often operating as mixed-use “mini cities” with a combination of residential, office, hotel, and public space. As Soto put it, “We’re thinking more about creating social connections in a vertical setting.”

Wood called the MULTI “the holy grail of elevators” to address such shifts. For one, the system allows multiple elevator cabins to operate on a loop, moving more people in a continuous flow. Eliminating the space traditionally reserved for elevator shafts, it also frees up square footage for more apartments or office space. Schierenbeck estimates the system can achieve up to a 50 percent higher transport capacity, while increase a building's usable area by as much as 25 percent.