Imagine a 78-story skyscraper with each floor rotating independently so the building is constantly changing shape, morphing non-stop into an endless variety of forms. It’s not just an urban edifice, it’s a dynamic vertical sculpture——one tall enough to dominate a skyline.

Now imagine this unlikely structure as a net energy producer, delivering surplus power to the grid.

If this sounds like a sci-fi fantasy, think again. In fact, if you’re super-rich and have a hankering to live in Dubai, you could be enjoying the 360-degree view from your living room as early as 2010. You could also set up shop in Moscow, where another tower is in the offing, with New York City and other cities to follow.

The designer of these buildings is the Italian architect David Fisher. The concept, which he calls Dynamic Architecture, came to him when he noted the premium prices a Miami developer was charging for ocean-front views. “That’s when I said to myself, ‘Why not rotate the whole damn floor?’” he told the magazine Architech.

Calling Fisher’s approach “visionary” doesn’t really do it justice. Start with the fact that when you put an 80-story building in motion——and not just as a monolith, but in 79 constantly changing units of motion——it undercuts some of our most basic assumptions about buildings. For thousands of years, we’ve designed our buildings to be solid and stable. This has given them a fixed and static quality. In a sense they’ve stood outside of life, which is always changing. Fisher’s buildings challenge this age-old separation. Because his buildings, like organic matter, are always evolving, they have a lifelike quality about them.

Fisher’s approach to clean energy also breaks the mold. Horizontal wind turbines are squeezed into the two-foot gaps between the floors. The 80-story Dubai building will have up to 79 such turbines. It’s an approach that eliminates some of the environmental negatives associated with the typical wind farm. There is no need for power lines or service roads, nor is there any visual pollution.

Fisher also makes extensive use of photovoltaic cells——and there’s not just one roof, there are lots of roofs to house them on, with approximately 20% of each roof exposed to the sun.

With all this onboard clean energy, Fisher’s towers are projected to produce five times more energy than they consume, enabling them to sell energy back into the grid.

The skyscrapers will also be constructed in an innovative, eco-positive manner. The floors will revolve around a central core, which is the only part of the tower that will be constructed on site. The rest of the building will be entirely fabricated in factories and attached to the core. This approach enables buildings to be constructed much more quickly; it will take only seven days to add a floor. The result: reduced energy consumption and construction pollution.

For all their breakthrough green qualities, Fisher’s Dynamic Towers do have a sustainability downside. For one thing, skyscrapers require more material per square foot than lower buildings. There is also the matter of scalability. Fisher’s approach to clean tech will make virtually no dent in the climate-change crisis because it will be limited to a handful of pricey skyscrapers scattered around the globe.

Last but not least, there’s the matter of conspicuous consumption. Fisher’s buildings are built for the super-rich. The smallest apartments in the Dubai tower are priced at over $3 million. The top stories are reserved for villas, which take up the entire floor and are vastly more expensive. About 11,000 square feet in size, they will include luxuries like indoor swimming pools, bathrooms of Italian marble, and voice-activated commands for controlling the floor’s rotation. Villa owners will also be able to have their cars (presumably not Priuses) transported by conveyor belt and special elevator to their floor. For residents in a particular hurry, attached to the sixty-fourth floor there will be a retractable heliport.

Can a building be green when it’s built for the Lamborghini crowd? It’s a fair question. Sustainability has a social as well as a technical dimension; we can’t have an environmentally healthy planet without improving poor people’s quality of life. On this matter, Fisher’s buildings are conspicuously silent.

But who says you have to be perfectly green to get props for what you have achieved? And the fact is that Fisher’s Dynamic Architecture represents a significant step in the right direction. There’s no question that a highly evolved eco-sensibility is at work here. Horizontal wind turbines between the floors? Photovoltaics on every rotating roof? This isn’t just the stuff of genius; it’s the stuff of green genius.

And then there’s Dynamic Architecture’s potential for elaboration and adaptation. David Fisher has introduced a dramatically new way to think about buildings (the noun) and building (the verb). In the process, he’s tasked an entire generation of green designers with a challenge. Call it “trickle-down architecture”——how to scale up his wildly innovative (and very green) ideas by adapting them for the middle class and poor.