New Tower of Babel

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Maciej Nisztuk
Poland

In an era where mega-structures threaten to strip man’s needs and the humanity of architecture from new buildings and the field as a whole, the “Tower of Babel” seeks to do the opposite, existing as a living monument to its creator and their aspirations. The building is perpetually “under construction” as the needs and wants of its creator evolve, allowing the monument to experiment with and showcase many architectural trends.

The skyscraper is a mutation of the Palace of Culture and Science, an enormous, landmark structure built in 1955 in the destroyed center of Warsaw, Poland (which was still ravaged from WWII). Although it is the most recognizable symbol of Warsaw, it is a controversial building, as it symbolizes, to many, Soviet domination and the enslavement of the Polish nation. A typical communist monument, it ignored the local architectural vernacular and good urban planning, and instead was built as a monolith to tower over the rest of the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Mountain City

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Charly Duchosal
Switzerland

With today’s weight of cities on the landscape, we tend to lose our original relationship with nature. The cities are getting bigger, larger, and higher as the population increases and our connection to natural landscape is disappearing. Urban planners and architects have been trying to recreate nature in cities by drawing parks and planting trees on streets. The implementation of these “green parts” in cities has nothing to do with nature in its original state.

Instead of trying to force nature into the city, we should adapt the city to nature. For example, living underneath the earth allows us to preserve most of its surface. We know that verticality allows cities to face the increasing needs for density.

The design for this city is set in a wild landscape inside a mountain to preserve the development of nature around it. A geothermic plant is the logical solution to provide energy to the city. The main condition for this is that the city should be located in a geographic zone with high geothermal gradients – active tectonic and volcanic areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Coal Power Plant Mutation

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Chipara Radu Bogdan
Romania

The incredibly destructive effects that coal plants cause to our natural environment are well documented and known, but 50,000 plants still operate the world over every day to power the planet, as green technology has not evolved to a point where they generate enough energy to replace fossil fuel processes. The “Coal Power Plant Mutation” project is a proposal for coal factory addendum, a skyscraper built over an existing factory that can reduce the amounts of harmful waste that spew from their chimney stacks while we wait for green technologies to take over.

The skyscraper coal cleansers are comprised of three long, tubular legs that join are built around the existing factory’s chimneys and meet high in the air to share a bio-filtering area that also has balloons to capture and hold waste particles. The structure is made out from multiple carbon-fiber steel props that are held together by a carbon-fiber steel mesh; the props are anchored in the existing foundation of the power plant. The chimneys rise 1,000 meters in the air; as the smokestack pollution rises through the tall skyscraper chimneys, tubes with various types of air filters with various densities are placed at different heights. The lower filters for carbon dioxide exhaustion use synthetic carbon fixation techniques, while filters located higher in the chimneys are bio-filters. , At the very top, the chimneys are equipped carbon and vapor capturing and filtering devices that keep the gasses from reaching the atmosphere. They are made of horizontal air pipes connected only to the exterior. The vapors condensate on them, and the resulting water is gathered and distributed back at the base. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Xiaoliang Lu, Yikai Lin
United States

On the borders of two regions at war, those who suffer the greatest are the citizens who simply want peace for their nation. Often, warring regions build great walls between them, but do such walls truly solve conflict? They don’t, say the designers of the “District 3 – Skyscraper of Liberation” project – instead, walls obstruct mutual understanding and intensify the discrepancy.

This project is imagined for the border of Israel and Palestine, which is defined by three districts: an Israeli district, a Palestinian district and a third, which is a zone where the borders are separated by a wall. This wall will be removed and replaced with a skyscraper, transforming the isolated and hate-filled area with one that is shared and fosters reconciliation. The skyscraper can only be entered by Palestinians and Israelis who are non-violent and seek peace and cooperation, and is administered by the United Nations. Read the rest of this entry »

Bridge of Hope Skyscraper

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Mohammed Adib, Ivan Arellano, Jordi Cunill, Maria Teresa Farre, Christian Koester, Davide Roncato
Spain

The Bridge of Hope is a symbolic structure that seeks to link the shores of the Dead Sea to promote peace between Jordan and Israel. Construction of the bridge would commence from both sides of the sea, ultimately meeting in the middle; there, a settlement for Arabs and Jews to live harmoniously is established.

The water level of the Dead Sea is dropping by 1 meter per year, and plans are currently underway by the Jordanians to replenish the water levels by connecting it, via pipelines, with the Red Sea. In addition to the bridge’s construction, this project also proposes the creation of aqueducts from Israel’s side to help replenish the sea with water from the Mediterranean. These aqueducts would generate electricity as the water flow drops 400 meters; this electricity is used to desalinate the water, making it useable for irrigation purposes (residual water is discharged into the Dead Sea). Salt water pools  (with normal salt levels) are created within the Dead Sea for fish farming, and other pools are also created to cultivate mineral baths for a variety of uses (potash is used for fertilizer, Bromine for fire retardants, fresh water for hydroponic farming, Dunaliella bacteria for its high CO2 sequestration rate, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »

Vertical Ground

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

George Kontalonis, Jared Ramsdell, Nassim Es-Haghi, Rana Zureikat
Greece, United States, Jordan, United Kingdom

The “Vertical Ground” project reexamines the “norm” for the organization of college campuses. Students today want proximity to the culture, activities and networks available in urban settings, but typical campuses are horizontally oriented and require large swaths of land for development, which are increasingly rare in desirable urban areas. By orienting a college campus vertically instead, colleges can locate in dense areas and perhaps even better facilitate social communication amongst students and faculty.

20,000 students are located on a campus complex that is comprised of several towers that occupy a small city footprint, and are connected at varying heights by sky bridges. By spacing programmatic needs properly throughout the towers, the vertically orientated campuses can give students both space for privacy and opportunities for dynamic interactions with others. The campus tower typology is composed of series of clustered departments and open spaces that are located amongst the college’s three schools: Applied Sciences, Design, and Social Sciences schools. Read the rest of this entry »

Airport Skyscraper

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

ZhiYong Hong , XueTing Zhang
China

Ninety-seven percent of Chinese airports will need to be rebuilt by 2020, according to a recent survey, causing huge implications for cost and land use issues, and the city of Beijing is currently planning the construction of a second airport. The designers of the Air@Port propose avoiding using precious land for new airports by constructing one that is positioned 450 meters in the air. The airport sits atop the bases of dozens of thin towers that mushroom out at the top with wide platforms that all connect to support the runways and airport facilities on top. Locating an airport city so high in the air has many immediate benefits. Being so high up will mean that there won’t be height restrictions on the buildings erected on the platform, which will allow for great stimulation and creativity in the resulting development. Also, because wind speed is higher 450 meters in the air than it is at sea level, the length of the runway can be effectively reduced, saving space. Read the rest of this entry »

Aakash Skyscraper

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Lemire Abdul Halim Chehab, Suraj Ramkumar Suthar, Swapnil Sanjay Gawande
United Kingdom

Aakash, the Hindi word for “sky,” provides the inspiration for this project, which proposes locating floating clusters of development high in the skies above Mumbai, one of the world’s most congested metropolises.

The complex as a whole is comprised of tree-like structures that stem at nodes throughout the city, grow into the sky and then branch out into wide, floating modules that connect to create a road-less cityscape. The majority of the structural load is taken by cloud-shaped helium balloons; only some of the load is transferred to the ground by means of nodes. Read the rest of this entry »

Cliff Dwellings

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

PLUG: Román J. Cordero Tovar, Eric Israel Dorantes, Daniel Justino Rodríguez, Izbeth K. Mendoza Fragoso
Mexico

Is it possible to develop a zero footprint construction? Is it possible to build while being part of the landscape?

For many years we have been developing unsustainable models that year after year are taking more natural landscape and resources to satisfy the necessity for grow.   The typical skyscraper offered the chance to have a small footprint in order to have more free horizontal space, but at the end, if we build a lot of them we will end up with the same unsustainable model.

The main idea behind this project is to inhabit the natural vertical geographical conditions. The vertical plane with zero occupancy offers the possibility, with the help of technology, to conquest the apparently inhospitable wall areas in order to preserve the green horizontal plane exclusively for wild life. The cliffs are the new virgin territories to explore. Read the rest of this entry »

Human Rights Skyscraper in Beijing

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Ren Tianhang, Luo Jing, Kang Jun
China

Illegal acquisition of land by local Chinese government entities has caused thousands of residents incredible grief and even death recently, plus social instability, say the designers of the Structure of Human Rights in Beijing. Though private property doesn’t really exist in China (and buying a property only ensures its use for 70 years), the designers of this structure feel that land use needs to be reexamined in China, as a private home is a basic human right. Their proposal to bring every person a place to live takes into account the country’s exploding population and need for dense development, and thus is oriented vertically. Read the rest of this entry »