Honorable Mention
2014 Skyscraper Competition

Jason Orbe-Smith
United States

The Infill Aquifer aims to reconnect the built world with the natural environment in order to create healthy and thriving urban ecosystems.

The project does this by re-establishing the ground plane as a vital component of urban building design. The Infill Aquifer is a floating mass, exposing the ground and soil to natural processes while accommodating the density required by growing cities and world populations. The Infill Aquifer is an optimistic proposal that humanity and nature can coexist and flourish.

Densely urban environments have many rich and positive qualities. The ability to gather together large populations generates great advantages in creativity and commerce, education, technology, and social interaction. However urban environments also often lack other features that enhance quality of life; features such as open space, recreation, green vegetation, a calm atmosphere, and the organic and inorganic processes of nature.

The project targets two main concerns facing us now and in the near future: the quality and quantity of new open space to build, live and work; and issues surrounding water usage and rights. The Infill Aquifer is designed as a regeneration and rehabilitation program for groundwater supplies within a city while maintaining its functionality as a usable building.

The Infill Aquifer is both a singular building design as well as an integral component of a larger ecological network. They are strategic pinpoints that can be located within a city as surface parking lots and underutilized pieces of land are redeveloped. With each new infill, the network in the region strengthens and grows, increasing the diversity of composition of the city and aiding in the health of the aquifer and hydrologic cycles. Cities that begin to implement infill aquifers can have the benefits of water security, increased green space, improved air quality and improved quality of life for the inhabitants.

The Infill Aquifer is as an achievable step in the conversion of our cities from static, sprawling monoliths towards active, vibrant and sensitive ecologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2014 Skyscraper Competition

Diego Espinosa Figueroa, Javiera Valenzuela Gonzalez
Chile

It is estimated that over 50% of the global population lives in an urban settlement. The growth of cities and their massive expansion brought great progress but major setbacks on the level of land use. The overloads of the soil through our urban developments have caused extinction of species, fertile land reduction, and poor distribution of biomass.

Realizing that the soil, its biomass, and what it conceives is a limited resource, gives us a glimpse of how we should live to preserve and improve our natural environment. Re-Silience Skyscraper looks for an answer by proposing a new organization and resources distribution of the soil and its biomass through the observation of natural forms such as honeycombs, coral reefs, and ant nests.

Our buildings today set a null relationship with its surroundings having no more than one or two interrelations in one place, Re-Silience allows to cross the threshold and reorganize this behavior through an optimal use of soil and biomass. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2014 Skyscraper Competition

John Houser, Parke MacDowell
United States

This project side-steps the common stylistic tendencies of computation-driven architecture, synthesizing our expanding digital toolset with the language of Classicism. At a time when these digital tools facilitate the generation of novel and varied architecture form, we embrace nostalgia and acknowledge the inherent, if indefinite, significance of the Classical elements, genera, and their organization, taxis. Classicism provides an established register against which architecture might be evaluated and understood. Thus, amid a preponderance of indeterminate architectural form, a new Mannerist Project emerges, augmenting and modifying the Classical kit-of-parts and rule set with computational methodologies.

Located at the site of the abandoned Chicago Spire, this project is motivated by the city’s history of tower-building and place-making. While the neoclassical style of the 1893 World’s Fair was not without detractors, none can deny the potency of its image. Its ordered civic grandeur inspired classically-styled architecture and city planning throughout the nation, legitimizing a rapidly evolving society via analogy to valorized ancient regimes.

This building understands classical form as an architectural means of codifying social structure. The parallels are overt: a configuration of discrete parts, governed by over-arching rules of proportion and order. With this in mind, the tower’s deep classical facade can be evaluated with respect to its deviation from the norms of the classical canon. Here, the genera are represented faithfully, the Doric, Giant Ionic, and Colossal Corinthian Orders rendered true to historic norms, but their organization is heretical. Hierarchy has been reconfigured in this thickened envelope of cascading classical thresholds. The primacy of greater Orders over lesser can no longer be taken for granted, sequence is fractured across multiple elevations, rhythm and symmetry emerge, then disappear. As such, the building reflects contemporary social structures, where diffuse and malleable networks have supplanted rigid hierarchical systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2014 Skyscraper Competition

Stuart Beattie
United Kingdom

In the past few decades the world economy has seen a global shift of industry and manufacturing eastwards to the emerging markets of China and India purely for economic efficiency and not innovation. The rate at which urban populations are expanding will impact upon how we perceive the strategies of sustaining our cities with regards to supply and demand. The rise of global cargo shipping has seen the ability of local enterprises to move their businesses to areas of low labor costs but sharp rises in oil prices is only enhancing the argument of more localized production.

The population of New York City is expected to grow to 9.4 million people in the next two decades and in addition with a declining manufacturing industry, not aided by recent rezoning, the pressure to support the proposed influx will only grow exponentially with an ever-increasing reliance on imports. Dense cities such as New York, with a substantial inventory of older factory structures have the capability to look at the new innovative and flexible industrial methods to revive manufacturing locally and regionally.

In constrained, urban environments could certain import-reliant industries be designed to act vertically to prevent unnecessary horizontal expanses of manufacturing ultimately as a stimulus for urban and economic growth? How can a paradigmatic architectural approach be adopted to support and promote local and city wide manufacturing as a precedent for a new industrial urbanism?

The project aims to investigate, in a world of free trade and rapid globalization, the possibility of flexible alternatives to inefficient industrial sprawl by considering the prospect of vertical manufacturing towers.

Vertiginous manufacturing structures would be proposed in former areas of prominent industrial activity; where struggling businesses are being forced further away from their consumers due to higher rents and potential re-zoning uncertainty – Williamsburg, Long Island City, Newtown Creek and Red Hook amongst others. The manufacturing hubs would intend to act as a physical socio-political barrier to counter-act the adverse affects of the current administration’s inadequate industrial assistance and the onset of encroaching residential and commercial developments in nearby Long Island City and Williamsburg.

Three 158m high towers perched on the Newtown Creek peninsula in Queens aim to create a new paradigmatic urbanism within the eclectic idiosyncrasy of the city. The repeatable industrial cluster provides a range of flexible manufacturing spaces that can accommodate small/ large-scale industries, be they labor intensive or entirely mechanical, that would choose to locate in inner city New York. A vertical assembly line running up the south of each tower accommodates large mechanical industries that would otherwise have a huge footprint. An exterior mega structural frame, variable large floor to ceiling heights and exterior structural lift cores allow for maximum spatial allowance and adaptability. A reintroduction of the iconic finger pier has been utilized in order to re-establish alternate distribution methods that have become uncommon in the city with 90m high projections into the East River to enable waterborne traffic to once again freely interact directly with a large agglomeration of manufacturers on a small footprint in the heart of the city.

With an average of 10 floors, each tower has 70,000 sqft of rentable space in each tower with the potential for over 1000 employees or the equivalent of 40 local businesses. Over 3000 jobs/ 120 manufacturers can be accommodated through the development of each manufacturing node. Read the rest of this entry »

2018 Skyscraper Competition is open for registration.

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2013 Skyscraper Competition. The award was established in 2006 to recognize outstanding ideas for vertical living. Since then, the publication has received more than 5,000 projects that envision the future of building high. These ideas, through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

In 2013, the Jury, formed by leaders of the architecture and design fields selected 3 winners and 24 honorable mentions. eVolo Magazine received 625 projects from all continents and 83 different countries. The winners were selected for their creativity, ingenuity, and understanding of dynamic and adaptive vertical communities.

The first place was awarded to Derek Pirozzi from the United States, for his project “Polar Umbrella”. The proposal is a buoyant skyscraper that rebuilds the arctic ice caps by reducing the surface’s heat gain and freezing ocean water. In addition, the super-structure is equipped with a desalinization plant and solar powered research facilities and eco-tourist attractions.

The recipients of the second place are Darius Maïkoff and Elodie Godo from France, for their “Phobia Skyscraper”. The project seeks to revitalize an abandoned industrial area of Paris, France, through an ingenious system of prefabricated housing units. Its modularity allows for a differentiation of various programs and evolution in time.

The third place was awarded to Ting Xu and Yiming Chen from China, for their project “Light Park”, a floating skyscraper that takes new development within large cities to the sky. The project allows for a continuous growth of the world’s mega-cities by providing adequate infrastructure, housing, commercial, and recreational areas.

The honorable mentions include several projects that explore a sustainable urban future including a pH conditioner skyscraper that resembles a jellyfish and purifies polluted air or a volcano skyscraper that harvests geothermal energy. Some projects explore new frontiers such as a proposed network of skyscrapers in the stratosphere, a cluster of artificial islands that create the 7th continent in the Pacific Ocean, and nomad skyscrapers that terraform Mars. Other honorable mentions include morphing structures and digital explorations among many more ideas that look into the future of our natural and built environments.

The members of the Jury are: Vincent Callebaut [principal Vincent Callebaut Architectures], 
Giacomo Costa [visionary artist, author: The Chronicles of Time], Julien De Smedt [principal Julien De Smedt Architects – JDS], 
Hernan Diaz Alonso [principal Xefirotarch, Graduate Programs Chair at SCI-Arc], Mathias Hollwich [principal HWKN, founder Architizer], Ed Keller [principal aUm Studio, Associate Dean at Parsons New School of Design], Marc Kushner [principal HWKN, founder Architizer], 
Francois Roche [principal R&Sie(n) architecture, professor at GSAPP Columbia University], 
Roland Snooks [principal Kokkugia, professor at GSAPP Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania], 
Dongbai Song [winner 2012 Skyscraper Competition], 
Tuuli Sotamaa [principal Sotamaa Design, designer at Alessi], Kivi Sotamaa [principal Sotamaa Design, Director at Aalto Digital Design Laboratory, Professor at UCLA], Tom Wiscombe [principal Tom Wiscombe Design, professor at SCI-Arc], Hongchuan Zhao [winner 2012 Skyscraper Competition]
, Zhi Zheng [winner 2012 Skyscraper Competition]

To commemorate the award, eVolo published a collector’s edition of its highly acclaimed book “eVolo Skyscrapers”. The book is a two-volume, 1300-page set with the best 300 projects received during the last years. Only 150 copies are available worldwide.

eVolo Skyscrapers Collector's Edition Book

eVolo Skyscrapers Collector's Edition Book

First Place
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Derek Pirozzi
United States

During the last decades of global warming, the polar ice caps have experienced a severe rise in temperature causing the northern and southern ice shelves to become thin, fractured, and melt into the ocean. Rebuilding the arctic layers is the primary objective of this proposal which cools down the Earth’s surface by reducing heat gain in vulnerable arctic regions.

The Polar Umbrella’s buoyant super-structure becomes a statement for the prevention of future depletion of our protective arctic region. Through its desalinization and power facilities, this arctic skyscraper becomes a floating metropolis equipped with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) research laboratories, renewable power stations, dormitory-style housing units, eco-tourist attractions, and ecological habitats for wildlife. A series of these structures would be strategically located in the most affected areas.

Salt water is used to produce a renewable source of energy through an osmotic (salinity gradient power) power facility housed within the building’s core. In addition, the structure’s immense canopy allows for the reduction of heat gain on the arctic surface while harvesting solar energy. The umbrella’s thermal skin boasts a series of modules that are composed of a polyethylene piping system that pumps brackish water. Finally, the Polar Umbrella also regenerates the ice caps using harvest chambers that freeze the ocean water. Read the rest of this entry »

Second Place
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Darius Maïkoff, Elodie Godo
France

The Phobia Skyscraper is a new form of modular suburban residential development for Paris, France. It is located over the “Petite Ceinture”, a former industrial site with excellent views of the city and an extensive transportation network.

Two main ground slabs and an empty tower structure, constructed of recycled industrial materials, hold prefabricated units that are stacked to utilize the same plumbing system but are rotated to open to outdoor spaces. The units are grouped around outdoor common green spaces.

These common areas, or “nuclei centers,” are equipped with displays that provide real-time feedback for residents on societal issues within the community, occupancy rates of the structure, and messages. It also contains water-collection equipment and solar power panels.

Despite its solid skeleton, the Phobia Skyscraper and its modular units are designed to evolve as does society itself. Its materials are the byproducts of abandonment and recycling; the building itself could be abandoned and once again revitalized, depending on the desires and needs of its residents. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Ting Xu, Yiming Chen
China

The rapid increase of population within the major cities around the world has led to poor development and serious urban design problems, including the lack of infrastructure, housing, and recreational areas. In Beijing, a large portion of the historic center has been demolished.

One way to make scarce green and recreation space available to residents of this crowded city is a skyscraper that floats above the land, taking new development to the sky. The Light Park stays afloat thanks to a large, mushroom cap-like helium-filled balloon at its top, and solar-powered propellers directly below. Programmatic platforms that host parks, sports fields, green houses, restaurants, and other uses are suspended from the top of the structure by reinforced steel cables; the platforms fan in different directions around the spherical vessel to balance its weight. These slabs are also staggered to allow for maximum exposure to sunlight on each level.

Translucent solar panels cover the top of the vessel to power the uses below, and water collectors, also located at the top, direct precipitation towards filters that send clean water throughout the structure.

Though it doesn’t completely solve Beijing’s serious traffic and overpopulation problems, the Light Park can return valuable green space to the public, and also help mitigate the pollution that comes with increased development – with parks and plants floating in the sky above the city, the air is partially cleaned. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Julien Bourgeois, Olivier Colliez, Savinien de Pizzol, Cédric Dounval, Romain Grouselle
France

Energy is one of the major concerns of our current society. Today sustainable architecture seeks to minimize the negative environmental impact of buildings by enhancing efficiency and moderation in the use of materials. Noise is part of our urban environment and our everyday life and it is one of the most prevalent pollution form in cities, but it is also an important source of energy not valued yet.

The soundscraper takes advantage of city noise pollution by capturing airborne sound and converting it into usable energy. One of the most abundant energy sources is ambient motion. Vibrations can provide plentiful energy, and can be transferred through many media, making this form of kinetic energy very useful.

The Soundscraper is located next to main transport infrastructures, mostly outside city centers where noise pollution is at it maximum. Motorway junction, railway hub represent no man’s land in the urban territory and areas of greatest efficiency to produce energy . Read the rest of this entry »