Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Victor Kopieikin, Pavlo Zabotin
Ukraine

Natural disasters, the threat of technological meltdown and even the possibility of visitors from space all present a need for cities and even countries to reorganize to implement infrastructure that can protect people from possible catastrophes.

The “Citadel Skyscraper” project is imagined for Japan because of the numerous natural and manmade disasters that have struck the region in recent years. The project proposes a three-part implementation of new structures with an end result of protecting the island with a fortress-like defense shield. The first part involves a restructuring of the land use of all of the country’s major cities as residents are moved out of the city proper. Businesses and commercial endeavors will stay located within the cities, but residents will move out to sea and live in self-supporting residential skyscrapers, or citadels. The second part specifies the location of these citadels: They will be lined up as a single “sheet”, creating a barrier 2-3 km from the shoreline that can protect the mainland from tsunamis. The skyscrapers themselves are connected by a system of breakwaters and drainage channels, and are able to withstand waves up to 50 meters tall. These are further bolstered by a connected series of fiber sails, buried as deep as 1,200 meters, that surround the island. When the waves hit the sails and meet the oscillations of its stretched fibers, such a dissonance is created that the wave is reduced to nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Ying Xiao, Shengchen Yang
United States

Moved by the economic disparity in the United States brought to light by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, the designers of the Occupy Skyscraper propose creating a building that can further empower protesters and accelerate the Occupy movement. The temporary Occupy skyscraper can be erected on any protest site to provide shelter and meeting spaces for dissenters. By providing a means for protesters to take their movement from a horizontal plane to a 3-D vertical reality, the Occupy skyscraper strengthens and bolsters the event as a whole, but amazingly, it does so only using hemp rope and canvas.

The skyscraper’s construction begins as soon as a protest takes place: Ropes are woven into a vertical web by attaching to and climbing nearby buildings. The webs are woven thicker and thicker until they form nets that can support weight. At this stage, the “building” can be used for climbing, hanging flags and supporting sleeping bags in the vertical spaces, and can be used for gatherings on the horizontal plane. Canvas is then attached to create solid paneling to segregate space uses within the building. The designers envision several designated areas: orientation spaces, and other spots for recreation, sleeping, workshops, conferences, rallies and large meetings. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Adrien Piebourg, Bastien Papetti
France

How to live vertically? Building higher and higher does not seem to change the way we live. Most people wish to live in single-family residences, but the problem is the lack of diversity and density. How to have the benefits of suburbia combined with the intensity of living in the city?

The history of the skyscrapers goes back to Elisha Otis, who invented the elevator in the 19th century. This invention promoted the conquest of the sky with projects competing for prowess and size.  What would happened if within a house the elevator is used as a remote control to move from one floor to another, from one program to another?

This new “object” would challenge the function of living. The house becomes smart and incorporates multiple applications – one application per floor. The elevator is for the house what that Internet is for a smart-phone. A necessary parameter! Now you can “zap” your life spatially. Imagine yourself in your room, put on your slippers, go in your elevator, and zap! You will be in your living room, your garage, your favorite bar or business place; the park where you go jogging!

The new tower is born, or rather, the first cell. We must now find the idea of “Tower”. This cell is only anecdotal, but multiplied and intensified, it marks its existence. It is now clearly identifiable as an “object”.  The idea of “Tower” is inseparable from the idea of city, so we have now an object in the city, which looks like a city.  Perceptions are distorted. The object in the city became literally the “city-object”. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Damian Przybyła, Rafał Przybyła
Poland

The “Migrant Skyscraper” is literally mobile: A giant, thin tire with a building and green space in the center, this skyscraper is ready to roll.

The concept behind this structure is that in an unstable world, people need the stability of self-sufficiency to truly be free, and the future of the architectural field can help provide that to people. By constructing a safe haven for residents to live in that ensures they will have food to eat and water to drink, the Migrant Skyscraper affords people freedom despite what natural and social disasters may come. The building-inside-a-wheel can stay stationary for however long residents please, but, for example, if political upheaval destabilizes a region, residents can fire up the biofuel-powered engine and cruise to a new location.

The structure’s exterior tire is clad in recycled rubber. Inside, two buildings and surrounding green space provide everything residents need to survive, making the tire-encapsulated unit completely self-sufficient. Outside of the buildings there is space for agriculture, including crops and livestock; within the tire, plumbing systems circulate potable, gray and black water for drinking, waste facilities and irrigation. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

MADETOGETHER – Nikita Asadov
Russia

The race between countries, cities, and corporations to construct the highest structure is a challenge of pride and power. Our technological advances allowed for the construction of super-tall buildings – the higher they are, the more space they loose and the harder the engineering challenge becomes. The global financial crisis was the last decisive argument against such structures.

The House of Babel offers a radical revision for the common method of building a traditional home. With the help of aerostatic construction we can eliminate extra floors and elevate the building to almost any desired height. The post-crisis skyscraper is the house consisting of two floors connected with a high-speed elevator on a thin heavy-duty cable. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention

2012 Skyscraper Competition

Kim Hongseop, Cho Hyunbeom, Yoon Sunhee, Yoon Hyungsoo
South Korea

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean sits a mass of garbage that is 8.1% the size of the entire sea. It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), and is estimated to contain over 100 million tons of waste. The debris gathers in that particular location as ocean currents convene in the Subtropical Convergence Region, and is causing grave harm to the immediate ecosystem and those within a broad surrounding swath.

The Plastic Fish Tower, a circular structure floating on the ocean surface within the GPGP, will collect and reprocess plastic, which estimates say comprises 90% of the GPGP and is often ingested by birds and fish, causing their demise. A large fence will circle the structure underwater in a 1 km diameter to capture all the plastic that floats its way. The plastic will be recycled within the structure and processed into plastic patches that can be assembled into fish farms to restore the ecosystem. In addition to helping mitigate the pollution, the fish farm will also have two added benefits: the buoyancy of the plastic fish farm elements will be enough to keep the entire structure afloat since plastic is in fact so buoyant, and it will position the structure as a tourist attraction. Bringing tourists to the GPGP would greatly help in disseminating widely the reality of this manmade ecological catastrophe. The tourists will be transported to and from the site by ships that are fueled by chemicals that will be collected from the processed plastics within the skyscraper in an as-of-yet-undiscovered method of chemical extraction. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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 »