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 »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Mingxuan Dong, Yuchen Xiang, Aiwen Xie, Xu Han
China

As technological innovative and higher latest skyscrapers can be, they still need to rely on the support to the ground. So a higher heights usually means more unstableness as well as weaker capacity to resist disasters.

The project proposes a mega hex grid that evolves around the earth circumference at a stratosphere heigh, the principle that support this hypothesis is that it seem to be that in a building the larger the span is, the scale and the unstableness will proportionally increase. But if the span is large enough within the scale of the earth, the unstableness brought by the size decreases inversely. In this case the network of buildings and bridges connected to each other, covering the entire circumference of the earth, will no longer need structural ground support and can be suspended in the air by the effect of the earth gravity. The elevated bridges and buildings that relate the grid can reach any height with out worrying about overturning, earth-quakes, floods and any other natural disasters.

The earth needs to find a environmental balance. As human over-used the resources the earth is being heavily damaged, eventually approaching to a point in which the earth will be unsuitable for human living. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Hao Tian, Huang Haiyang, Shi Jianwei
China

The outbreak of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, since 1750, unavoidably brought severe environmental pollution. The most explicit consequence is the Acid Deposition caused by waste of large-scale industrial production.

Produced by the fossil fuel used in abundance, as well as the heavy traffic and industrial production, the SO2&NOx drives the PH value of atmosphere under 5.6. Gradually precipitating to the surface of the earth, these acidic materials have caused great harm to plant, architecture and human beings.

The project aim to use a gentle way to manage Acid Deposition and eventually turn pollutants into available resources (reclaimed water & chemical fertilizer) for the region of Chongqing.

The project is set to be 200-300m high where acidic pollutants gather. The aerocyst filled up with H2 at the top of the building provides buoyancy to it. The porous membrane attached to the air bags can absorb the acidic materials, like acid fog, collect and put them into core purifier where neutralization takes place with alkaline substance produced by nitrogen-fixing microorganism via biological action, which is stored in the purifier center. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Woongyeun Park, Jaegeun Lim, Haejun Jung, Karam Kim
United States

The Skinscape project was inspired from the idea that the natural environment modifies architecture as time passes by and in some instances nature even reclaims it. For example, Banyan trees now cover the Angkor Wat Temple in Cambodia built in 12th century. Experts have decided not to remove the trees because they now serve as part of the structural system – building and nature have become one. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Antonio Ares Sainz, Joaquin Rodriguez Nuñez, Konstantino Tousidonis Rial
Spain

The global increase in population, its concentration in cities, and the development of emerging countries lead to a big increase in energy need. The Earth has undergone dramatic climatic changes, which have been linked, by a large consensus, to greenhouse gases (GHG). The concentration of GHG in the atmosphere directly affects the global temperature, with potentially global, dramatic consequences. Without any doubt, it is indispensable to define an objective of maximum emissions, in order to limit problems in the future in the Earth.

The Project Nomad goal is to change the atmospheric and soil chemistry of Mars to make it hospitable for human colonization. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Jing Hao, Zhanou Zhang, Xingyue Chen, Jiangyue Han, Shuo Zhou
China

From the suffocation of Pompeii to the air traffic gridlock suffered in Iceland in 2010, the tephra that is expelled during volcanic eruptions has long posed grave threats to civilization. Since volcanic eruptions cannot be controlled, the designers of the VolcanElectric Mask I propose constructing an industrial structure over a volcano that can collect tephra during an eruption, keeping it out of the skies and away from cities and villages below, and also harness the power from the volcano’s heat in calm periods to provide clean electric power to surrounding areas.

For the prototype, the designers imagine locating the structure on the Popocatepetl Volcano, which is 70 km from Mexico City, is one of the ten most active volcanoes in the developed world and has 500,000 people living within 10 to 30 km from its crater.

The VolcanElectric Mask is actually a multi-layered skin that covers the volcano, perched above its surface and its lava crater. The skin is comprised of the adjoining tops of tentacles, which are shaped like screws, that are relatively flat on top – this is what is visible when one looks at the volcano – but are long and sharpen to a point at the bottom. This long, sharp bottom allows each tentacle to burrow into the volcano itself to monitor its temperature, helping to predict eruptions, and also allows each one to capture carbon dioxide that is used to create and store dry ice.

In periods of calm, each tentacle operates as a power station. The top layers of the tentacles, the screw head-like areas, which are above the ground, have ample openings, allowing the volcano’s surface to be ecologically undisturbed, with access to rain and fresh air. To create thermal energy, the top level of each tentacle acts as a rainwater collector. After a rain, water is transported to a sub-layer of the tentacle, where it comes into contact with lava. The resulting steam turns turbines in the middle of the tentacle, where the top meets the long, pointed bottom portion, and this creates clean thermal power. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Khem Aikwanich, Nigel Westbrook
Thailand, Australia

The Symbiocity project rethinks the way prisons are built and operated in an effort to better criminal justice and rehabilitation systems. Traditionally, say the designers of the Symbiocity, prisons act like a parasite on cities, sucking resources but giving nothing in return. By locating prisons in city cores, they propose, prisoners are surrounded by society (instead of isolated in prisons located in rural areas), and therefore inspired to better themselves so they can reenter society.

Other changes are also proposed: prisoners will be paid more for the work they do while locked up, but they will also be charged for their accommodations, food, and other amenities, inspiring them to work harder to earn perks like nicer cells or better food. Prisons will also be forced to become more self sufficient, instead of relying on taxpayer dollars: this will be done with inmates having to grow their own food in vertical farms and raise their own livestock. It will also take in money by renting out its facilities for functions in the busy, surrounding city, and also selling memberships to the gym located inside, as prisoners only have access to those facilities for part of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Nam Il Joe, Laura E. Lo, Mark T. Nicol
United States

By extending the ethos of reuse to the aqueous environment, In Charybdis reconsiders the plastic detritus in the world’s oceans as building material. Harnessing the complex, dynamic system of forces of the oceans and its intensive gradients, this project coalesces plastic particulates into a self-limiting, dynamically formed, yet chemically inert, super-tall building structure that plunges deep into the ocean’s depths.

Utilizing advanced material technologies, it provides scaffolding for deep-sea research vessels. These vessels navigate through the water column, over time converging and dispersing within the structure, forming and disbanding spontaneous research communities as they venture to the depths and slowly return to air. By utilizing an existing material condition to build a research facility in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this project leverages cleanup and rehabilitation for the advancement science, creating a novel venue for the study of the last and great, earthly frontier—the deep ocean. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Park Sung-Hee, Na Hye Yeon
South Korea

The quantity of small plastic fragments floating in the north-east Pacific Ocean has been increased a hundred times over the past 40 years accumulating and forming what we know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a great hazard to the earth ecosystems balance.

Studies estimate that the amount of plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the US State of Texas.

Kinetic Islands address this problem and propose a solution for disposal huge-amount of plastic and garbage patches in North-east Pacific Ocean, and take advantage of them as construction elements for a futuristic floating city.

The project propose a modular study on floating elements. Each module or element works as a flotation device, using 3 floats, that allow it to move trough the pacific ocean currents. Each module will recollect as much garbage as it is founding trough his path. Then when its full it will move to meet the nearest units to form a garbage chain. By the time many chains floating in Pacific Ocean, meet each other, they can be assembled like a Spiral Shape formed by ocean currents and centralized like a big island. That island can be covered by soil in order to have c a strongly solid founding that allow to develop farming crops. Read the rest of this entry »