Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Lee Seungsoo
South Korea

The Urban Earth Worm skyscraper uses one of the basest of creatures as its inspiration. Just as earthworms clean the soil and solve pollution problems, promulgating life in thriving ecosystems, this skyscraper will clean air and soil pollution in cities and also feed cities – literally.

The structure is in fact even shaped like a worm, horizontally extends and curves throughout the city, cleaning the air, processing waste and providing food in not just one but many points. The top part of the structure has growing tubes that are filled with soil and grow trees and plants. This green area cleans the city’s air and also provides crops for the city’s residents. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Ekkaphon Puekpaiboon
Thailand

Mankind has always face the threat of extinction, from an extreme natural disaster.

“Zero” is a radical skyscraper, designed to ensure mankind’s survival after global devastation. Like an emergency toolbox, it will be the starting point to the reestablish social order through digital communication and information exchange.

“Zero” will provide the crucial elements to support life and to rebuild our existence, even if we had to start from zero. The key element to ensure that humanity is not lost is information. We live in the digital age. Communication and knowledge It is our most important resources today.

“Zero” is dedicated to gathering information; an online data vault to make sure human knowledge is not lost. Government, institutes and organization around the globe are able to upload information to “Zero” data vault. Anything considered important from architectural construction, agricultural planning, scientific records, language translation, or even family photos can be stored within this data vaults. If a “Zero” is destroyed, the data will not be lost as they are duplicated and shared around the world among other “Zero” units. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Jong Hyuk Lim, Seung Jun Park, Sung Wha Na, Jae Chung ko, Ho Young Yeo, Gyoeng Hwan Kim
South Korea

The massive amount of waste and debris accumulated in the Pacific Ocean is known as the Pacific Garbage Patch. The Scraper is a floating building designed to collect and compact the garbage into cubes with the use of automated robots. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Michael Charters
United States

“Big Wood” is a prototype on mass timber construction that offers the possibility to build more responsibly while actively sequestering pollutants from our cities. Sited in Chicago; “Big Wood” aims to write a new chapter in high-rise construction.

Steel and concrete structural systems have been the primary materials of choice in skyscrapers construction over the years. Unfortunately, these materials have a heigh energy production and recycle costs considering the entire life of a structure.

Understanding that the construction industry accounts for 39% of man-made carbon emissions, it’s imperative that we develop more intelligent and less environmentally destructive strategies for construction. Recent studies had proved the success of 20-30 story mass timber structures with the potential to go higher using hybrid systems.

“Big Wood” is a mixed-use university complex sited in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood. The structure consists of a mass timber system utilizing lumber grown and manufactured on a brown-field site in South Chicago.

Known as “South Works”, the tree farm site was once home of a steel mill, where raw materials were brought in via barge on Lake Michigan. A majority of the steel used to build Chicago’s famous towers (including Willis and John Hancock) came through the South Works steel mill. Implementing a tree farm will extract toxins from the soil as well as carbon dioxide from Chicago’s air. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Shinypark, Liu Tang, Lyo Heng Liu
South Korea, China

Building an underwater city is the main goal of this project that responds to the sea level rise in the upcoming decades. The US National Research Council estimates that in this century alone, the sea level will rise between 50 and 200 centimeters – leaving some existing cities underwater.

The project has been designed as a floating bowl with a massive atrium open to the sky where sunlight will be able to reach all the underwater levels. The geometry is composed of an array of boxes in different sizes that allow for very specific program delineation. The stepping and shifting of volumes create and intricate system of terraces and voids imagined as community and leisure areas. The project also resembles a traditional hillside town with a network of stairs connecting the various levels. Providing views to the mysterious world beneath the water surface is a priority of the design while vegetation also plays an important role in the design. The idea is to provide as much green surface as possible for parks, farms, and oxygen generation. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Milos Vlastic, Vuk Djordjevic, Milos Jovanovic, Darki Markovic
Serbia

Moses is a decentralized, self-sustaining city unit, populated by approximately 25,000 inhabitants, which offers the transition of men from land to sea, so that the land could be used for food production and the Earth could start its process of self-regeneration from the negative human impact. It functions independently as a city-unit, as well as a cluster of units, which share information, energy, and goods.

Each city-unit is placed on the intersection of perpendicular traffic lanes, which form the grid that serves as a connection between cities and land through a network of ultra fast trains. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Santi Musmeci, Sebastiano Maccarrone
China

By 2100 it will be extremely unhealthy to live in megacity areas and people will migrate to the countryside seeking cleaner air, food, and water. By 2150 megacities like Beijing, Jakarta, New York, and London will be abandoned ghost cities and automated bulldozers will be sent to demolish buildings and infrastructures, saving only sites of historical value. By recycling the demolished material, the bulldozers will start the construction of Sphera.

Sphera is a new type of living environment, where the citizens of the world will live during the “earth’s regeneration”, by using innovative and sustainable energies. At the same time, the purpose of Sphera is to build an entirely new civilization, where people will try to redesign their culture and generate a sustainable society by creating a global-resource based economy that enables all people to reach their highest potential, a society that protects and preserves its environment.

All people, regardless of political views, social customs and religion, ultimately require the same resources, such as clean air and water, arable land, medical care, and relevant education. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Jin Ho Kim
United Kingdom

Nowadays approximately 3 billion people rely on rice as their major source of food. It is expected that the rice demand will continue to accelerate and by 2025 more than 4 billion people will rely on it. As a consequence local governments in East Asia have established a total control on rice fields and production. This has been a disastrous event for the local farmers and has left the price of rice in absolute control of a handful of people. It is also expected that the price of rice will gradually increase to a point in which the majority of the Asian population will not be able to afford it.

This project proposes the creation of decentralized aeroponic vertical farmlands that will be able to provide enough rice for future generations. The basic structure consists of an array of bamboo parallelograms that create stepping terraces of rice fields. It counts with a natural irrigation system where gradually flows down with gravity through a network of irrigation paths. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Ivan Maltsev, Artem Melnik
Russia

The form of a skyscraper is a growing crystal – a structure characterized by the inconstancy and regularity of its elements. The height of the units ranges from 130 to 180 m. At the full height, in the center of Multipurpose Research Complex (MNC), is a static rod – a quantum safe energy source, which will produce energy in the required quantity. The center of quantum computing, greenhouses, walking tracks and, aeration blocks are placed in immediate proximity. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Zhang Zhiyang, Liu Chunyao
China

This project begins with the premise that Shanghai’s distribution of water resources is out of balance. The first problem is a lack of groundwater; according to the designers of the Water Re-balance tower, the people of Shanghai, in the quest for clean water, have taken so much water from under the city since 1860 that the city itself has sunk 1.7 meters in the past 40 years. Additionally, the water supplies that do exist today are largely polluted. Despite that shortage, the city does experience flooding in monsoon season, and the Suzhou River’s level can sometimes reach to the city’s streets.

By building towers that can collect and purify rainwater and also purify the water from the river, several advantageous things occur: clean, drinkable water is readily available for the city; rising river levels are mitigated before flooding occurs; and clean water can also be pumped back under ground to fix the sinking subsidence problem the city is experiencing. Further, the tower collects organic matter as it filters the water and uses that waste to develop and feed farmland, wetlands, and to grow green algae. The farm and wetlands purify the air, and the algae is cultivated and processed within the tower by a generator to create energy. Read the rest of this entry »