Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Alessandro Arcangeli, Filippo Fiorani
The Netherlands

Core Issue
Modern capitalism has been the 20th Century’s religion, and finance is its product. This system created utter inequality, the final stage of class struggle, where 1% of the population controls more than 40% of world’s wealth. Growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity.
Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. In 2008 financial capitalism collapsed. This collapse aroused the crowds, breathing life into a new political and economical approach, which we call Socialism 2.0. The upcoming neo-socialist economy requires a collective action, it is based on the certainty that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest-in other words, the common welfare-is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. The Architectural product of the XX century was the Skyscraper, and its mania for reaching the sky. The Skyscraper is the XX century’s Babel tower, where people only work, speaking different languages, distancing themselves from the city and from other people.

Our Position
Assuming that every spatial choice is political, and every political choice is spatial, we want to reverse the idea of the skyscraper, giving back the tower to the public. Most of the hybrid buildings we know failed, resulting in structures where different functions and spaces just stand in top or in front of each other, without interacting. We tried to create a space where functions and spaces interact, rather than co-exist, basing our design on the distinction that Aristotelis first, than Hannah Arendt, made, between the two verbs act and work.
A space where people act rather than work. Action goes on directly between men, corresponding to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not man, live the earth. Plurality and connectivity are the natural conditions of Agorà.

Architectural Manifestation
We take the street and we flip it, arranging in vertical all the spaces we walk through when we go for a stroll in town. We base our design on the connection within public and private spaces.
The former will be distributed along the three dimensions of the tower, the latter will be literally re-invented: a new flexible working space, based on interactions between spaces and people, where sharing is the keyword: sharing services, workforce, ideas. From the city of Madrid, we access the tower arising on the new Spanish parliament, where the community decides for itself in a new form of free and collaborative democracy. From this political theatre we walk up to two squares that introduce the working spaces. Six modules of three floors, for different needs. These spaces stand on a structural steel grid along which tools such as chairs, printers, tables, panels, slide, being accessible by everyone. This space is conceived for young workers, startuppers, students, who have the possibility to rent a just a cheap table, enjoying the possibility of sharing the cost of common services and more important: to meet other people, potential collaborators and teammates. If we keep climbing the tower we end up in the library, conceived as an ascent on big steps to the rooftop. In the boarding spaces we found the hologram rooms, where people can experience through holograms, and 3d projections the spaces descriptor in the good old books. On top of the tower we find what called the labyrinth: a space where people lose themselves and meet inside this monumental labyrinth of monoliths scattered on the square. The whole building is conceived as a spiritual and social path, running from the crowded arena, to the spiritual, intimate, religious labyrinth. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Abolhassan Karimi, Amir Khosravi, Soudabeh Abbasi Azar, Shima Khoshpasand, Fatemeh Salehi Amiri, Maryam Nademi, Neshat Mirhadizadi
Iran

A major destructive earthquake is predicted to shake the city of Tehran in the near future. To mitigate the damage from such earthquakes it is necessary to find relevant risk factors of Tehran by assessing the social and urban response to such catastrophes.

Our proposal for a safe and temporary infrastructure in the event of an earthquake consists of a network of urban links that lead to central core or “stackable” shelter pockets. We have strategically selected the Deh-Vanak area of Tehran as our scenario location due to its high urban density of buildings at high risk of collapsing and its lack of open public spaces.

In the event of such earthquake, our project proposes a network of infrastructure and vertical safety nods acting as temporary central cities that will safely mobilize and shelter the local community.

The proposed central safety nods are based on the antisismic properties of and consist of clusters of sliding sphere geometries. Mixed use clusters that cover basic needs are allocated around a core public space and key transportation nods. These nods are capable of serving as shelter by aggregating the mobile sphere units that navigate the network.

Network
The proposed network in Deh-Vanak analyses threats and opportunities of the site and efficient trajectories not only at pedestrian level and but also along clearances of low rise and mid-rise buildings.

Through this analysis we are able to deploy minimal infrastructure to reach safety and optimize the number and location of these central safety nods.

Sphere Geometry
The geometry of the sphere allows the minimum friction and the maximum freedom of movement hence minimizing structural tension during the repercussions that follow in the aftermath of an earthquake.

A selection of spheres are fixed to compose central pockets that serve as public spaces while other spheres characterized by their double shell act as mobile units to host diverse functions from information points to first aid checkpoints to food and clean water distribution centers. The shells of these mobile spheres have the capacity to ensemble into emergent shelters.

Supporting infrastructure such as water and waste canals feed along main links into the core public space and key stations. Connectivity between spheres in shelter pockets is possible through connecting joints. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Jie Liu, Wen Sun, Hewen Suo
Canada

Research has shown that crime has closely related to personality disorders. Conventional correction center usually conveys a feeling of suffering for the inmates. Limited sunlight and tight space has negative psychological impact on the inmates. Personality disorder tends to be aggravated in the custody process, rendering the inmates difficult to effectively reform or being corrected. Healing Matrix is trying to break the ordinary design of a correction center; it is attempting to address this social issue from an architectural perspective.

In this building, newly defined healing cluster-space has replaced the traditional detention space to facilitate the healing of personality disorders, and meet the needs of inmates in different stages of the healing process. During the entire sentence, under the arrangement by the Command Centre of the building, inmates will interact with each other according to their instant need. Inmates will also be able to look inside to discover their inner spirit and interact with the architectural space itself, through a multi-layer treatment approach, therefore fundamentally cure the personality disorder and achieve the goal of complete healing.

To achieve crime prevention and psychological and cognitive rehabilitation, other than the setup of a conventional correction center, six independent yet related types of spaces are created here. Each space has its own function and approach towards self-healing and self-correction. Each space is a cluster of several cubes. Different needs of inmates with distinct personalities are addressed here. Spaces are divided as such: Praying Space (religion support), Meditation Space (the power of inner peace), Accompaniment Space (interpersonal interactions and support), Anger/Depression Management Space (cognitive behavioral therapy), and Social Training Space (communication and soft skill polishing)

Each inmate has his/her own independent space (each space is a cube with dimension of 3m*3m*3m). Inmates’ life and privacy are appropriately respected and protected. Inmates’ instant need is transmitted through feeling receptors to the Command Centre of the Building. The matrix network would then automatically match and transfer the inmate to a “best fit” space to optimize the healing effect. In order to ensure the free multi-directional movement each unit, the building itself has an inner matrix space, which allows for three-dimensional movement. The mobility of the space has not only created diverse environmental experience for the inmates, but also has realized the frequent interactions between inmates hence promoting the healing effect.

In terms of the appearance, due to the changing needs of the inmates to the healing space, the inner form of the building is kept dynamic and adaptive. At different times, by observing the location and volume of the clusters formed by different cells, inmates’ current psychological status and the needs for particular space could be identified.

Rather than being differentiated through conventional parameters, inmates are identified and distinguished by the types of personality disorders they are suffering from. Each inmate’s experience of space and healing path is determined in accordance with their unique personalities and healing needs. The sentence is not merely sentence here; it is a customized self-healing journey. One’s peculiar character determines one’s fate. The length of staying in the building is no longer determined based on the type of crime one has committed, rather is determined by psychological indicators such that psychological and behavioral assessments are done periodically to determine when it is a proper timing for the inmates to return to the society. This spontaneous healing mechanism promotes a more positive way of self-discovery and personality improvement. Life path and the meaning of space are being revolutionarily redefined here in the Healing Matrix. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Ko Anthony Chun Ming
Hong Kong

In the 21st Century, the act of cities throwing away architectures and everything that contributed to their present scene is no longer strange to the eyes. Everyday there are buildings being torn down, immeasurable amount of objects being abandoned and sent to landfills at an overwhelming rate. Neighborhoods change progressively, eventually becoming a place we are no longer familiar with.

In Japan, the government created artificial islands within Tokyo Bay as a method to bury the evidence of earthquakes debris and also, indirectly reduce landfills. Unwanted objects are then hidden beneath as reclaimed lands. Their existence and contribution to the city are obscured.

It is urgent; a revolt is needed to criticize on the erasing actions of human and cities without considering the true values of what it is demolished.

The ‘Displacement’ is to evoke the nostalgic emotion of mankind, through architectural salvage to regenerate the abandoned and hence turnaround their fate to be forgotten. Boats and ships perform the salvation by moving the abandoned from their origin to Harumi in Tokyo Bay, an artificial island where the project took place.

The salvaged are then processed through the factory on-site, granting them a new aura relationship while inheriting their memories as well. The whole architecture is an empty framework sitting on the site. Through the architectural salvation, it will continually be infilled with the reclaimed objects and buildings in phases and in the end it attains saturation. It is an architecture that inherits buildings. Not hiding what we abandoned, but acknowledging their efforts to create our memories. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Israel López Balan, Gabriel Mendoza Cruz, Ana Saraí Lombardini Hernández, Yayo Melgoza Acuautla
Mexico

Neza York
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl or more commonly Ciudad Neza, is a city and municipality of State of Mexico adjacent to the northeast corner of Mexico City. In the 20th Century, the land on which Ciudad Neza sits was under Lake Texcoco and uninhabited. Successful draining of the lake in the early 20th Century created new land, which the government eventually sold into private hands. Today Ciudad Neza is a sprawling city of over one million entirely with modern buildings.

Until the 2000s, most migrants from Mexico to the United States, especially to places like New York, were from poor rural areas. However, since the turn of the century, another wave of immigrants is coming from poor urban areas such as Ciudad Neza.

These immigrants tend to be younger and better educated than their rural counterparts, and tend also to keep separate from them. This is bringing into existence a new Mexican subculture called “Neza York” distinguished by dress, speech and the likelihood of learning English. Businesses with names like Tacos Neza and Neza Grocery have appeared in New York City.

Subsidence
As Mexico City continues to pull water from the aquifer below, its ground is sinking. The subsidence that results from groundwater extraction is a problem all over the world, but is especially dramatic in Mexico City. The aquifer has been under increasing pressure over the last several decades as the city’s population has skyrocketed.

While subsidence has been stabilized in the city center, many parts of the metropolitan area continue to sink. Some parts like Ciudad Neza have sunk more than 30 feet during the last century.

Vicious Circle
Mexico City puts a lot of effort to stop the sinking. In some locations it has caused the sewage lines to become slanted – resulting in the lines running backward. Consequently, the city struggles with flooding during the rainy season. Emergency pumping stations have been built to maintain extraction capacity, but a major solution is still needed.

The water difficulties have become a vicious circle: as the city grows, more water is pumped from the aquifer. As more is pumped, the city sinks further. The sinkage ruptures more underground water pipes, sending fresh water gushing into the sewers, aggravating the shortage, requiring more water to be pumped from the aquifer, and so on.

Design Concept
If Mexico City receives significant pluvial precipitation at a total rate of 215 m3/s, pluvial water is partly responsible for the urban flooding problem in rainy season, but rainwater harvesting could be part of the solution for people living in Ciudad Neza. Here, rainfall is heaviest, and the area is sufficient to collect and store water to reduce costs.

In the other hand, the total amount of wastewater treated by public wastewater treatment plants is 10 m3/s and all the treated wastewater is reused. At the present time, reused water is utilized to fill recreational lakes and canals (54%), to irrigate agricultural areas and parks over a total area of 6,500 ha (31%), cooling in industry (8%), diverse commercial activities (5%) and to recharge the aquifer (only 2%).

With all this in mind, the proposal is to replace gradually the network of small storm sewers in Ciudad Neza with a rainwater system collector that converge in recreational lakes on the surface, where towers emerge as large natural filters for rainwater storage; and treatment plants with absorption wells for underground injection. Following this system, floods will decrease because drainage system of the city will not be saturated in rainy season, and after treated water is injected directly into the aquifer, the sinking will stop. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Lin Rujia
China

Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean is a divided country between Greeks and Turks. Nicosia is the capital of Cyprus and it’s the only city divided in two in the world since 1974.

The demographic composition of Nicosia consists of Turks who live in northern cities and Greeks who live in southern cities. There were lots of public spaces and facilities in the “UN Buffer Zone” before Cyprus was divided and people needed them. But at the same time, the “UN Buffer Zone” became a barrier between the two parts because of it’s a limit of height. Both Turks and Greeks in Nicosia are looking forward to a unified country.

This project changes the horizontal “UN Buffer Zone” and public spaces near it to a vertical direction. Both Turks and Greeks ordinary life will have an intersection in the new skyscrapers

There are three design points of the “Unify Monument” skyscrapers: 1) Looking at it for each time, people in Cyprus could remember those periods that Cyprus were split into two parts. 2) Water is one of the most important elements for people in Nicosia. Water in vertical “UN Buffer Zone” can make people know that we connected the two parts with “water”, and this is an important function of the skyscrapers. 3) These skyscrapers distribute in all the main areas of Cyprus, which are passed through by the “UN Buffer Zone”. So the whole Cyprus will be “sutured” by these skyscrapers because all the people will go into them for public spaces. All main cities in Cyprus will build one skyscraper like Nicosia and each one will set up a corresponding relationship with the part of “UN Buffer Zone” in each city, and then, the whole country will be sutured by these skyscrapers. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Fangshuo Liu, Xiaoyu Wu, Qianhui Liang, Jin Che, Shoda Tomoki, Pablo Mariano Bernar Fernández-Roca
China, Spain

The human activities’ byproducts, such as the piston effect of the metro and elevators and the stack effect of the dominating skyscrapers within the metropolis, are generally unexplored due to the ignorance of the severity of the environmental situation. Based on the fact that the smog problem within Chinese metropolis always concurs with the lack of airflow due to meteorological reasons, this design intends to utilize these passive energies as the source of urban airflow.

By a careful analysis of our site, Lujiazui, Shanghai, China and the discovery of the never-changing core structure system behind the ever-changing facades of the skyscrapers, our team arrived at the conclusion that designing a new core prototype could be of great value not just to the incorporation of these passive energies mentioned above into the great war against smog, but also to the education of the entire population.

Beside the traditional functions of a core such as the stairs, the, toilets, the shafts and the elevators, this new core prototype includes this very core urban issue of air. Passive airflows from subways, elevators, atriums and stacks are intentionally conducted through a serious of carefully designed spaces and devices, so that the dangerous pollutants in the atmosphere can be absorbed by the mature and energy efficient methods, including centrifuge, wet deposition, HEPA, phytoremediation, and low voltage adsorption. Meanwhile more public and green spaces are created along this process, so that everyone within and without this building can interact with it to get more awareness of the air situation.

With the smog becoming a national issue, the government and the citizens in China are forced to fight together. FAR policies can be adopted to encourage the developers to apply this new core prototype, which benefits the city, making such bold architectural adventure more sensible. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

M Architects Ltd. 
Minh Phuc Nguyen, Linh Phuong Phan Vietnam

Hanoi, a city inside the river, is a sanctuary and special city. It is not only the capital of Vietnam but also a place where histories throughout different eras have met, where all cultural and historical values have converged and which has been inhabited since at least 3000 BC.

Hanoi has evolved significantly from its core – The Old Quarter. This Quarter initially started with 36 streets with each street had its name reflected the business trading happening on the street. This is one of many unique points of Hanoi. Some of the streets currently still reflect that such as: Steel street, Silk street, Paper Craft street. Hanoian is very proud of the Old Quarter. Especially, families those have been living here for many generations, those who called the Old Quarter the cradle of culture.

Hanoi nowadays is a big capital and comparable to London, UK. However, the expansion has been done much faster than living conditions of people. This has caused tremendous problem of leaving a large area of new parts of Hanoi in very much poor conditions in terms of people’s lives as well as infrastructure. There have been a lot of new urban developments started to fill up the gaps and to reduce density from the City center since then. However, due to unready infrastructure conditions in the new expansion areas, people still pull themselves into the city center to trade, work, and live. This has become a serious fact for a thousand year old capital. Together with the urbanization, the Core of Hanoi has become more complex. The complexity could be described through population density, types of professions, building’s functions and infrastructure. The Old Quarter is still the most important Centre of the City attracting a lot of businesses and trades as well as tourists, famous for its street activities within a human scaled street covered by two rows of trees along both sides.

The Tower is stemmed from an idea of bringing the horizontal density of Hanoi to a vertical living space and still reflecting all beautiful aspects of an Old Quarter and a busy city center. The Tower is expected to be a Happy Tower where people will live their lives with full of joys, experience good facilities and where tourists could come and experience Hanoi’s History through different eras. The Tower is also an ambition of future architecture, which is integrated with potential technologies to provide an uplifting sustainable living condition.

The Tower is a combination of modules, which reflect Hanoi urban density in a better way. Two types of modules are created: Experience and Residential. The Experience is distributed along the Tower right from ground level to the Top. These are places of interests, where visitors come and experience History of Hanoi. They will find different atmosphere, different experiences starting from Prehistory, Early Dynastic Epoch, through to French invasion period till current status. Moreover, these are covered with solar fiber in order to self-collect solar energy. The Residential distribution reflects the density throughout historic periods.

A great Core in the center connects all modules. This Core is not only for vertical transportation; it is where technologies are integrated in order to transform energy collected from the Experience’s solar fiber and the residential cladded PV fibers. Besides, it could self-collect energy from the earth and ground water. In addition, modules also are connected by horizontal connections acting like pathways or water tubes. Read the rest of this entry »

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3
ISBN 978-1938740220
Hardcover/ 650 full-color pages
150 projects

Special price on last copies (45 remaining). / Order below based on your location.
$20 – within the United States
$89 – rest of the World

The future of architecture and urban design unveiled by 150 innovative projects submitted to the world-renowned eVolo Skyscraper Competition.

The third book in the Skyscraper Competition series showcases visionary designs that utilize the latest technological advances, offer sustainable architectural solutions, explore new territories, propose a social change, and examine radical urban strategies.

Since 2006 the annual Skyscraper Competition receives thousands of entries from more than 80 different countries. The projects presented in this edition represent the top entries selected by an expert international jury.

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS 3 (Limited Edition Book)

Honorable Mention
2016 Skyscraper Competition

Layton Reid, Adrian Jimenez Escarfullery, Sakib Hasan, Bryan Ruiz, Milot Pivera
United Kingdom

Site
The prototypical site in China, Wuxi City, Jiansu Province, allows the exploration of issues of displacement and cultural identity as well as those of community and diversity as defined by architectural form.

The smart city leverages both passive and active technologies in its formation this includes the local, as a definition of connectivity, with off grid networks owned by the inhabitants. It is proposed that the physical and material qualities of this construct should manifest itself in a porus coral like form , these can either appear as slices joined together to form a more conventional urban grain or as in this instance become a stacked series of evolving circumstances defined by the consequence of the internal and external environment.

Concept
The banyan tree deposits additional downward branches to stabilize its imposed load much in the manner of this structure, Osteon city maximizes the potential of a small footprint, touching the earth lightly, whilst providing the maximum in amenity, at times appearing as a cumulo-nimbus cloud formation, and at others as a floating forest.

Ethos
The proposition consider the nature of the skyscraper as a 210 floor community, where work , retail ,, hospitality , leisure and residential accommodation form an aerial community serviced horizontally by driverless cars and bicycles swegeways and pedestrian routes.

Structure and form
The diagrid is re purposed to a waffle format, much like a radiator, the interleaving structural elements , join together to form a self supporting yet extremely strong and flexible structure.The elements which make up the structure are porus lightweight and analogous to bone “ osteo, it is envisaged that the construction will make use of rapid prototyping techniques on an industrial scale with integrated services technology.

These elements are then horizontally braced with walkways and lift cores .

Zoning
The three main elements of residential, leisure and work are located within the vertical elements of then tower , whilst retail sits within the landscape mounds which appear to rise and descend from the aerial parks .

Residential elements are disposed within the diagrid structure, cradled such that they can be interconnected to form more or less complex arrangements as required.

Aerial parks and landscape
These areas, provide respite and a sense of localism to the towers inhabitants, the voids allow light to penetrate deep into the structure, whose surfaces act as sun scoops illuminating the inner areas of the tower.

Vertical farms
Within the leisure zoned tower additional atria are created to house a range of agricultural activities thus making the aim of self sustainability an achievable goal when allied to the range of personal and communal garden solutions allowed by the proposal.

Sustainability, energy, microclimate
The aims of a building of this type are to act as an energy generator, hence the form mimicking that of radiator. The blade like surfaces of the structure house micro turbines and solar surfaces in the porous blade like structure these are used to drive local amenities, energy generated is stored and exchanged through the structure and surface of the building .at its highest levels temperature differentials, create precipitate, which can be encouraged, dissuaded used immediately, or stored for re use as directed by the control mechanisms contained within each zone.

Plan
The ground level structure defines a series of light filled plazas, whilst the upper levels show the range of spatial configurations, which include crescents and squares, roads and land bridges. Read the rest of this entry »