1st Place
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Changhak Choi
United States

First Place

Even though we have reached an era of advanced technology, the majority of the skyscrapers are structures that don’t provide sustainability to their social, cultural, and ecological environment. In a contemporary and diverse metropolis, such as New York City, the skyscraper should be a reciprocal organism that interacts with its many different layers. In this case, the proposed skyscraper recognizes New York as a temporal residence for millions of students, artists, and tourists.

The proposed scheme analyzes their short-term needs and creates a system of organization around a single geometric unit. The combination of multiple units provides a structural, programmatic, and formal solution to the skyscraper.

The proposed algorithm identifies the singularity and plurality of the geometric unit, depending on the location and use of the tower; a reciprocal system that adapts to its environment. The basic shape of this cell is a deformed hexagon that through multiplication, repetition, and deformation creates an open-end and close-end system.

Once a linkage technique between the units is established it is possible to explore a suitable reciprocal system for a specific location. A unit generates a basic open-end system by repeating, multiplying, and scaling. It grows upwards and downwards from the center allowing porosity and different programmatic events. The system is complete only when every single requirement is met.

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2nd Place
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Gonzalo Pardo, Susana Velasco, Victoria González
Spain

Second Place

When you visit Manhattan as a tourist you keep the city in your memory as a series of fragments, bodies, perceptions, sounds, and atmospheres. The position of everything is engraved in your memory; a new psycho-geographic map of the city is born. We have chosen seven fragments of Manhattan, (5th Avenue, Broadway, piers, Financial District, Brooklyn Bridge, and Central Park), that could be thought about as individual cities; autonomous bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures.

With the use of manipulating and folding mechanisms we look for overlaps that cause hybrid conditions and programmatic impurities. The result is a tapestry of accidents engineered by our memory.

When the defined fragments are folded into loops, a new city (skyscraper) full of intersections and possibilities emerges; a vertical three dimensional network. Instead of a conventional pile of floors, each level and section connect with different programs and situations in the upper and lower areas. In that way, all planes could be connected at least by one trajectory. The pile of folded surfaces would create a complex landscape, where program, circulation, and structure are one.

A skyscraper as an intensified vertical landscape emerges.

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3rd Place
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Neri Oxman, Mitchell Joachim
United States

Third Place

Peristalsis: The rippling motion of muscles in tubular organs characterized by the alternate contraction and relaxation of the muscles that propel the contents onward.

The core of the skyscraper, its structural and circulatory conventions, as a central obstacle to tall building design is well known. Should the elevator, of all things, persist as the non-negotiable limit of our vertical habitats? The limit is vexing, for not only does it determine compositional forms but, more significantly, the arrangement of social practices with regards to both our labor and leisure. Elevators stifle more than facilitate our movement by virtue of their rigid planes and fleeting occupations. That is to say, the vast space which the elevator shaft occupies is, temporally speaking, useless. But suppose we involved ourselves with a different interpretation of that inactive, rigid, and sequestered domain which much of this central shaft represents. It would demand a vital shift, or at least a conceptual reworking, towards an active utilization of such space.

By employing a dynamic spatial application against the traditional organization of core and space, we dissolved the dichotomy between circulation and habitable environments. We have eliminated typological stacking where experiences are vapidly suggested to be diversified by simply designating floors to particular social practices.

Ideation: Circulation = Space
An inhabitable pocket is contained within a flexible element. It is a module that flows in a vertical communicative field with the surrounding members. Their positioning is determined and managed by a responsive signaling system.

Technology: Fluidic Muscle Tectonics
This is a soft, pliable, sealed, and non-mechanical innovation which encapsulates the volumetric structure. Textile reinforced hoses execute a peristaltic action. Thus, the modules are enabled to create an articulated motion that is symbiotically connected to an urban armature.

Environment: Sky-Surface as Community Realm
The sky-surface is the eventual destination for the transportable unit occupants to celebrate with pleasured retreats and striking vistas overlooking the Hudson.

Perspective: Urban Window
The peristaltic-fabric is designed as a sequential organization around an ‘urban window’ condition; a visual gateway to both city and waterfront allowing a selection of interchanging viewing angles and heights. This temporal effect re-reads the city constantly, promoting a quality of transparency in the context of urban mass.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Marco Steiner
Germany

Special Mention

How to transform horizontal into vertical?
The famous German architect Erich Mendelssohn once said: “Man can only find tranquility in today fast living in the motionless horizontal line”.

How do we combine the vertical expression of the skyscraper with the serenity of a horizontal space? The “Skyframe” tries to answer this question. The Skyframe is a multifunctional skyscraper in which public areas such as conference center, shopping mall, cinemas, and recreational spaces are located on the ground floor. Restaurants and apartments are located in the upper part while the rising verticals allocate offices and meeting rooms. The vertical segments reflect the active and busy aspects of working life.

The connectors between the verticals and horizontals are used as mechanical rooms for technical and energetic support. With a height and length of 500 meters, the Skyframe could be considered a very tall and massive building, but its unique design characteristics make it open and light.

The building is located in the Spanish metropolis of Barcelona, a city with one of the highest population densities in the entire world. The Skyframe is located by the sea, away from the busy downtown area and the surrounding mountains.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Justyna Karakiewicz, Jeff Cheng, John Kao
Hong Kong

Special Mention

Hong Kong is a city of extreme landscape conditions in which the majority of the land is defined as high steep terrain. Due to this condition there is a complex infrastructure of trains and escalators for the mobility of the pedestrians. This type of infrastructure accounts for more than 50 percent of the available land. The remaining areas are clustered with isolated skyscrapers surrounded by heavy vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

Because of this phenomenon, we think that Hong Kong doesn’t need another skyscraper but a building that will offer public areas for the inhabitants.Causeway Bay, one of the most heavily populated areas in the world, is defined by a large public park to the east and a major traffic route to the north. An entrance to the Cross Harbor tunnel is also located in this area. Slow moving traffic is a constant all-day long, causing intense noise and pollution. The traffic spreads to the surrounding streets and heavily suffocates the neighborhood.

The only access to the harbor front is through a pedestrian tunnel, which was originally built as water infrastructure. This has lead to a deserted waterfront with a lot of residual spaces. By identifying this land we come up with an interesting development proposal that would provide a large number of public areas, as well as housing and office spaces. This proposal is designed in phases and will grow through the years. It will also regenerate the harbor and will bring back life to this area of Hong Kong.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Loren M. Supp
United States

Special Mention

Rather than looking at the city as an extension of architectonic space, the Shanghai market is here reinvented as an internal extension of a fluid landscape. Operating under this axiom, the vertical market changes the previous horizontality of the urban activity by pulling the city fabric upwards, enabling a further densification of the city.

While modeling the existing economic flows of the city there was revealed a potential for a systemic expansion of the streetscape skyward. This move enables an accretion of market functions, pulling the chaotic action to a single site. Formally and theoretically, the degradative nature of fluid market economics define the building architecture, the thickness of circulatory structure responds to the predicted expenditure of capital as one moves through the building, and space is allocated for market activity accordingly.

After initial studies into fluid tendencies of market vectors and their formal potentials, the spatial needs for a market were investigated using a dynamic technique reliant upon the structural generator of the fluid form, a typological skyscraper was deformed. The resultant change in topology was then used to define the spatial and formal conditions of the market itself.

The union of the fluid structure and its progeny allow for almost unlimited market program. Interconnected market spaces are united through a flowing structure and circulation, while the pods create an unlikely juxtaposition of both unity and definition. This juncture lies at the nexus of the Shanghai marketplace and citizenry, the need to blend in, to sell ,and to hide; or in the fluidic context of the city, to live and flow like the building that houses them.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Marco Vanucci
United Kingdom

Special Mention

In nature, organisms try to respond to the impact of various forces with minimum energy consumption. Similarly, materials are subject to a process of self-organization/adaptation in relation to the action of intrinsic as well as extrinsic forces acting upon it, aiming to fulfill a state of equilibrium. Exploring the inherent properties governing the behavior of a given material and its effects on the surrounding environment, represents the starting point for a broader understanding of material forms as a mutable, multi-performing, and generative design tool. The bottom-up approach towards the research onto a given material system discloses the opportunity to deeply investigate the proprieties of such a material, as well as opening unexpected potentials for inclusive performances and effects.

The aim of the research is to unfold a set of extensive investigations on catenary structures developing a generative tool-set for architectural design and overcoming the traditional notion of programmatic determinism and building types. The analysis of the properties of catenaries, the inherent relationship between geometry and structure, and the behavior of the material under the application of a set of experiments, represents the core of the research.

The hypothesis of the research is to develop an extensive set of investigations and trigger new speculations about the way catenary can nowadays be used, not only as global load bearing system to support vertical loads, but also as a geometry that can provide spatial arrangement for vertical structures. The parallel study on the physical and the digital realms constitutes the method of research.

Understanding the built environment as a dynamic assemblage of generative material organization that yields potentials for inclusive performances represents, among other things, the starting point for a critical redefinition of building typology. Thus commonly considered as a rigid top-down organization within which every element plays a particular role and performs a specific task, the very idea of typology restricts the architectural discourse into codified standards where technology is the only driving force for innovation. Unfolding the organizational potential of high-rise buildings into a dynamic topological and morphological matrix where a multi-parametric material set-up opens up potentials and establishes a feedback loop between elements and their differentiation, shifts the discourse from typology to new ecology.

The Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo is the environmental testing ground where the system operates, modulating its morphology accordingly with external stimuli and internal organizational logics. The new high-rise building is integrated to the existing market representing its vertical extension. The existing market is characterized by a top-down layered organization whereby each element is aiming for a homogenous spatial standardization. The different degree of interiority within the building is achieved through an increasing number of material thresholds. The accumulation of discrete material sediments is defining the boundaries between different degrees of interiority-exteriority within the existing fabric. The new structure, instead, provides a differentiated generative system whereby local, regional, and global arrangements inform each other, defining new organizational distribution, as well as morphological, geometrical, and programmatic set ups.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Martin Henn, Max Schwitalla
Russia

Special Mention

Historically loaded and about to be demolished, the centrally located Hotel Rossija constitutes an exemplary terrain for an architectural operation. Starting with Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügeln in the 1920’s, followed by Stalin’s 7 Sisters, and the Palace of the Soviets in the 1940’s, there is a long history of skyscrapers in the city of Moscow. Contrary to planning of the new suburban business district “Moscow City”, we propose our building to be located in the heart of Moscow.

Due to the lack of space a vertical arrangement of the program must be proposed within the perimeter of the Hotel Rossija. Relationships and dependencies between the different capitals resulted in the vertical configuration of the programs. The stacking of entire program typologies (e.g. soccer stadium, office blocks) resemble a vertical city rather than a conventional high-rise building.

The intensity of programmatic interaction expresses itself in the different degrees of spatial connectivity. The more a program depends on its opposite the closer it moves towards it. Consequently, the two towers rise separately and clash according to the climaxes of interaction. Horizontal infrastructure layers are inserted at every clash node to distribute the inhabitants. These infrastructure nodes function as public spaces comparable to squares and streets in the traditional city.

The primary infrastructure system works on an urban scale to fulfil the needs of 40,000 people that circulate through the vertical city. Plugged into the Moscow Metro system the UP WAY opens a new district in the heart of Moscow. The UP WAY is able to run on the tracks of the Moscow subway system. They share the same gage of the track: 1520 mm (cabin diameter of connecting trains: 2,5 meters). For boarding and leaving, the cabins turn 90 degrees. UP WAY trains run with 3 cabins each, and transport 135 people, 45 passengers per cabin. Single cabins are connected by hinges. Several infrastructure layers function like node points from where the people are distributed through the programmatic clusters of the structure. The secondary infrastructure system compares to conventional high-rise circulation. The Macro-structure consists of a bundle of tubes within which the UP WAY is running.

By connecting the two towers, horizontal forces can become more efficient. The tubes are arranged in a 25m x 25m grid, then bend in one direction by 25°. They host different functions next to the UP WAY such as supply and emergency exits. Together with the substructure and the floor plates they form one Mega-tube.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Michael Samula
United States

Special Mention

Questioning what possibly is or will be the skyscraper for the XXI Century… It must not be singularly definable, but instead, in a multiplicious manner. A skyscraper for the XXI Century should act and react within itself as well as its context: both locally and globally, reconsider program and activity, generate new appetites, question standard fabrication techniques, create abundant spatial possibilities, and most of all, it must aim to redefine social identity and cultural conditions.

For instance, the proposal reacts to the forthcoming of an international train station aiming to decentralize Rome. The physical and cultural implications of such a project are immense, and the question is: how does a city prepare for such an abrupt change in its current fabric so that it will fully utilize this new transportation asset and flourish? In this case, it reaches out to international organizations and aspiring companies to become a hub in its international context. With an objective to facilitate conception and development of small seed companies, it strives to standardize procedures, strengthen Italy in Europe’s existing biomedical field, and utilize local resources. By involving local resources, including but not limited to universities, hospitals, medical schools, businesses, and retailers; the skyscraper assists in generating an enduring presence within its local fabric, but more importantly connect itself and immediate context to international bodies. Within itself, it acts and reacts through a program proposal to standardize procedures.

Programmatically, the tower establishes a feedback loop. Initiating this is its connection with international bio-facilities to standardize procedures. By introducing these procedures and opportunities to small rising companies, acting as a host, companies grow; which later will affect the hub’s procedural training and influence future small companies as well as those bodies that are internationally connected. Spatially, as a company develops, more facilities are available for their development. Within the tower, spatial possibilities provide for varying laboratories, freezer areas, lab support, holding rooms, and sample storage. All of which are possible through an open infrastructure.

The infrastructure was developed thanks to an understanding of a dynamic system. Its behavior-influenced conception is that of an abstract machine that allows multiplicious spatial possibilities. This infrastructure questions not only current fabrication techniques, but also spatial configurations. It redefines what wall, floor, structure, and enclosure are. Such a framework enables opportunities for different activities. As space develops, it affects the development of other spaces, when voids are full; each one can attract or repel growth of another. With spatial opportunity and new structural consideration, the skyscraper of the XXI Century must do much more. It must redefine social identity and cultural conditions, and not conform to them. Looking at the proposal, one might argue that such an intervention seems out of place, out of scale, and inappropriate. On the contrary, it is exactly what the skyscraper should be. It must break conformity and redefine its environment as well as the cultural identity of its immediate community.

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Special Mention
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Bea Goller
Spain

Special Mention

The site selected for the skyscraper is located on the Mediterranean Sea, off the Barcelona Waterfront, creating a grand vertical visual icon at the end of the Diagonal Avenue, in Barcelona; an urban axis, cutting the city grid on NE-SW angle, and finishing on the sea shore. It is erected on an artificial man-made peninsula, on which three intertwined towers would be built. They are entering a marine dominion, maybe representing utopia, extending the city, using a vertical element in a metropolis (Barcelona), while simultaneously turning toward the sky. It fulfills an old desired intention in an unconventional manner.

We were inspired by deep-sea sponges to create a complex glass structure beneath the sea. We tried to apply our findings from this organism on a high-rise building, to create vertical marine structures, looking as garden towers, using a skin made of optical fiber and fiberglass. The three skyscrapers intend to be a new type of bioclimatic buildings, in total mimesis with natural organisms, inhabitants of the deep sea around them. The double skin is composed by two layers, and contains a third layer of suspended vegetation, which becomes a new type of urban vertical agriculture.

The Venus BCN skyscraper structures will also be ecological and energy self sufficient, having highly positive, repairing and productive results for the saturated urban environment, a sustainable design. For this reason, we propose an intelligent use of energy, water, and waste. This will be accomplished with a green bio-climatic envelope, which controls temperature, sun exposure, and ventilation, so the use of cooling and heating is kept to a minimum. The atmosphere water collector systems are implemented over the outer skin, and the use of bio-gas from the nearby purification plant would be implemented, having this as an energy resource, stored at the sky lobbies of each module.

The outer skin structure will be made of fiberglass, as used in ships’ construction, and other materials would be silica and optical fiber, with a steel core. The fibers that will comprise The Venus BCN skyscrapers’ skeleton is composed by a lattice crisscross pattern. Its reinforcement would be made of fibers running diagonally in opposite directions, within alternating squares across the pattern. This construction technique will help counteract shear stress, which could easily cause a non-reinforced high-rise structure to collapse. The Venus BCN skyscrapers are divided in 6 segments on different slanted angles, which rotate themselves each at a 60, 120, and 180 degrees, in relationship to the gravity center. Each segment has a different use and remains as an independent element within the main structure. The joint between each of the segments is reinforced by a large open space, which doubles as a refuge zone, also housing energy management facilities, will serve as a Sky Lobby, as well. While the towers have different inclinations, only the elevator core remains as a central straight structure all the way to the top, a gravity center giving further structural stability to the towers. There will be 10 elevators in each of the cores, and four Sky Lobbies. At the end, we will have three shiny organic skins, which will emulate a live marine organism, varying from blue, purple to green tones, depending on the angle of the sun rays and varying with the seasons. It will glow at night, acting as a new type of lighthouse, which can be seen from approaching ships and planes. It will always change its colors, also depending on environmental conditions such as pollution or UV levels. The outside structure will act as a conductor of energy and information – due to the nature of fiberglass and optical fiber utilized of the outer skin, so the building will simultaneously be a receptacle and a conductor of electricity and telecommunication for its own use.

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