1st Place
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Somnath Ray
India

First Place

The skyscraper as a ‘modernist’ invention was a logical conclusion to the desires of a paleo-capitalist society, as an urban landmass approached its critical point of wealth and density of inhabitants. Imagined as a sign of cultural power and ownership, the skyscraper was typified in its ‘classical heroism’ from its logically consequent tabula rasa condition; as a formulation for a utopian blank slate on which a new building is conceived, free of compromise or complication after the demolition of what previously stood on the site.

Any speculation to the order of formulating a ‘new’ condition of the ‘skyscraper’ must encounter this semantic intent and deviate from its historical tendencies. Contemporary speculations on the typology of the skyscraper side-step the essential semantic dimension and instead, merely engage with a technological evolution of its species (intelligent systems, efficient circulation, stronger structure, energy efficiency, environmental consciousness etc.). Although some radical formulations of the mega-structures, such as Archigram, Constant and the Metabolists, as designs of pure infrastructure, attempt a semantic alteration where the content is attached at will, they are still invested in the modernist genealogy by their tabula rasa tendencies.

Para-city is imagined as a system of programmatically neutral habitats that situates itself dialectically to the tendencies of the Modernist projects and has the capacity to locate sites and proliferate in the varied and complex geometrical and cultural constructions of the present Metropolis.

With ever- increasing densities and changing programs, Para-city grows in the entire three-dimensional space of its host; the existing skyscrapers of the present urban landscape. Para-city feeds on the service-cores of its host, since sufficient service spaces already exist within the host-structure, to potentially free itself as a program-less ludic-zone, implying a radical overcoming of any spatial hierarchy; an architectural assemblage for a nomadic generation, where work and play coincide in nebulous zones of continuously shifting technological and cultural flows.

Para city is explicit as a version towards a progressive utopia that seeks ‘play’ between the totalizing form of the city and organicist individualism. The ‘play’ suggested here has its origins in the idea of the ‘event’; “ the moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematization of the very assumptions of the setting within which a drama may take place-occasioning the chance or possibility of another, different setting.” [as described by Foucault and further incorporated into the architectural discourse by Tschumi (Architecture and Disjunction)]. The future of architectural utopia is imagined in the facilitation of such play, implying a constant rupture and its immediate resolution… ad infinitum. An infinite feedback loop of perpetual anguish and its continual absorption.

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2nd Place
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Yi Cheng Pan
United Kingdom

Second Place

The past decades have seen the creation of major cities from scratch, at break-neck speed, through the endless proliferation of Skyscrapers. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Dubai, Singapore are mere specimens of such a milieu that is set to perpetuate and grow.The mass production of this ubiquitous and definitive building type, that investors, planners, and government addictively rely on to achieve both market efficiency and the “landmark” effect in any new urban development, clearly exposes the very paralysis and inability of the state to imagine a new city that is not populated by high-rises.

However, the insistence of such an ambition consequentially culminates in an inflexible urban plan that hinges on “uncertain” investments, while indefinitely postponing and denying the participation of mid/small-range, often local, businesses from activating the site with more economical building types.

The total abdication of control for the laissez faire agglomeration of skyscrapers is no longer the solution. Instead, control should be localized and intensified typologically to give the “city” different types of buildings.

To subvert the control of the skyscrapers over the ground plane from its endless proliferation, the strategy is to invert the skyscrapers’ massing through the cultivation of multiple urban plans within the skyscraper type, hence not only releasing the ground plane for the immediate activation of a variety of smaller building types, but also creating multiple “clustered” volumes for increased partnership of public and private establishments.

The project resists the formation of a generic empire, a city entirely submitted to the discretions of the corporations, by providing an urban typological framework – The Inverted Skyscraper Typology, is committed to the cultivation of difference, through the coexistence and participation of multiple types and stakeholders.

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3rd Place
2007 Skyscraper Competition

José Muñoz-Villers
Mexico

Third Place

Articulating the contemporary European city
“Although it owes much to its heritage in the American skyscraper, the contemporary “Euroscraper” is in need of a new expression, one that provides distance from the modernist orthodoxy of the 20th Century and is a critical response to the ornate and delirious notions of the 21st Century tall building that now proliferate in cities such as Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The European urban dilemma is that while rightfully holding onto the notion that cultural difference will continue to prevail throughout the European urban landscape, a new economic imperative must somehow become evident and explicit on the global stage.” Hani Rashid

The Void: defining space with space
The concept of emptiness as aesthetics, the void as negative space, as positive formal element was borrowed from Isamu Noguchi’s theoretical interests, a growth upward of earth-generated forces. He intended to capture the void, the immaterial by emptying the space of mass. The idea of framing the space or the city is also present in two examples in Paris: Arc de Triomphe and La Defense. Both entities seem to be interacting and framing one another. By designing a looped shape, a dialogue within the building itself, and between the building and nature, is achieved. The project basically filled space with space, rather than piercing it with a needle-like structure. The building was able to look at itself, understand itself, as a unified entity, as a belt, a city within a city; it is a single, unending surface. Weight and mass were replaced by light, time, and space.

The formal scheme not only generated a coherent geometry to engage the flow of program and people, but also gave a new interpretation to the concepts of base, shaft, and crown, which are present in every single tall building. Keeping the idea of the base as a more horizontal-oriented element, which actually interacts with the city while forming a natural departure for the shafts, it still anchors the building to the metropolitan fabric. The shaft, which basically ties the earth with the sky, appears bifurcated while redirecting upwards, a configuration that offers variety in floor plate shapes. When the shafts become one, the presence of the crown is addressed in an unusual way; the crown resembles horizontality in the endeavor of gaining more area at the top, which is meant for public spaces.

Structural Skin: questioning the central-cored, four-curtain-walled orthogonal scheme
Unlike traditional buildings , which use vertical supports, in this design the principal structural elements are central ring-like core and diagonally steel elements that spiral around the outer edge of the project. The aerodynamic form encourages wind to flow around its face, minimizing wind load on the structure and cladding. Natural air movement around the building generates substantial pressure difference across its face, which can be used to facilitate natural ventilation. This first building is not a traditional tower, but a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections that establish an urban site rather than a point in the sky.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Eduardo McIntosh
United Kingdom

Special Mention

Alternatives to vertical circulation strategies within high-rises
The phenomenon of the “high-rise” can be read as a result of either high concentration of population or as a symbol of power and wealth. In any case, if we put structural issues out of the equation it is clear that the key element that enabled the birth of the skyscraper was the invention of the elevator. Therefore, it is ironic that the elevator is precisely what has totally limited the evolution of high-rise buildings in terms of programmatic and formal alternatives.

Many attempts have been made to try to escape the ubiquitous tower typology. Yona Friedman’s utopian inhabitable porticoes and interconnected towers, Moshe Safdie’s scattered prisms, and Arata Isozaki’s branching tree-like buildings, are a few of the most radical and original alternatives. Nevertheless, despite their seemingly dissimilar nature, they have one common omnipresent condition, the concentration of the vertical circulation, be it in the form of staircases or mechanical devices. The elevator, because of its capability of movement, is mistakenly perceived as a liberating agent. On closer inspection, its range of movement is totally limited by its encasing. It is particularly interesting to see that this encasing not only holds down the elevator form mutating, but by doing so, also constrains the possibilities of evolution of the building. One other interesting example is the case of Plug-in City by Archigram, where the mechanical device that governs the mega structure is a crane set on a railway.

The hovercraft is a transportation device that can negotiate almost any terrain and that is totally independent of the structure. Is this exogenous element a form of “architecture”? That question is irrelevant. The important issue is that a mechanical device for moving people within a building could liberate this building from the constraints imposed by the vertical circulation shaft. My proposition is to separate the vertical circulation from the main structure of the building. To do so, I plan to take the idea of the crane and liberate it form the railway by grouping several cranes into an autonomous free moving device that could roam along the exterior of the building by clinging to appendices scattered on its surface while carrying users or items inside capsules. The agents would work as a system that would be governed by a minimal route algorithm (e.g. ant colony optimization algorithm) to improve every users travel time. Power would be provided to these agents through the appendices on the buildings surface. This type of displacement also has the advantage of providing quick evacuation capabilities from every part of the building.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Anna Rita Emili
Italy

Special Mention

Sentina is an abandoned and degraded place situated in Italy’s west coast. The space dimension of this almost uncontaminated landscape needs a new construction that takes into consideration history and nature.

Our project traces a track of this landscape, a linear axis, a mixture of history and contemporary life: a route that highlights the presence of ancient country houses and an axis that ends unavoidably at the sea. Therefore the road as a bi-dimensional entity is transformed into a three-dimensional element, thanks to a vertically constructed space. Detaching itself from earth, it partly contains a route equipped with mastings, a canal, sporting and playing areas.

As it meets the line of the sea, the road bends, transforming into a skyscraper, which is one hundred and fifty meters high. It is an element which, without any mediation between the space and the surrounding nature, establishes a pure and decisive contrast between horizontal and vertical, between nature and artifice, between ancient and modern. The skyscraper contains lodging, services, communal and exhibition spaces, shops, and restaurants.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Eldine Heep, Gerhild Orthacker, Judith Schafelner, Elle Przybyla
Austria

Special Mention

Contemporary urban scenarios
The contemporary urban landscape, with its overlay of extensive freeway systems and infrastructures for mobility, can be viewed as an expanse of built form and its spatial residuum. These territories of voids are not planned in so much as they are generated by the changing morphology of the urban grid. Rather than resist or ‘correct’ these entropic tendencies that occur in the horizontal plane, the project seeks to embody them in a vertical, architectural scenario. As an urban model, the multi-functional high rise, with its mix of commercial, office, and residential programs, has the potential to dynamically engage in the spatial complexities that characterize the contemporary urban grid. By moving away from the notion of the fixed skyscraper, a functionally stratified structure that compartmentalizes program into predictable discrete zones, the proposal presents a systematic methodology for programmatic hybridization.

Typologies
Each program was assessed to determine how it operated in the horizontal field, with particular attention to accessibility, proximal relationships, and visibility. Residential, office, and shopping grid configurations can be said to have either a closed or open quality. Borrowing from network theory2, in which systems can be defined as centralized (more closed, based on a single node) or distributed (more open, based on multiple nodes), the programs were assigned network values to describe access.

The development of new program typologies, based on centralized or distributed access, establishes a unifying principle that applies to all programs equally. With their radial organization and focus on pathways, the diagrammatic plans for the different typologies can be recombined and, therefore, allow for the evolutionary development of vertical interconnectivity.

Structure and form
The primary structure, a bundling tubular system, consists of three tubes, each with a central core that runs from ground to top. Where the circulation distributes into multiple cores (resulting from the introduction of a distributed typology), two tubes merge and two programs are connected. In these areas of programmatic overlap, voids with different levels of interconnectivity emerge; this interconnectivity depends on the program mix. Where two tubes merge, the third remains independent with one central core (thus, maintaining its centralized typology). In the tower, each tube connects with the other two at one or more points. Because the tubes buttress each other, the floor plates can remain relatively small, despite the building’s height. The secondary structure, a transformative system, is articulated differently throughout the building, according to programmatic demands.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Xavier Lagurgue, Günther Domenig
France

Special Mention

While the first skyscraper projects emerge on the circular Parisian highway, with the aim to densify the agglomeration and preserve the historical center, we propose to set up a network of towers which we call biotopes. The smallest ones are higher than the Eiffel Tower. It’s a “building provocation”, or as the artist Tatiana Trouvé would say, “a paradoxical injunction in which different types of urban organization, although incompatible at the first sight, are superposed”.

When towers are built above the old city, the town as a whole changes and becomes a new one as the result of the dialogue between the contemporary vertical towers and the old horizontal city. The old town does not exist any more in the same way, although it is still there. The background of this paradox is to question our position as users of urban space. It allows us to place ourselves in a sustainable urban development perspective and set priorities: construction, society, economy, environment, history, aesthetics.

We propose to change the status of historical city centers by renewing their accommodation capacity and their evolution potential, rather than accelerate the « museification » of them. This always generates the decline of the suburbs, which are considered to be ideal for experimenting new urban forms. By doing so, the old town is serving as an enormous network of roots for the above located mega-systems, which are covering it and radically transforming its perception. It is only from that starting point that one can imagine building similar constructions in the suburbs.

Rather than being in favor of the uncontrolled expansion of cities – one of the major reasons for the increase in pollution and energy consumption – we propose to make the old city center denser, by superposing several layers which will multiply the actual capacity by ten. We postulate that the old town with its historical diversity, but also with its transportation networks, its energy consumption, and its exclusive relationship with all forms of life, is an obsolete model for the future evolution and is contributing to today’s environmental situation.

Finally, instead of raising the center of Paris as Le Corbusier intended in 1925 with his “Plan voisin”, we propose to superpose the existing with new layers of buildings, which are conceived for a long term life cycle, taking into consideration the future urban development of several centuries, but keeping the preservation of history as a fundamental principle.

We are all sensitive to what the architects Decostered and Rham call the “temptation of the heritage” but, with the perspective of global warming we believe that the idea of “freezing” the cultural heritage of old cities in order to continue expansion is not justified and is based on a short term vision. Therefore, on a theoretical level, the physical limits of the “vertical biotope” are articulated around three complementary principles which are known since 1950 and proposed by Buckminster Fuller in his giant dome covering the city: the capacity to increase the building surface, the autonomous energy system, the independency concerning the climactic and biological aspects.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Su Hou Chen, Melinda Sanes, Neil Cook
United States

Special Mention

Undeveloped land is scarcely available in Hong Kong, the densest urban area in the world. In the Western, Central and Wan Chai districts, this has historically led to the in-fill of Victoria Harbor and the creation of an artificial shoreline. This continued way of development replaces harbor with hardscape, further compounding the negative ecological consequences of unintelligent waterfront development, namely, added water pollution, increased impervious surface area, and reduced light exposure to the channel bottom.

A series of preliminary structural explorations led to the development of initial programmatic opportunities and constraints; the basic structural part of an oscillating system was formulated based on iterative massing models. Structural components were accumulated to fill out the general massing of tower height and width, and then modified locally to increase stability. Elements of the structural system were then thickened, multiplied, eroded, or atrophied based on a series of physical modeling experiments designed to expose structural redundancies and weaknesses. As such, a materially efficient structural design emerged. Areas of greatest promise and latent multivalence were selected and explored as detail areas. The entire tower was then revised and reaccumulated based on micro-scale structural and enclosure principles, site and contextual concerns, and overall vertical and lateral gradients of density, porosity, and opacity. These many sets of systems play themselves out through the tower, vertically mixing with each other, creating a truly novel spatiality, not present in traditional adaptations of the vertical building.

The tower’s primary structural system is conceived of as a lattice of alternating space-frame elements (pods) and planar elements (fins). The primary vertical structure oscillates between the interior and exterior of the tower, changing at moments of movement between spatial zones; the primary lateral structure has two components: the structural sleeve of interconnected pods, dealt primarily with rotational stability, and the crisscrossed lateral ‘braid’, dealt mainly with swaying and overturning. The systems are attenuated to their contextual situation, on the northeastern, harbor-facing side of the tower, the surfaces of the lattice multiply and expand vertically to create larger areas of contiguous facade, sheltering the interior open space from the strong prevailing winds. On the southwestern, urban side, the lattice surfaces pull back from each other, exposing the interior gallery and park system, and opening views between the interior of the tower and the city.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Ming Tang, Dihua Yang
United States

Special Mention

Inspired by the Lego blocks, the strategy of Geno-Matrix is to do as much pre-fabrication as possible, under controlled factory conditions. Within a modular building system, large quantity of cubic units are fabricated and assembled into a lattice system. These units can be “pulled”, “pushed” or “combined” in the lattice grid along the axis and form infinite typological features. The characteristic of the skyscraper heavily relies on these units’ location and the internal logic between them. The skyscraper is formed by the same building “blocks” that takes on an organization imposed by the social, economic, and culture requirements of the site.

While molecularization allows for units’ assembly from the bottom-up, the linear hierarchy is replaced by more complex network. In our project, we are investigating the relationships between the units. Occupation, habitation, lifestyle, need, and economy are reflected in this skin. For instance, grid like pattern repeats the grid of the streets, and small-scale living units can be combined to form large-scale commercial units. Overlapping multiple patterns form the potential mixed-use zones, which can be continuously configured based on the changing spatial requirements over the years.

By changing local relationships of individual units, Geno-Matrix can affect an emotional response, similar to that realized by the culture icon or national symbol, though on a much larger scale. For instance, to reflect the social value, an ordinary “tree” pattern can be generated by moving the units along the normal axis. Organization patterns emerge at varying scale and hierarchy.

Since Charles Darwin proposed his theory stating that all species are generated via the process of evolution, and genetic approach is now considered not only powerful enough to solve biological puzzles, but also useful in the simulation of creating algorithms and 3D graphics for higher level of complexity and diversity. Within the evolution hierarchy all individual features are condensed and passed to the next generation. Here, variations can simply take place by changing the crossover rule in hierarchy, or introducing a new genotype into the system. With GE, designers could yield novel, creative design solutions based on the mixture of several existing successful cases.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Dominiki Dadatsi, Fountoulaki Elrini, Pavlidou Eleni
Greece

Special Mention

This tower is a case study of a larger housing proposal situated in East London that serves as an example of adaptive architecture. Based on ecological systems, the team investigates how an urban development can be explored as a simulation model of natural growth that negotiates and adapts to the existing urban fabric. Borrowing rules and functions from the natural world, such as growth and phyllotaxis, the project is an investigation of parametric development adapting to different urban needs.

The project aims to create an open parametric system, towers as vertical urbanism, capable of adjusting to different conditions. It explores how to produce architectural forms based on understanding and simulating the people’s behavior and movement inside the urban fabric. For that reason, the team uses an agent based system as a generative method of design. Based on five different categories of users: students, business people, travellers, artists and academics; five different behaviors of movement are simulated, based on the characteristics of each type. The system is also informed by the data of the surrounding area (attractions, obstacles, access points, and infrastructure) creating the general urban field and vertical paths for the generation of the towers. Internally, two types of circulation are proposed; the first one is a vertical circulation that follows the paths of the tower and distributes the users into the units, and the second one is a helical model of circulation that defines the public realm of the building.

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