1st Place
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Elie Gamburg
United States

First Place

This is a proposal for a 720m tall skyscraper to be located above the existing Belarussky Train Station in Moscow, Russia. The program consists of a hotel, assembly, retail, cultural spaces, and apartments. These respond to the needs of the site, which serves as a major gateway to Moscow by road and rail. The main road to St. Petersburg runs through the site and is intersected by the main train line to Europe. Built in 1870, Belarussky Train Station is one of Moscow’s most important historical structures. It was celebrated throughout its history and earned the moniker ‘victory station’ for its role in shuttling Soviet troops to the German front during WWII, and for receiving the first trainloads of soldiers returning victorious after the war.

The process of designing a skyscraper for this site faced two problems above and beyond the issues typically confronted by skyscrapers, built above complex interchanges of roads, rails, and subways. Firstly, the building needed to address multiple urban contexts which varied drastically in their history, form, and program. Secondly, the design needed to confront the environmental difficulties of building in Moscow’s harsh climate. The solution proposes to de-laminate the performative layers necessary for skyscraper construction (structure, weatherized enclosure, solar control, circulation, and mechanical systems), in order to solve these divergent problems. The de-laminated layers are programmed with technical functions and then interwoven amongst each other. Most spatial conditions are defined as the spaces between (and serviced by) these layers, but at key juncture points (programmatically and structurally) the layers interweave forming more complex spaces.

Urbanistically, the de-laminated layers ‘interiorize’ the existing urban context within multiple levels of spatial enclosure. As the building approaches the ground, it splits to form a literal gateway over the city’s main street. At the same time, several of the layers pass over Belarussky Station to form a glass canopy above the tracks, while also helping to preserve the existing building. Other layers pass over the existing ‘object building’ modern context elsewhere in the site, turning the otherwise useless expanses of open space between those buildings into partially weatherized, and thus usable, public space.

Ecologically, the de-laminated layers allow for the ‘interiorization’ of multiple climactic zones. Each of the layers traps a zone of passively conditioned air. Each progressive layer of air insulates the layers within, meaning each layer takes progressively less energy to heat or cool. During the winter, the outer layers function as greenhouses, heating the inner ones. During the summer, the heat generated by the outer layers generates a stack effect – the rapidly rising air aids in passive ventilation and cooling. As a result, the building responds sectionally to its climate. During times of extreme cold and heat, the inhabitants of the skyscraper can withdraw into the inner layers, while at other times they can freely use the interstitial spaces between the layers. For special needs, each hotel or apartment occupant can choose, as required, to expend the extra energy needed to condition their share of the interstitial spaces, meaning that their domesticated space can ‘expand’ or ‘contract’ as they need as well.

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2nd Place
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Rugel Chiriboga, Ted Givens
United States

Second Place

Our project is based in Jurong East, Singapore. The site benefits from its adjacency to a mass transit line station and beautiful natural lake amenity. It is located between a Chinese garden and a heavy industrial district with large residential developments. Unfortunately, these residential developments do not take full advantage of sustainable building opportunities that are inherent in this region. Cultural richness and diversity in use, sustainability, and innovation particular to climatic influences in the region were primary drivers for our concept development. Our intent is to blend site specific sustainable strategies with a new interpretation of high rise design, derived from the juxtaposition of the vibrant complexity found in the traditional Malay village and the streamlined efficiency of modern Singapore. We sought clues from nature that could be utilized to develop a sustainable approach that would provide a stark contrast to the existing architectural landscape. The heavy use of gardens, both in the landscape and in the towers, provides a point of cultural departure in a sea of relentless housing blocks adjacent to our site.

An interesting fact about Singapore is that amidst constant deluges, Singapore has to buy its fresh water from Malaysia, due to a lack of adequate reservoirs. Water conservation thus became a primary initiative in concept development. In formulating a response to this challenge, we gained inspiration from the Wah Kim orchid, the national flower that pulls water directly from the air. There is inherent beauty in its form, and efficiency in the manner by which the orchid draws sustenance from its environment. This flower became a wonderful source of inspiration in developing a sustainable strategy for our mixed-use hotel and residential towers. The organic form of our buildings jumps out into the air to catch falling rain water.

With this as our starting point, the sustainable strategy for the towers became locally referential and provided for an environmentally inspired cooling and ventilation approach. The tower placements capitalize on the prevailing north winds to provide through ventilation in the buildings. The roofs of the modular pod units oriented to the north and south for the residences utilize a water-reclamation system to capture rainwater, purify it, and use it for cooling and gray water use. Energy for the system is generated by the building integrated photovoltaic cells in the double skin glass façade on the west face of the towers, where the majority of the solar radiation in Singapore occurs throughout the year.

Most of the modular residential pods have a green roof to assist with cooling and terraces for the residents’ use. The configuration of the pods for the north and south facades create dynamic exterior and interior sky gardens, capitalizing on climatic influences. The resulting undulations and overhangs formed by the placement of the units provide shade for the south facades. The units also peek out around the side skins to catch glimpses of an adjacent Chinese garden, lake, and newly created public area at the base of the towers. Connections to the community and site are established immediately upon arrival at various levels. The new public park and arrival plaza connect the hotel and residential towers to the community via natural landscape, orchid gardens, and undulating green roof areas, which conceal parking below.

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3rd Place
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Alberto Fernández, Susana Ortega
Chile

Third Place

Huasco City is a port in the north of Chile. The city is a place of important agricultural development thanks to the Huasco River, but in the last decade the water flux decreased, which will probably lead to agriculture disappearance in the near future. A new strategy is required to obtain water from the Atacama Desert. In this place there is a climatic phenomenon called Camanchaca, dense coastal fog that has dynamic characteristic: condensation at great heights that is carried towards coastal zones by strong wind currents. Its origin is in the anticyclone of the Pacific Ocean that produces a layer of stratocumulus, covering the coastal strip from Peru to northern Chile. The base of the cloud is at 400 meters (with a variation of 200 meters) above sea level. The second layer contains minerals from the sea, in lower concentration than sea water.

The idea is to build towers that collect water from these clouds and provide it to new agricultural land along the coast. The towers are 400 meters-high, and designed to catch water particles in the air that come from the coast to the Valley of the Huasco River. The anticipated performance, ranges from two to ten liters per square meter of vertical surface. Each tower has 10,000 square meters of vertical surface, producing a minimum of 20,000 liters per day, and an impressive maximum of 100,000 liters. There will be enough water to start agriculture in this arid coastal region.

The tower is composed of four components with specific functions:

1. Four sides of high density plastic meshes that serve as water collectors.

2. Four sides of low density meshes (copper) that link the spiral arms.

3. Four spiral arms that serve as structure and transport the collected water into the main cistern.

4. A main cistern located in the base and divided in three parts: a water accumulator in the upper face, a multi-composite filter membrane in the middle, and a circulatory system that distributes the purified water.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Christopher Talbott, George Tolosa
United States

Special Mention

The Freeway Interchange Tower seeks to reclaim the “throw-away” land often left in the wake of massive highway junctions, typically an abandoned, unattractive space at the center of maze-like crossings. These infrastructure nexus not only serve as transportation nodes, but also act as buffers between differing land conditions, uses, and city environments. In this particular site, the freeway interchange is bordered by low density residential neighborhoods on the south and east sides, a nearby institutional center to the north, and a major drainage canal to the northwest. With such proximity to varying uses and zoning regions, the interchange often becomes the separating barrier.

The intent of this proposal is to elevate the status of the interchange from utilitarian infrastructure to one of regional unifier. By sucking up the visual language of southern California’s formidable freeway system and coalescing it into an iconic high-rise, the tower can act as a symbolic ribbon that ties the area together, signifying the crossing points of the cities of Anaheim, Orange and Santa Ana. The mixed-use program of the tower – retail, commercial office and high end hotel near the top – completes the micro-arcology of the area, complementing existing nearby residential and recreational uses. At the same time, the tower reinforces the Southern California automotive culture, celebrating the constant dynamism and technological achievement of its impressive freeway system.

In a vision for the future of the these endless sprawl zones so ubiquitous to southern California, Interchange Tower would be the common place connecting and completing the local ecosystems. With the development of “community towers”, destination nodes would be created that enhance local economic stability (retail), relocate and diversify commercial office space, as well as form areas of vertical social density encompassing high end hotels and condominiums. Ironically, the Interchange Tower would serve to reduce the burden of excessive automobile transportation by creating waypoints; however, this intervention would also begin to render the mega interchange (its habitat) obsolete with the reduced need for such infrastructure.

In conceiving the idea of the Interchange Tower the parti was developed in which the freeway strata was brought quite literally into the tower, forming a symbiotic relationship between site context and object. As the automobiles are brought into the building, they would circulate up to the parking levels which are followed by retail and observation decks, office space, hotel, and final a sky lounge. In order to create a unified language based on the sweeping lines of the freeway below, the tower’s outer skin is composed of a helical ribbon of aluminum panels which serve two main functions; first and foremost a sound damping system to control the noise inherent of its surroundings, and secondly as a sun shading device which is more sinuous at the lower levels to allow more or less light at the upper levels, where solar shading is necessary.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Daekwon Park
United States

Special Mention

Skyscrapers started to emerge in cities like Chicago and New York towards the end of 19th Century. Over a century has passed, and the skyscrapers become the norm for the big city centers throughout the world. Although the skyscraper itself is truly an achievement of modern technology and vision, the urban space that is created by the collection of these seems to be fragmented, limited, and very unkind to nature. The project takes place in this urban context, investigating the way to reunite the isolated city blocks and insert a multi-layered network of public space, green space, and nodes for the city. 

Structure + Core
The main structure of this facility consists of two components. The first is the core, which acts as a spine for the units to be plugged into, and the second is the interlocking structure which distributes the overall load of the tower to the surface, slab, and the main structure of the existing skyscraper.

Wind Turbine Unit
This unit is designed to incorporate four wind turbines which convert the kinetic energy of the wind that flows through the skyscrapers into electrical energy. Vertical-axis wind turbine among the various types of wind turbine is chosen due to its flexibility in locating the generator and the efficiency in utilizing the wind energy from both windward and leeward sides.

Vertical Garden Unit
The vertical garden unit is an open structure which provides a habitat for plants, insects, and animals, which also becomes a public park for cities where natural spaces are limited. This unit is combined and multiplied throughout the towers in order to achieve positive effects, such as reducing the urban heat and filter pollutants from the air.

Sky Dock + Bridge
The sky dock unit is the node where the network between the towers and the existing skyscrapers takes place. The bridge connects the nodes to create a city where activity, movement, and events occur in multiple layers rather than just on the ground level and inside the skyscrapers.

Program Unit
The program unit is an enclosed space which accommodates multiple functions such as café, meeting room, observatory, museum, information center, retail, game room, restrooms, media library, etc. The program will be determined according to the location and the users of the units.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Tingxing Tao
United States

Special Mention

Interaction is the influence of two systems on one another, which can be understood as interchange and interrelation between the two. Transition means the connection from one status to another, or a gradual or sudden transformation between the two parts. Living-Tower is designed as a vertical strategy that situates itself within the most complex urban context- Shanghai, which is considered as the fastest-developing city in the fastest-developing country. Emphasis of this project is given to examining the idea of the interactive transition within and outside a building.

The theme, interactive transition, emerges when two systems react to each other. First of all, with a flexible-weaving base, the tower is a self-organizing creature, standing above a sophisticated highway joint, not only creating a new relationship between the architecture and the vehicular circulation, but also saving a huge amount of space within the urban area.

Interface between Units
Apartments are defined by their users, and the overall shape of the building is a response to these forces. Bridges are the result of reaction between these tubular units. Transition spaces connect different families, different generations, create the possibility of communication within the neighborhood.

Program & Geometry
We obtained the geometrical results thanks to the analysis of the architectural program.. The building is characterized by nodes which provide space for amenities and public recreation.

Horizontality & Verticality
At the base of the tower, there is interaction with the environment. The legs of the tower spread out, between the highway. The landscape becomes a mix of horizontality and verticality. A Living-Tower is explicit as a strategy towards a progressive building prototype idea, seeking a dialogue between the rapidly transforming city and its inhabitants. Architecture itself becomes an infinite feedback loop into the future.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Ben Simmons, Daniel O. Ware, Ginger Watkins, Joseph H. Tiu
United States

Special Mention

V-Hive for Vertical Hive – a concept for skyscraper design utilizing the natural organic growth of unitary hexagonal cells, which cluster, grow, and evolve to form honeycomb colonies in a vertical fashion, and applied to the vertical nature of skyscrapers. By creating a lattice structure to which these cells can attach, the organic germinating nature of city growth is reproduced. The clustering of individual cells form sky-pod colonies, which themselves become “neighborhoods” or “buildings”, in a vertical urban environment. Thus the life and energy of the two-dimensional/horizontal urban fabric of the city is continued along on the three-dimensional/vertical axis through the void/core of a transparent and environmentally permeable structure. This allows for the formation of an open-air 360 degree vertical urban corridor. This concept takes skyscraper design from the vacuum of visual icon to the experiential level of the vertical street. The honeycomb is the most efficient geometric structure in terms of using the least amount of material needed to obtain stability. Modular and rigorously structured, yet evolves into an organic whole. 

Circulation
This public transportation system is engineered to transition from underground, to a vertical orientation. This alleviates the need to stop, find parking and/or change into the secondary mode of vertical transportation such as elevators. All other infrastructure is designed to “seamlessly” transition from a horizontal into a vertical system.

Community
The lattice structure which is open, is transformed to form the “plazas” and ”side streets” where communities can interact as well as provide open-air circulation between the sky-pod colonies. This also brings “to light” the isolated nature of city dwelling in typical buildings, in which individual levels do not interact with one another. By providing the visually apparent nature of an open vertical urban core within the skyscraper, community identity (hive) is reinforced.

Optimization
Just as a plant thrives in its own particular niche, different building types will colonize the facets of the V-HIVE according to their needs. Residences, with higher heating needs, face southward, as offices, with demand for even light and lower cooling loads, tend to the North. As a self-sustaining colony, every liability becomes an asset, every waste, reused. The district systems serve to balance any excess that optimal orientation and passive systems cannot.

Adaptation
Growing and evolving, each individual can take advantage of the unique niches of vertical real estate created in the hive. At a scale accessible to the individual vertical farmer, shoe shiner, or attorney, the lattice provides framework which can support the smallest entrepreneur or largest corporate entity.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Frank Mahan
United States

Special Mention

The government-established program for the new U.S. embassy currently under construction in Baghdad is extraordinarily large, dwarfing any other embassy in the world. This project accepts this dubious program as its starting point, but questions how it and the architecture might change over time. In the first radical gesture, the embassy is configured as a tower, the most iconic, visible, and counterintuitive form for the building.

Next, to advance the architectural project and test one possible scenario for the embassy’s decomposition, a hypothetical timeline for U.S. withdrawal based on an optimistic assumption of gradual but continuous improvement is proposed.

Finally, as the political, economic, and security situations improve in Iraq, programmatic units of the building are removed, gradually creating an incomplete monument to this challenging period. The U.S. withdrawal is registered by the form of the building.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Vincent Barué
France

Special Mention

Live in a tower if you want to! Simply push one button to look beyond the horizon, watch the sun rising, admire your town’s aerial view. See without being seen with a complete view range of 360 degrees. Live the tower without the disadvantages, the price, the fears and dangers.

Plugged in the city, the virtual towers are integrated in difficult landscapes and urban fabrics, without constituting a mask for the buildings neighborhood and the roadway systems. Fine and svelte, they are almost imperceptible and do not fear the bad weather. Structurally, the virtual towers make use of the innumerable court yards of buildings as potential supports. These “urban periscopes” drawn up above the obstacles, offer the inhabitants a dominant panoramic sight of their city and their district, a pricey and rare privilege. Heights are variable and adapted to each place, the towers support chains of cameras laid out to sweep 360°. These new eyes of the neighborhoods exist as virtual windows.

The townsmen wishing to benefit from it , chose the orientation and the height of their apartment view. Indeed, each one of their windows can be replaced by a LED screen reconstituting the field of view of one of many cameras.

These “LED window screens” restore a quasi real and psychologically beneficial luminosity for the individuals. The height of the cameras guaranteed to benefit from the solar luminosity, from dusk until dawn. Moreover, LED are ecological and affordable because they diffuse neither UV nor infra-reds and can be recycled to 98 percent. Their energy consumption is minimal and they have exceptional life-span.

This concept of “virtual towers” can obviously be applied to a wide variety of scenarios, which would benefit from the feeling of freedom that comes with the new view.

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Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Daniel Hammerman, Kevin Kehler
United States

Special Mention

Inspired by the transformative process of rusting and ecological gradients of day lighting, our mixed-use tower twists and modulates from a thin, flaky character to a sharp, solid condition as it rises from Battery Park City, in Lower Manhattan. Facade porosity varies in response to environmental simulations and incident solar calculations, becoming more open on the north face, while more enclosed on other elevations, and distribution of program is informed by interior day lighting levels. The concrete core, composite slab and complex lateral bracing are clad in Corian panels, which have been thoroughly studied for curvature and seaming to delineate and accentuate continuity of flow from floor to wall to window mullions to ceiling.

We have developed and deployed innovative digital techniques in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and evaluation of patterns in the emergence of form which is greater than the sum of its parts, yet manifest at every scale from birds-eye to detail. Elegant organizations are highly integrated formal/spatial systems which operate similar to organic systems. Form results from adaptation to performance requirements and the holistic integration of structure, circulation, and skin, imbued with an intelligence of fabrication and assembly. Precise geometry and high-order surface continuity inform the continuous differentiation of our skyscraper.

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