eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organization. The award seeks to discover young talents whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The Jury of the 2010 edition was formed by leaders of the architecture and design fields including: Mario Cipresso, Kyu Ho Chun, Kenta Fukunishi, Elie Gamburg, Mitchell Joachim, JaeYoung Lee, Adelaïde Marchi, Nicola Marchi and Eric Vergne. The Jury selected 3 winners and 27 special mentions among 430 entries from 42 countries.

Globalization, sustainability, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution, were some of the multi-layered elements taken into consideration.  The first place was awarded to a project for a vertical prison designed by architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, from Malaysia. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields and factories that would support the host city below.

The recipients of the second place are Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, and Leonardus Chrisnantyo, from Indonesia, whose project ‘Ciliwung Recovery Program’ aims to purify and repair the Ciliwung River habitat. The building is designed as an ingenious habitable machine that would collect garbage, purify water, and provide housing to thousands of people that live in the slums along the river.

The third place was awarded to Ryohei Koike and Jarod Poenisch, from the United States, for their project ‘Nested Skyscraper’ that explores robotic construction techniques for a novel structure of carbon sleeves and fiber-laced concrete. The building is a system of multiple layers of composite louvers which thicken and rotate according to solar exposure, ventilation, and materials performance.

Among the special mentions there are skyscrapers used as bridges that link different territories, cities in the sky powered by renewable energies, instant deployable buildings for disaster zones, skyscrapers that purify and desalinate sea water, or high-rises that commemorate historic dates. Other proposals create new pedestrian layers for existing cities. Some use the latest building technologies and parametric design to configure environmentally conscious self-sufficient buildings, while others create city-like buildings where different programs are mixed in one structure.

eVolo Magazine would like to acknowledge all the competitors for their effort, vision, and passion for architectural innovation.

2 0 1 0   S K Y S C R A P E R   C O M P E T I T I O N   W I N N E R S

First Place
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, Beh Ssi Cze
Malaysia

Some studies reveal that post-release offenses are very high and that criminal’s imprisonment is just a temporal solution because they do not have the opportunity to rehabilitate in a desirable community.

This project examines the possibility of creating a vertical prison in the sky where inmates will have to work and live in a community that will contribute to the host city below. The prison will have agricultural fields, factories, and recyclable plants that will be operated by the offenders as a way to give back to the community. They will live “free” until they have completed their sentence and are prepared to rejoin their communities.

The vertical prison has its own transportation system which consists of different “pods” for officers, prisoners, firefighters, and other workers. Read the rest of this entry »

Second Place
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, Leonardus Chrisnantyo
Indonesia

The city of Jakarta, Indonesia, was originally designed in the confluence of thirteen rivers which were used for transportation and agriculture. The largest of its rivers is The Ciliwung River, which has been extremely polluted during the last couple of decades, characterizes by hundreds of slums inhabited by thousands of people in marginal conditions.

The Ciliwung Recovery Program (CRP) is a project that aims to collect the garbage of the riverbank and purify its water through an ingenious system of mega-filters that operate in three different phases. The first one separates the different types of garbage and utilizes the organic one to fertilize its soil. The second phase purifies the water by removing dangerous chemicals and adding important minerals to it. The clean water is then fed to the river and to the nearby agricultural fields through a system of capillary tubes.  Finally in the third phase all the recyclable waste is processed.

One of the most important aspects of this proposal is the elimination of the slums along the river. The majority of the people will live and work at the CRP which could be understood as new city within Jakarta. The CRP project will be a 100 percent sustainable building that will produce energy through wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Ryohei Koike, Jarod Poenisch
United States

The Nested Skyscraper adapts to climatic, urban, and programmatic conditions with the use of advanced materials and robotic construction. Its form and building method derive from the carbon sleeves and fiber-laced concrete performance. It is a composition of multiple layers of louvers which thicken and rotate according to solar and wind exposure.

The construction method consists of a series of robots that stretch a network of carbon sleeves that are sprayed with fiber-laced concrete to create a primary structure. A second set of robots wraps the structure with a steel mesh for lateral movements and increase or decrease its density according to structural and programmatic needs. The resulting structure of “nests” is a hybrid of compressive and tensile elements that frees the skyscraper typology from the rigid multiplication of floor plates.

This prototype was designed as a fashion boutique for Tokyo; a city of extreme climate, density, and earthquakes. It explores the use of advanced materials and robotic construction to re-imagine the skyscraper. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Hongjun Zhou, Lu Xiong
Australia / China / Japan

Some of the inspirations for this project are the classical Chinese landscape paintings of the Lijiang River, the natural environment, and the culture and traditions of the local ethnic groups. The main idea is to create sustainable towers for people seeking solitude and meditation. Among the different programs there are agricultural fields, terraces for meditation, housing, and recreational parks.

The towers are carefully designed to be integrated to the landscape and to provide a proper place to live and work for the different groups along the Lijiang River. It was designed with the use of three dimensional voronoi patterns that follow the configuration logic of the immediate landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Ayrat Khusnutdinov
Russia

This project is not only about design, it is about people. 

It is regular for US settlement system that people are separated, so natural people relations are broken. But relations, thoughts and ideas are the essence of people society, the basis of modern science, art, politic and all aspects of human life. I want to solve this problem by creating a large public space, the place where people would meet and relate with each other.

Structure
It has two load bearing constructions. First is on the ground, the second is above in the sky, the two is the building skeleton, the buildings body is situated between them. We can gain two advantages from this approach. The first is that the “body” is free from the load bearing constructions. If we look more attentively, we’ll see that the body consists of cells. At the same time the cells are flexibly connected to each other. The second advantage – the body plays role of a damper in case of an earthquake, reducing ripple of the load bearing constructions. 

Program
I would like to use old words “city inside the city” characterizing the functional part of the project. There are many functions I purposed to be in the SkyTable. The basic functions is housing: inexpensive and qualitative (almost the whole houses are in the perimeter of the platform level) offices, commercial spaces (in the pillars) vertical communications lifts and stairs (in the pillars too). Public spaces are as among cells as in the platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Maurizio Pino, Filomena Francesca Pastore
Italy

The lasting crossing of The Strait of Messina has been, for several years, one of the topics mostly argued by the Italian politics, and among protests and citizens favours it seems always more and more concrete the hypothesis of the realization of the Bridge that will join the sides of Messina and Reggio Calabria.

The two extremities of the Sicilian and Calabrian lands, at this particular point, are so close, (lower amplitude of the sea’s arm between the two sides equal to 3150 meters, which correspond to the level of the seabed with lesser depth 80-120 m), to comprise a single morphological, urban and social unit, so that it can be defined as “Metropolis of the Strait.”
The idea to physically connect the two sides has been revealed to the national attention in 1968 when the Anas, manager of the Italian road and motorway network, and the State Railways, hold a competition for the planning of a stable crossing of the Strait. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Jiang Yuan, Xu Yang
France

At the local scale, it is a fundamental element of a radically rethought urban space. It is imbued with a will to reform.
At the scale of the city, it plays a role in punctuating the city.

The site 
Confluence of la Seine and la Marne is one of the key points of the topography of Paris.

A skyscraper defined by context
As the response, the building is designed as a superposition of three total different programs. 
Also presented by three “frames “facing three rivers trends from the confluence: to the center of Paris, east of Paris (Vincennes) and south-east of Paris (Ivry-sur-Seine).

Instead of making copies of the site print, according to the different characteristic of the vertical context at different heights, three public programs are been proposed.
At the top: a museum on the top facing with the grand “frames” taking the skyline of Paris as the background of the exposition space.
In the middle, there is a library with a view to the bois de Vincennes – Paris’s biggest green space.
At the bottom part, one auditorium is just in front of the open-air theatre, giving a showcase to both inside and outside. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Dae-ho Lee, Byung-hwa Kim
South Korea

Metaphoric Generic Box
An overdose of form can be easily discovered in the recent projects of Asian metropolises such as Seoul or Dubai.  Today’s designers are facing a pressuring environment forcing them to create extravagant forms.  The ironic lining in such phenomenon is that, the abundance of extreme forms is degrading the whole architecture into a monotonous state.

Therefore, this project is a result of conceiving a generic cube form against today’s overdose of form. This project aims to tackle various issues of metropolitan life in a skyscraper, rather than clinging on the unrealistic mirage of form. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

ATELIER ZÜNDEL ET CRISTEA
Gregoire Zündel, Irina Cristea, Nicolas Souchko, Mario Russo 
France

Paris requires 70,000 new housing spaces per year, yet the image of the city becoming extremely compact and elevated causes fear. All new ideas need time to make their way into people’s minds. Ideas called ”harebrained” soon become “interesting”, then “imaginable”, and perhaps one day “obvious”. The principle of densification, as an anti-urban sprawl solution, has been proposed for a number of areas of the city, most notably along the Seine, and consists of: building on roofs, relocating public facilities, increasing the use of compactness and elevation.

Like the majority of European capitals, the Paris of today is a city of human scale, a delimited space, traversable by bicycle and on foot. There are rapid systems of transportation, including trains, metros, and trams. Nevertheless, strolling, lingering, and wandering remain possible, interesting, and necessary experiences of Paris. It is true, Paris is currently reviewing its ambitions of “greatness”. However, within a country where speed is not necessarily a condition of efficiency, and where “quality of life” is elevated to “the art of living”, a purely geographic and territorial expansion based upon the American model is unfeasible. Strolling about, getting lost, dreaming, living and taking advantage of beautiful weather and beautiful spaces is essential to the inhabitants of Paris. Read the rest of this entry »