eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Skyscraper Competition. The Jury selected 3 winners and 20 honorable mentions from 427 projects received. The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The FIRST PLACE was awarded to CLIMATE CONTROL SKYSCRAPER designed by Kim Gyeong Jeung, Min Yeong Gi, and Yu Sang Gu from South Korea. The project investigates the use of a series of skyscrapers to modify weather conditions that would improve the global climate crisis and stop desertification, rising temperatures, and natural disasters.

The recipients of the SECOND PLACE are Wang Jue, Zhang Qian, Zhang Changsheng, Li Muchun, and Xu Jing from China for the project TSUNAMI PARK. The project is designed as a man-made inhabited mangrove for the Tonga region to prevent tsunamis that would affect the Pacific Rim.

NEW SPRING: AGRO-ECOLOGICAL SKYSCRAPER designed by Michał Spólnik from Austria and Marcin Kitala from Poland received the THIRD PLACE. The proposal is envisioned as an aggregation of garden modules containing distinct flora and microorganisms that could be deployed to specific regions that would flourish with new life.

The Jury was formed by Volkan Alkanoglu [Principal, VA | DESIGN], Gianni Botsford [Principal, Gianni Botsford Architects], Steven Chilton [Principal, SCA | Steven Chilton Architects], Tsvetelina Georgieva [Principal, DesignMorphine], Nuru Karim [Principal, Nudes], Arthur Mamou-Mani [Principal, Mamou-Mani Architects], and Moon Hoon [Principal, Moon Hoon Architects]

First Place
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Kim Gyeong Jeung, Min Yeong Gi, Yu Sang Gu
South Korea

BACKGROUND
The two risk factors that will come to mankind over the next decade are “Climate crisis” and “failure to respond to the climate crisis”. 2019 was confirmed as “the Second warmest year in history”. Experts are referring to the end of the Earth as 2050 due to the abnormal climate. From the beginning of the 21st century to 2021, the average temperature of the Earth’s surface rose by 0.93 ±0.07’C, which is more than two-thirds of 1980. (It is increasing by 0.13 degrees to 0.25 degrees every 10 years). Due to the increase in temperature, the global village is currently facing various natural disasters and environmental problems. There are various damages, the most serious damage of climate change to extreme drought and desertification caused by drying up long-term. Of course, reclamation of forests, and man-made factors such as environmental pollution and deforestation have conspired to happen, but desertification due to global climate change is accelerating. Despite these global movements, environmental disasters and desertification around the world are still rising exponentially, and some experts say that environmental problems have already progressed a lot. In other words, awareness and policy on environmental issues are important nationally, but a movement to solve environmental problems through a groundbreaking technological and architectural approach is needed and should be applied worldwide. Then, how can we architecturally prevent desertification as well as persistent natural disasters? The answer lies in the ‘Climate Control Tower’. CCT is designed to cope with climate change and overcome the current climate crisis the world is facing. Through clouds generated by absorbing seawater, the climate crisis regulates the weather by raining where there is a drought, absorbing clouds where heavy rainfalls, or reflecting solar radiation. Read the rest of this entry »

Second Place
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Wang Jue,  Zhang Qian, Zhang Changsheng, Li Muchun, Xu Jing
China

People are often afraid of tsunamis. Technological advances have not led to sufficient measures to withstand tsunamis. When a tsunami strikes, people are still helpless. The Pacific Rim, which is linked to all four major tectonic plates, has the highest tsunami rate in the world, with more frequent undersea fluctuations. For example, the volcanic eruption in Tonga on 14 January 2022 resulted in a tsunami threat to the entire Pacific Rim region.

It is therefore envisaged that a skyscraper will be built in front of Tonga’s long and narrow coastline. The aim was to reduce the biological and ecological damage caused by the tsunami. We use the edge wave effect of tsunamis to advance the tsunami wave so that the building is in the sea to dissipate it when it has not yet inundated the city.

Mangroves are woody plant communities in the intertidal zone of tropical and subtropical coasts, with developed root systems and staggering growth, which have the best effect on tsunami mitigation. Therefore, the skyscraper is inspired by the principle and mechanism of mangrove resistance to tsunamis, and consists of a single unit aggregated to form a vast complex along the coastline. Each cell consists of a bottom pillar and a top multi-level platform. The bottom pillar is made up of thick concrete columns that form a porous structure to dissipate the enormous force of the tsunami, while the upper platforms are of varying sizes, heights, and interconnections to carry people’s lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Michał Spólnik, Marcin Kitala
Austria, Poland

How would the world be able to feed itself?
We live in a paradox – nowadays more food is produced than needed but the expansion of hunger is increasing. How is this possible?

Global food production relies greatly on an extremely small number of crop and livestock species. Grains are married to particular chemicals, becoming vulnerable to environmental changes, and lack immunity. Together with changes in how land and water resources are used, population growth, urbanization, and shifting food culture, this lack of crop diversity poses a threat to global food and nutrition security. For the sake of our society – and for the ones to come – we might like to rethink the ways we treat our land. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Haptic Architects, Ramboll
Tomas Stokke, Shonn Mills
United Kingdom, Singapore

The Regenerative Highrise is sited at Grønland, a multi-cultural inner-city borough of Oslo.

The proposed new highrise tower at Oslo’s Grønland metro station seeks to use large-scale development of the city as a means to repair or enhance the inner-city neighborhood. In the first instance, this is a site of unique potential, where the metro meets the river above and its adjacent cycle and riverwalk. As such the new tower becomes a vertical linkage of these existing and developing transport networks, most notably the increased use of the city’s waterways for electric ferries.

The tower structure reuses an existing highway viaduct at its base, creating active frontages spanning three levels: the canal and metro level; the high street, and the viaduct level. The base of the tower gives back to the city, providing cultural, leisure, and sports facilities for the inhabitants of the city. The highway viaduct is repurposed for leisure purposes, to ensure the embodied carbon of the existing structure does not go to waste.

The tower itself seeks to address the challenge of waste in the construction industry. Changing needs and standards often lead to relatively new buildings being demolished and rebuilt. The proposed tower employs regenerative design at its core, thus ensuring future flexibility for change.

A superstructure consisting of 3-story high structural decks, allows the tower to be reprogrammed over time. The triple-height sky villages are flexible and can accommodate a variety of uses, such as a single-story production space, two stories of office space, three residential floors, or even a row of terraced housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Yi Liu, Baichao Wang, Hao Zhang, YiHui Gao, ZongHao Yang, Shiliang Wang
China

Changchun is one of the most important cities in China. At the beginning of the last century, urban designers of Changchun carried out the road network system with reference to the theory of Howard’s “Garden City”. The urban transportation in Changchun is a system formed by multiple city squares as the center and roads as the axis, which initially established the main roads in the urban area of Changchun, and this urban layout is still in use today.

With the economic development and population growth of Changchun, the advanced urban transportation system can no longer meet the needs of the city. Although the city square connects several main urban roads, it is very easy to cause traffic jams in the surrounding area of the square during the peak urban traffic hours. For many years, Changchun is one of the cities which has the highest urban traffic jam rates in China. The main framework of the city cannot be changed, and we urgently need to create a new method and model to solve this problem.

This design distributed a number of transportation centers in the busy urban squares in Changchun. The interior of these transportation centers includes an urban cable car system that extends in all directions, a three-dimensional green landscape, and a number of residential and commercial space units. People gather here and take the cable car to any parts of the city. The vertical green landscape system can absorb the automobile exhaust air. The movable and detachable residential and commercial units enrich the center’s commerce system and provide citizens with a convenient urban life. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Ron Krakovski, Talia Tsuk
Israel

The main purpose of The Tree skyscraper is to provide accessible water to the villages of South Sudan. The Tree unifies the new community while providing it with water for agriculture, sanitation, and everyday needs.

South Sudan is located in northeastern Africa; it gained independence from the Republic of Sudan in 2011, making it the latest nation to be recognized by the United Nations. Conflicts have undermined the developmental gains achieved since independence and worsened the humanitarian situation. As a consequence, South Sudan remains caught in a web of fragility, economic stagnation, and instability a decade after independence. Poverty is ubiquitous and has been reinforced by a history of conflict, displacement, and shocks.

59% of the population of South Sudan lack proper access to clean water sources. Constant conflict and civil war, which began in 2013, Have led to the current water crisis in South Sudan. During the war, the nation’s water systems were deserted and demolished. 1 in 3 people use contaminated water daily, increasing the risk of infection by waterborne diseases. Currently, in South Sudan, 77% of children under the age of five die from diarrhea. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Zheng Xiangyuan
China

The population of Hong Kong has shown a continuous growth from 7,185,996 in 2015 to 7,496,981 in 2020. People have built skyscrapers in order to create more space on limited land. In the beginning, skyscrapers do provide more space for people, but with the increasing population, the number of skyscrapers will continue to increase, and eventually, they will fill the land of Hong Kong. How are we going to create new space for people to use when we can’t build new skyscrapers anymore?

Hong Kong is one of the cities with the highest population density in the world, its population density is 23.8 times the optimal urban population density. Only 1,106.66k㎡ of land carries 7,496,981 people, Nearly 80% of them live in coastal areas, which make up only 15 percent of Hong Kong’s total area. Over the past decade, Hong Kong’s population has grown by an average of 0.8% per year. Hong Kong faces a very serious population problem. As the population continues to increase, the average living space of people will continue to decrease. How to create more space in a limited area has become a serious problem for us to think about. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Yunheng Fan, Baoying Liu, Rongwei Gao, Junliang Liu
China

Urbanization is an important symbol of a country’s transition from a backward agricultural society to modernization, and China is undergoing an important transformation of urbanization. Migrant workers, a discriminatory and self-contradictory title, deeply reflect their status of “marginal people,” the main force of urban construction in China. They work in cities but do not have urban hukou, or household registration, and do not enjoy social security. They make great contributions to the city, they yearn for the city, but are not accepted by the city and are free from mainstream society.

The migrant worker community gathers these workers (often called “drifters”) together and the collective living allows them to gradually blend into the society. At the same time, the Urban Condenser serves as a cohesive device for the city, allowing urban residents and migrant workers to intermingle. With community, city, migrant workers, residents, and other dimensions of identity as the object, and with lifestyle, tourism, community mechanism, and other connections within the community as the link, the Urban Condenser builds a “super community” to stimulate social development. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Wang Changsi, Guo Fang, SiYuan Zhang
China

With the continuous expansion of the city scale and the continuous increase of the population, the “urban diseases” that are similar in the major cities have appeared. This design focuses on the problem of urban ecological distribution and utilization. The architect hopes to make the city natural through his own design. The organic combination of ecology and urban human ecology will form a self-sufficient urban ecological system that can make full use of clean natural energy to realize residential, office, commercial, and transportation activities.

The design is firstly designed as a single unit based on the needs of residents and is divided into two main functional systems: commercial and residential. The monomers in the two systems are designed separately, but they all follow the same rules: the spatial arrangement of the monomers is carried out through a parametric program, and all the monomers will be logically searched for their 3D spatial positions: 1. The secondary monomers are directed to Higher-level monomers that are close together, 2. The same monomers keep a sufficient distance, 3. There is a minimum distance between different monomers. Through these three logical building units, it will find its own reasonable position in the space. When the two systems are stabilized, structural reorganization is carried out to form a new complete system. Read the rest of this entry »