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

The Sky Table is a large horizontal building suspended above six blocks of an abandoned neighborhood of a generic city. Its primary structure is a steel mesh that peels into four colossal columns that connect to plazas and parks at street level. Due to its large scale and the variety of programs this proposal could be considered a city within a city where offices are located inside the pillars, housing is available in ten levels within the platform and recreational areas cover the entire roof level.

Many green technologies are integrated; a recycle plant and gas tank is located underground below the main columns. Solar panels are located on the roof level along with wind turbines which are also used below the steel mesh where the aerodynamic shape of the building will direct fast air currents. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Maurizio Pino, Filomena Francesca Pastore
Italy

One of the most discussed topics in Italian politics is the construction of a bridge over the Strait of Messina which will link Sicily to the main land. The shorter distance between the cities of Messina  and Reggio Calabria is 3,150 meters and the average sea depth is between 80 and 120 meters. In 1968 the Italian Road and Motorway Network held a competition to design this bridge and the winning project “Future Metropolis of the Strait” by Alberto and Giuseppe Samoná considered both areas a single entity and proposed one city on both shores.

The main idea of our project is to further develop their concept and design this bridge as a skyscraper and a place to live. The building is configured as a modular three-dimensional grid that rises from a hollow platform below the sea level. The volumes are articulated according to different functions such as residences, public spaces, and cultural and entertainment areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Jiang Yuan, Xu Yang
France

Vertical Confluence is a contemporary skyscraper that integrates to Paris’s historical urban fabric. The volume morphs according to its program and relationship with the existing urban spaces and landscape. The lower volume contains an auditorium and an open-air theatre facing the Seine River. In the middle there is a public library with views toward Paris’s biggest green space known as “The Bois de Vincennes”. In the upper levels, facing the city’s skyline, there is a museum, a restaurant, and a café. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Dae-ho Lee, Byung-hwa Kim
South Korea

Cities like Dubai and Seoul are developing hundreds of extravagant skyscrapers as way to express their economic prosperity and geopolitical power. Architecture has been transformed into a marketing tool for individuals, corporations, and countries in which, unfortunately, there is a lack of responsibility towards the existing urban fabric and the environment.

This proposal departs from formalism and focuses on the interaction between programs and the transformation of the building volume according to its relationship with the inhabitants, the city, and the landscape. The structure consists of three main building blocks for housing, offices, and gardens. There is a set of rules to plug each block and optimize the space while creating a novel program distribution. The result is a porous tower with gardens and terraces distributed throughout the entire building. An environmentaly responsible cladding is equipped with photovoltaic panels and manual windows. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

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

During the last couple of decades, Paris, like any other major city has exponentially grown. Nowadays it requires 70,000 new homes per year; a situation that has created a lot of controversy as urban planners propose skyscrapers and Parisians drastically refuse to change their beloved city. Paris is a city of low buildings that recognizes street life and human scale as one of its most important aspects. The few skyscrapers located in La Defénse have been criticized and almost no one believes that skyscrapers could be the solution to their housing problem.

This project proposes a possible solution by creating a city-like skyscraper that takes Paris’s street life to the sky. The volume of the entire building is fragmented by a spatial ribbon that begins at street level and moves upward to create community areas, restaurants, auditoriums, parks, and cultural spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Muchan Park, Luc Wilson
United Sates

Beyond Manhattanism
The New York design and development community arguably has been the leading international nexus for innovation in skyscraper design over the past 150 years. Roughly every other generation, in interaction with changing technology, design theory and zoning codes, it has innovated a new building type. We leverage existing NYC zoning, and rearrange the traditional elements of the city to produce a new skyscraper: the Elevated Street and Plaza Skyscraper.

Call and Response Cycles
Innovation in skyscrapper design proceeds through a call and response dialogue between zoning and building type. First, an existing building type is called into question by technological change, or health and safety concerns. As part of the public discourse around these issues, architects begin to reform the existing building type, eventually developing a new “better” building type. This discourse (including design experenentation) leads to the revision of building and zoning regulations. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Viktor Ramos, Richie Gelles
United States

The ubiquity of the high density residential podium city typology throughout Hong Kong has made it one of the densest cities in the world.  The typical podium city consists of a huge mega-block shopping mall (in plinth form) with 8 to 16 high-rise residential towers sitting on top.  Upscale podium cities have resort like amenities on the surface of the plinth such as spas, tennis courts, and giant swimming pools.   These amenities, while a primary selling point, are in fact rarely used by the residents, particularly in comparison to public amenities located in the rest of the city.  The overwhelming genericness of the actual residential units themselves has caused developers to advertise the buildings as a chic lifestyle choice rather than focus on the details of the actual living space.  The podium cities’ relentless high density efficiency has destroyed street life in the areas where they are located and eat up huge amounts of potential public space with their underutilized private amenities. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Mikhail Belyakov, Vyacheslav Borisenko, Pavel Pechurkin
Russia

Does a skyscraper have a soul? If it does than this is a soul given by humans. Taking away a material shell from a skyscraper we provide it with a possibility of transformation so it can get closer to a Plato’s idea of a skyscraper (At this point we need to insert a smiley). Still, seriously enough we do move from a totem to a pure spirit that keeps skies untouched and pure no matter how sexually unappealing it sounds. 

Though having had said that we have told only half of the story. The second half of the story is connected with a crispy fresh history of Saint-Petersburg, where a fight with the Okhta Centre skyscraper that ruins the historical cities’ skyline has become a real and unique example of citizenship and a symbol of human spirit prevailing over the power of money. We want a different “non-material” skyscraper to emerge every night on the spot of the Okhta Centre tower.

Imagine a skyscraper made of light, or more exactly, of laser rays and a net lifted by a zeppelin into a night sky. This is a skyscraper that becomes a skysaver. Read the rest of this entry »