Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition
Layton Reid
United Kingdom
Ethos
This project seeks to use the detritus and waste elements of production to create an attractor, both economic and social, a free territory for the dispossessed, offering accommodation, leisure, employment, and health.
Typology
The building takes the form of a series of ribbons rising from the landscape to a stoa above this augmented market of interchange, celebration and shared hope, self-administrated, a patria of the air.
Concept
The issue of inequality plagues the world, and refugees and migration receive little credit for their life-giving entrepreneurs, This project creates a vessel for an opportunity, a new territory forged from the industrialized world’s detritus, a land above borders which cleans and links the oceans, a new tech business-focussed Dubai-Vegas, where the ethos of the migrant can be celebrated, a yearning for freedom and a search for success.
New User
The removal of work possibilities from the migrant and casual worker, create a new economic opportunity, in a new destination venue, rising above the border as a magnet of reduced tax and social and commercial enterprise organization, Those returning will find a welcome in the plethora of opportunities in a city where energy and water are free commodities and those who come for its services will find an international economic alternative to their usual circumstances.
Demographic
If located along the varying terrain of the American Mexican border those described as illegals will preside over a new enterprise culture of services businesses and cultural enterprises. A magnet for business innovation and leisure, like a horizontal Dubai.
Successful nation-states are recognized for their policy of welcoming the world. Internationally organizations, benefit from the rich cultural and business links which open borders, deliver and range of individuals across the world, who wish to become part of the global family.
Materials
The materials are reconstituted plastic waste scoured from the surfaces of the oceans; these are then reformed to create pockets of fiber into which local material is forced, rather like a series of continuous gabion walls. ETFE is used to clad the reinforced structural grid skin.
Climatic conditions
Energy and Sustainability the turbines within the towers provide main power throughout driven by the regulated air movement, enhanced by the buildings form generation, whilst atmospheric ‘Tesla’ electricity generation energy collection, linking directly to the water vapor production and dust-filled climatic conditions offer a new technological approach to the use and production of power.
Construction
Using rapid prototyping techniques the zoned module strips which form the city elements join over time to create a continuous lines city, traversing a range of terrain, sometimes embedded and sometimes surface touching dependent on their performance requirement.
Landscape
The landscaped areas offer moments of respite in this linear metropolis, trees grow through the voids created in the structure, allowing light and ecosystems to proliferate, creating new atmospheric conditions.
Water
The project draws on the night atmospheric defense to create vertical dew harvesters and sub-level reservoirs, the building’s form generates its own ground force pressure forcing air up through the towers and across the landscapes.
