SOFTlab’s latest installation, CHROMAesthesiae, arrives at Devotion just in time for spring. CHROMAesthesiae is a flourishing landscape of color, blooming across the ceiling in high contrast-gradated clusters. This installation is an investigation on the spatial and chromatic perception of space. SOFTlab uses modularity as a core modality in order to generate complexity from repetitive form, allowing for rapid expansion or contraction of every piece created. With the motto, “everything changes,” the ability to adapt and grow conceptually underpins their entire body of work. This customizable installation is made of discrete, laser cut paper structures held together with binder clips: everyday objects are repurposed and precisely recombined. Forms evolve and shift color throughout the exhibition.

SOFTlab is a design studio based in New York City. The studio was created by Jose Gonzalez and Michael Szivos shortly after receiving graduate degrees in architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. The studio has since been involved in the design and production of projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture, to interactive design, to large-scale digital video installations. As the studio adjusted to a wide range of projects, it began to focus less on medium and style and more on ideas.

SOFTlab has produced a wide range of design projects and collaborated with various artists, designers, publications and institutions including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Times, eVolo Magazine, Surface Magazine, Columbia University and Pratt Institute. The studio has also exhibited work in galleries throughout New York City.

Opening: 7 p.m., Friday, March 19th, 2010 Until April 5th, 2010
Location: Devotion Gallery - 54 Maujer St, Brooklyn, NY, 11206

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

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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. 

Technologies
I have considered that energy will be created in three ways simultaneously. The first is energy of underground accumulated gas tanks. The scheme is a simple one, the pillars go through ground level and they are placed bear on the underground concrete parking box (in this case it works as a balance unit). The parking box is situated on the system of underground gas tanks (gas is made from rotting waste products got from the building vital functions). All waste products collect in one place, then the waste is decayed by special bacteria colonies. So we have two advantages as the result of this approach: the first is the skyscraper stands on the gas pillow isolated from ground ripple. The second advantage is the gas created in the gas tanks using as energy supply source. The second energy source is the wind. The building itself makes wind streams move in certain direction. The building bottom reminds a wing. Especially the chosen region is very windy. Furthermore, the systems` interaction can be increased placing heat-conducting paths out of gas tanks. This way we make wind to blow faster and take away superfluous warmth out of the gas tanks. This way the building itself turns air flows to the wind turbines.  The wind turbines are always working this way. The third way of creating energy is in using of the constructions ripple when the special devices that morph ripple into electro energy were put in the parts of the building where rippling is stronger.

There is a distinctive part of the project. It may reduce energy consumption by unusual way of using solar energy. The proposal is to use solar energy as rain water is collected: numerous quantities of lenses are used as devices for light gathering. Then the collected light rays lead to users via glass optical fiber. We can deliver sun rays into the centre of the building where is no way of natural lightning otherwise.

The other one feature of the project is the building`s ventilation. All the winds blowing through the building are collected in a single duct. All the building spaces are ventilated with this duct: need of air conditioning falls off. A dweller just should open ventilation gateway if he feels warm, if he feels cold he should push the bottom to switch on the heating got from the methane pillow. 

We know how constructions of buildings became aesthetic (Eiffel tower is the perfect example of this process). The same way we can make social part of architecture become aesthetic with great ecological efficiency. The large public space on the top of the SkyTable and the wind turbines embedded into the construction are the examples of this approach, this way they become the essential part of the building, they carry not only functional part of the design but they become the aesthetic part. This way the meaning of social relation should change, the meaning of ecology should change.

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.

Among the rewarded proposals the “Future Metropolis of the Strait ” by Alberto and Giuseppe Samonà considers the area of the Strait as a single physical and geographical entity, proposing a foundational city who settled on both the shores of Sicily and Calabria. The design of the skyscraper begins with this hypothesis, and redesigning the bridge, it plans to turn this place of passage into a place to live. The mirror sea between the continental Italy and Sicily has been experienced in the past as a public space, such as “a square” between the two sides; currently the Strait corresponds to a virtual border between North and South, East and  West and it is a many routes crossroad. Silhouetted against the landscape in a totemic and enigmatic way, the skyscraper, with its 800 m of height, is measured by the geographical scale of the Strait and it becomes a vertical city  you can reach by bridge or by boat. The town and the infrastructures live symbiotically.

The city has an architectural language that can be compared with that of the major road works rather than with the scale of the settlement. Everything is simultaneously built without any stratification. The residential spaces choose to be anonymous on the outside and recognizable only by those who access it from the inside through the complex system of connection.

The building is configured as a set of shares held by a modular three-dimensional grid that rises from a hollow platform placed below the sea level. This space has been designed as a hypostyle room marked by pillars that measure the size, and populated by some objects intended to research activities related to the sea. The volumes that are articulated in various ways within the structural grid, admit the required functions in order to make autonomous the city, residences, public spaces, services and trade, and among  them some amorphous bodies, some stones set in the modular space, which  accommodate  culture and entertainment spaces, become evident. At the share of the bridge (60 meters from sea level), the vertical city intercepts the road and rail, with a large parking area and storage of goods spaces. Bridge and city are energy self-sufficient, each external wall facing south has photovoltaic panels, but in particular the marine currents of the Strait are exploited. The peculiar conformation of the places and the different physical properties of the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea and Ionian Sea determine the ideal conditions for a high energy performance by including a series of turbines anchored to the bottom and the platform of the skyscraper.

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.

With the arrangement of the local circulation, connecting the other facilities at the other sides of the confluence, — a public green space and a sport center,  at this moment, the skyscraper become a landmark building surrounded by the public facilities , gathering all the locale residents .

We believe that a skyscraper can be a contemporary answer to a historical city context, it can not only well intergrade in the existing urban tissue but also emphasize the rhythm of the historical urban structure.

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.

Metropolitan Life Accumulation: Collective Zenga
The stacking of the blocks of Zenga holds great potential for the strategy of void composition. From the juxtaposition of the blocks, various types of structures can be generated, such as cantilevered terraces, subtractive balconies or bridges, etc. These combinations of clusters provide everyday spaces for people to live, work, and interact in, giving the tenants of the skyscraper an alternative of metropolitan life in a vertical sense.

This skyscraper is consisted of four main programs; residential, commercial, office, and botanical garden. The function of the botanical garden is to improve the conditions of the remaining programs. The tenants will be enhanced in quality of life with the experience of adjacency of the botanical garden. Maximized terrace space will be generated in the accumulation of blocks, each benefiting from the garden in air quality and enrichment of the metropolitan life. 

Program Distribution / Unit Aggregation
The combination methodology differs in mainly three ways; maximizing the terrace garden, connection by bridge, connection by escalator. The resulting elements surround the atrium which is connected vertically, integrating the interactions in three or four floors at a time.

Continuous Atrium: Metropolitan Condenser
Various programs such as retail stores, auditoriums, residences, offices, etc. entangles, creating congestion which reinforces the metropolitan life. The formerly mentioned aggregation devices well organize the vertical and horizontal access. Circulation with maximized connection boosts interaction between the units in the skyscraper.  Attractive cantilever units reminiscent of the Laputa – floating island provides a spectacular vertical view.

Botanical Garden: Lungs for Natural Ventilation
 There are three separated major ventilation zones within the whole skyscraper. The contaminated air from metropolis enters the building via the botanical gardens, functioning as the natural filters of the architectural organism.

Incision Area: Observation of the Metropolitan panorama
To emphasize the rhythmical sensation in the elevation, two incisions are made, dividing the envelope into three parts. Each incision is consisted of spaces with minimum columns and maximized free space and viewing.

 Operable Window System
Utilizing the wheel system instead of the electrical system, ventilation can be actively carried out in each part of the building, providing flexibility of partial ventilation.