Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Kinchun Ma, Chiawei Liao
United States

Cities are aggressively expanding its size and population; Urban Swirl is a new design concept that re-thinks the relationship between skyscraper and its immediate urban context.

In metropolises like Tokyo and New York City, the shortage of land is the major reason for vertical developments, but skyscrapers are increasingly becoming isolated islands within the cities – disconnected from the horizontal plane.

Urban Swirl examines the opportunity to connect the vertical with the horizontal by building connections between towers, as well as connections between the towers and the ground plane.

The project is a ‘cluster’ of buildings composed of three major towers and connection spaces between them which provide a smooth transition between the vertical and the horizontal plane while creating a multi-layered experience of urban life.

Instead of traditional program organization, different programs are categorized and nest to each other throughout the whole site. Starting from the edge of the site, the program intensity gets stronger as the program swirls into the buildings. In general, the base is the least rotated part of each building. The base is more ‘loosen’, and the space is open up to accommodate public programs. In the upper floors, rotation becomes vigorous, space tightens, and partitions are formed along the rotation axis – spaces become more private and rooms for offices and residential are created. Therefore, the building with a more drastic rotation, the shortest one, would have more individual spaces, and will serve as hotel building while the least rotated one would serve as office building.