Editors’ Choice
2023 Skyscraper Competition

Yang Zhao, Shi Qiu
United States

Traditional Asian Community has evolved for thousands of years with its own strong characteristics and deep meaning of social relationships that work for Asian people the best. As we all know, Asians like to live gregariously. One of the underlying reasons is that the early Asian food production were mainly through agriculture. And, agriculture needs to rely on collaboration, thus lead to group living. However, In the past two centuries, with the second and third industrial revolutions, industrialization has greatly affected the living patterns of Asians — small families live in segregated apartments, and family members also live in separate rooms. Over time, people would rather face their digital screens than talk to each other. As a result, traditional Asian residential communities stopped evolving and became history. We have to admit industrialization and technology are excellent strategies that solve the growing need for residences in modern cities, but it does not mean we need to abandon the meaningful heritage of social relationships and natural systems.

It’s time for us to rethink the wisdom of Asian dwellings, and integrate it with technology to serve the new generations. So, imagine in the future, we combine the best aspects of Asian traditional architectural principles, the industrial manufacturing and assembling process, together with digital technology and the informational advantages the future society would offer, what kind of future residential High-rises would look like and how can we solve the still growing need for living in the continuous urbanization? Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2023 Skyscraper Competition

Zhaoxu Huang
China

Desertification is a phenomenon that the dry land ecosystems is constantly degraded due to the influence of climate and human activities. With the continuous progress of global industrialization, surface vegetation has been continuously destroyed, and persistent desertification threatens the poorest population in the world and the prospect of poverty reduction. Therefore, combating desertification has become a century-long problem that puzzles mankind. With the increasing concern of the international community about desertification, more and more countries and regions are carrying out afforestation activities. However, due to the single species and sparse number of vegetation, it is impossible to form a stable ecosystem and the effect is insufficient.

Although the undeveloped desert area are full of dangers, it is difficult to serve as a basis for human beings to transform nature. However, the desert contains a lot of valuable energy, and rational use of the desert can greatly reduce global warming caused by carbon emissions. The desert is both a crisis and an opportunity! We obtained all kinds of environmental and meteorological data about desert areas around the world through literature retrieval. By comparing and analyzing the environmental indicators of different areas, and according to the climatic conditions needed for plant growth, the design site of the skyscraper in Gurbantunggut Desert was finally selected. The desert is located in the middle of Junggar basin in northern Xinjiang, with an annual precipitation of about 70 ~ 150 mm and a wide variety of vegetation, which is suitable as a test site for initial desert transformation. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2023 Skyscraper Competition

Runze Wu, Jingkun Sun, Jingyi Liang, Liying Yang, Yizhuo Dai, Pengyu Chen
China

Itaewon is a famous local business district and a bar street in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, South Korea, which is usually very popular on weekends. on the night of October 29, 2022，More than 150 people died in a mass stampede at Itaewon，Local media said it was the largest number of people killed in an accident in South Korea since the sinking of the passenger ship “Shiyue” in 2014.The night of the accident, Itaewon held a Halloween party, the number of people gathered nearby was approximately 100,000 people, the accident occurred in a long narrow ramp, and the injured were mostly young people. Among the people who died, except for a few in the front row who were trampled to death, more were crushed in the chest could not breathe, and eventually died of traumatic asphyxiation.

At the time of the accident, the whole alley was crowded with people, the part where the stampede occurred was a section approximately 5.7 meters long, and more than 300 people were packed in a space of approximately 18 square meters.The lack of response before the incident and the lack of effective limitations on the number of people, as well as the lack of guidance at the time of the incident, which led to the crowd getting together and not being able to find the direction of evacuation, are some of the important reasons for the stampede in Korea. Even though the subsequent Korean police and rescue forces arrived at the scene in large numbers after the stampede, the rescue forces were crowded at the periphery, because the huge crowd was difficult to evacuate quickly and could not implement effective rescue for the first time.For us, the most important thing is to learn from the mistakes and eliminate the hidden dangers. After all, urban governance is not just about how many high-rise buildings are built, but also about how to make people feel safer. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2023 Skyscraper Competition

Fan Yiming, Wang Yue, He Kai
China

The threat of desertification is a global problem, which is directly manifested by the loss of productive land, the movement of sand dunes and dust storms. According to the data of IPCC, desertification now covers 46.2% of the global geographical area. It can be seen from the geographical distribution map of dry land and the population diagram of dry areas that many regions and countries in the world are affected by drought. Desertification is no longer a simple ecological environment problem, but has evolved into an economic and social problem, which brings poverty and social instability to human beings.

The building is located on the Mesopotamian plain in present-day Iraq, an alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Western Asia. Thousands of years ago, the fertile soil created by the annual flooding of two rivers gave birth to one of humanity’s earliest civilizations, the Mesopotamian Civilization. However, with the historical changes, soil salinization and desertification, the once glorious Mesopotamian civilization was gradually buried by sand and dust. Over the past two decades, Iraq and many other regions in the Middle East have been threatened by desertification. According to the Iraq Desertification Commission, up to 90% of Iraq’s land area is threatened by desertification, and 45% of its agricultural land is at risk of drought and desertification. Loss of vegetation, overgrazing, wartime deforestation, improper irrigation practices and water scarcity are some of the main causes of desertification in Iraq. According to the above problems, we decided to construct a new skyscraper that can control desertification of the land, and solve the desertification problem more effectively by means of technology to make the sand soil. Read the rest of this entry »