Editors’ Choice
2024 Skyscraper Competition

Jin Yurong, Li Yaning, Lei Yu, Zhao Jingjia, Shiliang Wang, Jiang An
China

With urban density increasing and traffic pressure growing, viaducts have become a fast and efficient mode of transport in many cities, but their construction has created lost spaces under bridges, which inconvenience grassroots and damage urban texture, coherence and wholeness. These spaces often cause people to use more time-consuming travel means, increasing travel time and costs, and crime rates, impacting physical and mental health. Some cities install facilities like car parks and shops but cannot effectively utilize these spaces due to lack of planning. How to efficiently utilize these lost spaces is a key issue to address. Additionally, effective management and utilization of these spaces can also improve the quality of urban life.

Under the trend of high-density urban sprawl, viaducts have gradually become a product of the era of high-speed urbanization, and in the rapid expansion of urban sprawl, the space under the bridges is often neglected, making these spaces defined as “lost spaces” because they are neglected, abandoned or considered as marginalized spaces that are not suitable for living. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2024 Skyscraper Competition

Cheng Qian, Zitong Song, Yingjiao Zheng, Le Bai, Jixi Hou
China

Based on the impact of ocean currents on Marine life, the site was chosen for the construction in the Sea of Japan on the western coast of the Pacific Ocean. Designed a three-dimensional farm and seawater purification building for a site near the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where the Warm Japanese Current and the Kuril Current meet. The Marine life in the region is rich and diverse, which is conducive to the cultivation symbiosis.

Japan began discharging treated Fukushima nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean on August 24, 2023. The total amount of nuclear waste water is more than 1 million tons, and the nuclear polluted water directly leaks into the ocean and rivers, which will cause serious Marine pollution. Because the soil naturally absorbs the chemical elements in the nuclear sewage, it also causes pollution to the cultivated soil. Therefore, based on the common impact of nuclear sewage on the ocean and cultivated soil, we design the complex building of cultivation and cultivation by using the aquaponics tower. In addition to the purification of the polluted water body, it supports the growth of the top plants, and uses the water circulation system to solve the dual problems caused by nuclear pollution on the sea and land.

In the concept generation, starting from the unique shape of coral, the fractal is spread from the center point, and the coral structure is generated from the three-dimensional Angle. With coral as the positive form, the space in the cube is the negative space, and then slice, pick the usable space, form a rich split-level and hole space, on the basis of further formation of different partitions according to functional requirements.

The water is a three-dimensional farm system, and the architectural form comes from Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2024 Skyscraper Competition

Taoning Wen, Jaoning Zhang, Yuchen Zhang
China

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but humans cannot live in the cradle forever. The Earth’s ecosystem is just a speck in the vast ocean of the universe, small and fragile. Global climate change, rising sea levels, widespread infectious diseases, and even nuclear war… These issues have become the Sword of Damocles hanging over humanity’s head. Some people are looking to the universe: enabling humans to fly out of Earth in large numbers, move to other planets, and become an interstellar civilization, thereby greatly strengthening their resistance to environmental changes.

With the development of aviation technology in recent years, reusable rockets have become a hot topic. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 completed its first recovery on December 21, 2015, marking the transition of reusable rockets from theory to reality. Its emergence and maturity have greatly reduced the cost of rocket launches, making it possible to launch rockets on a large scale. Large-scale reusable rockets, represented by Starship, are undoubtedly the best choice for humans to leave Earth in large numbers under current technology. It can be foreseen that in the near future, commercial spaceflight and even space migration will form a certain scale based on reusable rockets.

However, the increasingly frequent rocket launches also cause huge environmental damage. According to a new study published by NOAA in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, if the number of rocket launches using hydrocarbon fuels increases by 10 times, it will damage the ozone layer and even change atmospheric circulation patterns. Pollution emissions during rocket launches and entry into the stratosphere are even more severe. At a time when humans cannot completely separate from the Earth’s environment, it is still necessary to find a suitable balance between protecting the Earth’s environment and exploring space. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2024 Skyscraper Competition

Lisa Suen, Youda Li, Yunxiao Ju, Linxin Wu, Ziyi Wang
China, Sweden

The Horn of Africa is facing a severe food crisis, and in 2023, the Horn of Africa experienced six consecutive rainy seasons without rainfall, resulting in a massive reduction in crop yields and is experiencing the worst drought since 1981, resulting in more than 1,900,000 people have been displaced and 13 million are facing severe hunger, sounding the “hunger alarm”.

This project is located in Oromia, Ethiopia. Because this is the central location of the Horn of Africa, it is convenient for external food aid. Moreover, this place has a plateau mountain climate, with a rainy season of 6 months and a dry season of 6 months a year, which provides conditions for water extraction and agricultural cultivation.
In addition, Ethiopia has a special geological feature called the African Rift Valley. The Great Rift Valley is about 700m wide, 500m deep, and thousands of meters long. The project was sited in the Great Rift Valley because the ground is cracked during the dry season. Only the windy and foggy conditions in the Rift Valley offer the possibility of extracting moisture during the dry season.
The project aims to create a composite Agricultural Community in Great Rift Valley, that integrates living, food planting, water storage, and shared space to solve the local food crisis. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Kim Min Sung, Kim Jun Ryeun, Park Do Hyun
South Korea

People rush to London. To accommodate everyone that has gushed into already saturated London, it modified its established density system. This naturally leads to an increase of floor space index and a redevelopment plan starting with old urban center that has lost its function.
Modern buildings are too easily demolished. Numerous buildings are forgotten in the name of development or redevelopment to fulfill the city’s density – whilst the cost, time and effort that are required to build a structure is neglected. The increase of urban density has been continuing for more than 300 years since the industrialization. Cities all over the world are trapped in this flow, continuously being smaller and higher. Major cities such as New York, London and Beijing has reached floor space ratio of 3300% today but sykscraper higher than existing buildings go up. Modern architecture has fallen into this viscious cycle of requidation and construction. At this point, we question ourselves. Is a building simply a vessel for accomodation? Should the memories and traces of people’s lives be rubbed off onto a flooding crowd? What will be the way to preserve various values as long as the building’s own lifespan while it exists in the same timeline as people? This will be a story about an architecture that ages with people’s memory – an architecture that freed itself from city’s hypertrophy and people’s desire system, an architecture that lasts for more than a century without being demolished with increasing population and rising buildings. Read the rest of this entry »