Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition
Abolfazl Malaijerdi
Iran
Contemporary urbanization has reached a geometric and ecological breaking point. Cities expand horizontally in a pattern that resembles an infinite open line—consuming land, erasing rural identity, destroying biodiversity, and exhausting infrastructures far beyond their intended limits. This project proposes a radical, mathematically defined alternative: a circular megastructure that transforms uncontrolled sprawl into a self-regulating urban boundary, allowing nature, agriculture, and community to re-emerge within a protected central territory.
The proposal is set at the edge of Reyshahr, a region where the city grows aggressively toward remaining agricultural grounds and historical rural settlements. The aim is not to design a vertical object but to redefine the skyscraper as a territorial system—one that reorganizes land consumption, energy cycles, and human settlement patterns. Instead of extending outward, the city becomes a continuous ring that contains its own growth. The interior, once threatened by expansion, is reclaimed as a large-scale ecological reserve: forest, productive farmland, natural water systems, and restored wildlife.
The circular geometry is not symbolic. It originates from the principles of pure mathematics. In topology, a circle is a compact set—finite, closed, and self-containing—an exact opposite of a divergent line. In Euclidean geometry, the circle distributes distance uniformly, enabling equal access, symmetric organization, and coherent spatial hierarchy. In real analysis, the circle represents the elimination of infinity: the act of turning limitless extension into a closed, stable, regulated form. These mathematical characteristics become architectural logic: the circular skyscraper becomes a limit, a boundary that stops sprawl, and a framework that reconnects the fragmented systems of modern metropolitan life. Read the rest of this entry »
