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.
This project extracts triangles as design elements from African architecture and applies fractals to them. From a micro perspective, the architect uses triangles as spatial units, which are dynamically connected through mechanical interleaving. At the same time, this project uses 3 as a model to design 3 types of residential units, 3 types of public space units, and 3 types of agriculture to adapt to the needs of different residents and the planting conditions of different crops. At a macro level, after the monomers are aggregated, a folded adaptive site-aggregated agricultural community in the valley is generated to meet the survival needs of local people.
To solve the most fundamental problem of drought, this project also achieves a balance between man and nature through different ways of collecting water in different seasons. During the dry season, the mist-catching net in the building extracts and collects moisture from the air and stores it in water storage tanks. During the rainy season, the naturally formed setback structures between each unit play a role in collecting rainwater and providing natural irrigation. These two rainwater collection methods can be freely switched to achieve self-regulation to meet the functional needs of different seasons.
Africa is rich in mineral resources, of which the iron ore content reaches 11.2% of global reserves, ranking third in the world. Because the total span reaches 1000m, it is a long-span building, and the special overlapping method requires the building to be high-strength and light at the same time. Therefore, this project uses carbon fiber steel composite structure (CFRP) as the main structural material. This material has the characteristics of high strength (strength is 7-10 times that of steel), lightweight (the mass is 1/4 of steel), corrosion resistance, and low life cycle cost. In this project, rammed earth material with typical African characteristics was also used as the material to bear compressive stress.
The material combination of CFRP and rammed earth creates a contrast. This is also a new way of merging modernity and tradition.
