Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Ben Danks, Mark Ferguson, Adam Blaney, Aaron Jones
United Kingdom

How do you evolve an education system that is failing its pupils? Cocoon proposes to start a teaching revolution through architecture. Over the last two hundred years the UK has relied upon the same Bismarckian methods, taught within the same untailored spaces, to educate pupils. This old fashioned structure has failed to keep in step with massive changes to modern lifestyles. The emergence of the digital world has led to a cultural reform, allowing access to types and quantities of information that were previously unattainable. Currently, schools fail to harness these immense resources, restricting their teaching to the educator, textbook model.

The emergent learning network proposes a revolution in teaching techniques, utilizing a system of self organized education, based on the theories of Sugata Mitra, Sir Ken Robinson and Konrad Waschsmann. The network proposes a future without teachers or traditional class rooms. The pupils are part of constantly morphing groups of four or five and are set tasks to research using any available resources. The internet is provided along with a ‘granny cloud’ and other digital media. Studies show that group access to resources encourages emergent learning between the participants, and improves the ability of the pupil to retain knowledge. Exam results improve along with far greater levels of participation. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Tatsuya Sakairi
United States

This project is a mixed-use building that consists of live, work, and play areas as continuous programs throughout the entire building. Located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn it relates to the mixed-use condition of the neighborhood with residential, industrial, and retail areas.

There are two main ideas that drive the project’s concept. The first one is the organization logic or aesthetic driver- an aggregation of different geometries that provide variation in space. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Geoffrey Braiman, David Beil
United States

We live in a stacked world. The unending array of floor slabs do very little to further the human condition beyond limited, linear, regular, and expected. The city of the future is a multivalent hybrid reliant on strong infrastructure. While the current street grid and utility infrastructure have facilitated changes for centuries, the limit to its effectiveness and expansion is tied directly to its horizontality. The most common solution to densification is to stack volumes, insert a circulation core, and then subdivide the resulting spaces. This approach repeats the ineptitude of the street grid by rotating its vector perpendicular and extruding the form. This affords little flexibility in the variety of spaces or in the ability for the resultant tower to grow and change over time. In order to adapt, we must look for alternative organizing strategies to accommodate our changing needs. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Ankita Dahiya, Dhruv Bahl, Mayank Ojha
India

1 The following key concepts, taking off from a conventional habitat, form the core of our design, along with justifying the manifestation of the adjective – vertical.

1.1 Multiplication of Urban Space: The vertical habitat is conceived, not as a sub-division of the Urban Floor with stacked plans of identical units, but instead as an extension of, or multiplication of the Urban Floor along its normal. This reifies the conventional ideology of a ‘core + lobby + unit + facade’ typology and incites us to design for ‘built areas’ and ‘open spaces’ within a vertically rising structure.

1.1.1 Built Areas: The elementary unit constitutes of a lot, instead of a built up fixed layout apartment, where depending upon the ownership, an individual, a cooperative or a developer can construct houses/offices/shops/institutes as per the regulatory zoning planned.

1.1.2 Open Spaces: The multiplied Urban Floor is utilized by creating vertical gardens, piazzas, congregational and communal spaces thus maximizing green areas, leisure and recreational prospects as well as facilitating interaction and healthy living.

1.2 Circulation Network: The circulation within the habitat is analogous to a typical urban transit system which evolves to a hierarchical network as well as allows for multiple choices based on priorities. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

HyeYun Oh, Yunwei Xu
New Zealand

It can be said that both architecture and urban design of the contemporary metropolises and suburbs are directly influenced by the reinvention of modes of movement such as lifts, subways, and automobiles.

As a result of such inter-twined development between the automobiles and modern urbanism, the world at large is undergoing what may be described as a ‘bifurcation’; experiencing concurrent population, technological and information shifts.

This point of instability due to energy crisis allows for the formation of a ‘new state of order’. The Auto-Hive Project is conceived as such a response.

Newmarket, is a primer retail district and arterial route of central Auckland, New Zealand which is threatened by rapid population shift and decades of unchecked suburban sprawl.

The concepts of connectedness and movement became a vital question during the design process, where densification is augmented by a system for increasing mobility; an evolution in the transportation network. As a result, Newmarket was re-envisioned as a sub-metropolis in a proposed post-cartographic information era within the design project, where physical location is negated in favor of connectedness in the new city-network. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

BIOMSgroup / Maria-Paz Gutierrez
United States

Buildings are currently the highest single contributors to anthropogenic climate change accruing to approximately 45% of the world’s current energy consumption. Projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimate that advancements in buildings’ energy efficiency could potentially reduce anticipated global carbon emissions up to 30% by 2030. Yet, emerging global economies are projected to increase exponentially energy, water consumption and toxic emissions due to the unforeseen density and scale of new constructions.

Next-generation building technologies thus bear undeniable responsibility to streamline accelerated innovation of building technologies to diminish the ever growing pressures on ecosystems. We anticipate that in this pursuit, architecture will shift into considering new models of energy self-generation and material degradability to further approximate autotrophic built environments designed to balance resources’ inputs and outputs.

This proposal addresses the opportunity of developing an internal (Part A) and external membrane system (Part B) that through live (algae/lichen) and synthetic matter integration can process matter, and contribute significantly to decrease energy consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Fillette Romaric, Chandrasegar Velmourougane
France

The densification of cities and exponential growth of its population has left very few areas for structures that do not contribute to its urban life and economy

Paris in particular, has very few land dedicated to cemeteries and every ten years the tombs are ‘recycled’ – this has led thousands of remains without a proper resting place.

The idea behind the vertical cemetery is to remember death as part of our humanity by creating a symbolic tower with a rightful place within the city that the deceased so much loved – the skyscraper will become a new landmark for the city where families could gather.

The center of the tower is occupied by a skylight, offering an opening to the sky that reflects light into a water pond at the bottom. Around the skylight, a spiral ramp offers a walkway along the graves and leads to the top with amazing views of Paris. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Tee Khay Mee
Malaysia

The Rescuer Skyscraper is an algae hydrogen-powered floating skyscraper proposal to be used as temporal shelter for disaster zones. It could also be used during the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the affected areas.

The project is based on the idea of producing bio-fuels through an ingenious algae farm that covers the top part of the structure. The algae will absorb CO2 as its main nutrient for photosynthesis and will produce hydrogen to be used in bioreactors.

The geometry of the project resembles a vertical blimp with an open structure where housing units could be located. Read the rest of this entry »

Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition

James Diewald
United States

Global financial turmoil is likely to push a growing class of wealthy elites towards tax shelter states. Monaco is foremost among these, currently commanding an average of fifty thousand euros per square meter for residential properties. The state itself is quite limited geographically and began constructing high-rise towers in the 1970s to accommodate growth. In the late 1980s, a ban on high rise construction was imposed, but was revoked in 2008 due to intense demand and the infeasibility of polder expansion. Located immediately adjacent to the harbor, the tower sits lightly on raised plinth, which calls to mind 17th century bastions and is sympathetic to the historic fortress nearby. Two formal axes lead to the building entrances, one by road and one by sea. The building skin lifts off the ground to reveal glazed lobby spaces beyond.

Geometry + Structure

The global geometry of the Formal Attire is defined by the transition from a 6-pointed Star, to a hexagon, to a triangle. Each shape has circumscribed radius of 24 meters. The height of the tower is 7 times the diameter. Novel construction technologies and structural evaluation techniques such as robotic formwork and advanced finite element analysis packages offer new formal possibilities with added efficiencies and spatial richness. Formal Attire proposes a primary structure of topological surfaces that continuously modulate the spatial qualities of the residences and other programs. The structure forms the demising walls for the residences, producing a stunning variety of unique living arrangements. By allowing the structural walls to cross the entire width of the building, an extremely stiff, yet visually lightweight and slender solution is possible. Read the rest of this entry »