Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Adam Nakagoshi, Thao Nguyen
United States

Elevated Connectivity is a high-rise proposal that creates a new urban grid above the city by connecting existing skyscrapers. This elevated horizontal platform would become a new type of public domain that will redefine the interaction between people and their city – allowing new program and architecture on the top levels of the existing structures. The entire city would have three main layers. The ground floor will remain public and mainly used for transportation. The middle layer will be a private one with residences and offices while the third one will be dedicated to leisure and entertainment activities. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Dalho Yang, Seungdon Jung
Republic of Korea

One of the most famous buildings in New York is the former New York Times headquarters known as One-Time-Square. The skyscraper opened in 1905 and has been through several renovations and transformations ever since. It is the place where New Yorkers and the world celebrate the New Year with the famous drop ball. Another interesting fact is that its façade is almost entirely covered by the most expensive billboards in the world which cost more than $10,000 per hour.

This proposal seeks to transform the infamous building into a vertical amusement park. The project explores the potential of using a roller coaster as means of transportation between the different programs. It is an exploration of transportation in three dimensions which has never been tested and tries to break the norm of using elevators and horizontal corridors. The park is divided in zones specifically catalogued with different colors with each zone composed of a series of modules attached to a primary steel exoskeleton. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Hyunbeom Cho, JinKyu Pak, HongSup Kim, Jiwon Kim
South Korea

The Korean de-militarized zone (DMZ) is a 2 kilometer area between North and South Korea established in 1950 as a buffer zone between the two nations to prevent further hostilities. After more than 60 years this area has become the habitat of hundreds of endangered species – a pristine habitat untouched by human beings.

The Barbe-wire Skyscraper is based on the idea of a unified Korea in the near future and the importance of preserving the untouched natural habitat of the DMZ. The idea is to create a series of skyscrapers with the existing 250 kilometers of barbed-wire as a landmark of the unified country. The structures are designed as museum and ecological reserve, where visitors will enjoy different sports facilities and outdoor recreational areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Milorad Vidojević, Jelena Pucarević, Milica Pihler
Serbia

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pile of plastic floating in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean. The San Francisco Chronicle claims that the patch now weights more than 3.5 million tons, 80% of which is plastic waste that reaches more than thirty meters in depth. This area of the Pacific Ocean is a relatively calm region that causes the accumulation of floating garbage in big piles. Its removal will cost billions of dollars and no country claims responsibility.

This proposal consists of a series of underwaterscrapers, floating islands that will be used to remove and recycle the garbage patch. These are self-sustained structures organized by function hierarchy with four communication cores that connect three main programs – collectors at the bottom, recycling plant in the middle levels, and housing and recreational levels atop. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Victor Kopieikin, Pavlo Zabotin
Ukraine

Mexico City is one of the major and more polluted metropolises in the world. With over 20 million inhabitants, the main problems are the lack of affordable housing, long commute distances, and no recreational areas. The Kinetic Skyscraper addresses these challenges in a unique and innovative way. The structure has three main programs with a geothermal plant at the base, housing and offices in the upper levels, and a solar plant powered by thousands of photovoltaic panels on the façade. The most interesting part of the proposal is the design of kinetic housing units attached to a main exoskeleton. These units resemble a flower and are able to open, close, and direct towards sunlight. The skyscraper also has recreational and working areas – it is a city within the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Mengni Zhang
United States

In December 2010, the Ukrainian government lifted the restriction on tourism in the zone around the Chernobyl power plant. Conceptually, this proposal deals with the reconstruction of a post apocalyptic environment. Since the accident in 1986 the site has been abandoned long enough for nature to take over, the absence of humans provides an opportunity for creating a utopian vision for a city. The proposed structure would engage the existing site and architecture as a new layer of landscape, a network of self-evolving skyscrapers that will address scientific, cultural, and historical concerns.

Due to the unpredictable distribution of fallout materials and possible radiation, the primary structure will be manufactured with light-weight fiber composite materials and fixed and transported onto the site by air. Secondary structures, such as highways and other programs, can be built above ground like cantilevered bridges. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Adrian Vincent Kumar, Yun Kong Sung
New Zealand

Air pollution is a major problem in the city of Guangzhou, China. The main contributor to the air quality is the outrageous number of industrial facilities within the metropolitan area.

The White Cloud Project is an air purification network of skyscrapers. These are inverted buildings that liberate the base for public use and create a cluster of structural branches with residences and offices on top – almost like a group of trees. The structure is covered by a fine membrane that cleans the air through an ingenious filtering process. The air particles are trapped by the cloth-like structure and washed away by a constant mist. At the same time the collected dust is transported through a secondary branching system to a brick factory on the bottom. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2011 Skyscraper Competition

Justin Oh
Canada

The final height of this skyscraper has not yet been decided, as perpetual development of the project has continued for more than twenty years. Its rich history can be witnessed and analyzed through the changes in the facade, the same way history can be seen in layers of stone or the rings of a tree. The architecture of the skyscraper changes as each firm contributes their own unique design proposals for the next addition to the tower’s elevation – mankind’s skyscraper project of the twenty-first century.

Hong Kong’s Kowloon side is Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, compressed and multiplied. Victoria Harbour has decreased to accommodate endless developments as the majority of the population live and work in skyscrapers. The principles of Coalesce are to discontinue Hong Kong’s public housing estate-style developments and remove existing estates in order to unite the parks on the Kowloon side. The equation of the project: recreational green space substitutes each estate razed, and with each estate razed, the equivalent amount or more leasable area is added to the central skyscraper. With an increase in green concentration at the heart of Kowloon, the district is expected to experience a drop in its uncomfortable temperatures and filter polluted air, while providing recreational space and facilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Zaha Hadid Architects announced the completion of the Guangzhou Opera House. The opening ceremony was held this weekend with representatives from various countries around the world. Like pebbles in a stream smoothed by erosion, the Guangzhou Opera House sits in perfect harmony with its riverside location. The Opera House is at the heart of Guangzhou’s cultural development. Its unique twin-boulder design enhances the city by opening it to the Pearl River, unifying the adjacent cultural buildings with the towers of international finance in Guangzhou’s Zhujiang new town. The 1,800-seat auditorium of the Opera House houses the very latest acoustic technology, and the smaller 400-seat multifunction hall is designed for performance art, opera and concerts in the round. Read the rest of this entry »

Boston’s TREEPODS INIATIVE proposes to embody, and artificially enhance, the most important biological characteristic of natural trees: the capacity to clean the air, taking the CO² and releasing O².

Boston’s TREEPODS INIATIVE is a sustainable project leaded by Influx_Studio and ShiftBoston. The aim ff this collaboration is to allow the achievement of Boston’s global goals in terms of carbon reduction programs in the short time, giving us enough time to make the change from the present fossil fuel economy into a new Zero carbon energy economy.

The proposal could be define as a CO2-scrubbing living machine. Treepods may well redesign in an urban radical new way our polluted urban environment, interacting with natural trees, and enhancing its carbon absorption capacity. In that way, those artificial trees don’t replace the natural ones, but they act like small urban “air cleaning infrastructures”. Advanced technologies are actually already developed that allow the capture of the atmospheric carbon dioxide from ambient air in an efficient, economic and sustainable way. Developed by Dr Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, this revolutionary process is based on the discovery of the ‘humidity swing,’ a technology that enables the energy-efficient capture of CO2 from air, allowing to close the carbon cycle and creating a valuable product for beneficial use. Read the rest of this entry »