Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Walter R. Hughes
United States

We are faced with a need to implement adequate strategies along the architectural-technological process that include precepts of sustainability to reverse damages infringed upon the environment. In addition to energy performance, the reduction of energy requirements and the introduction of renewable energy, it’s extremely important to reach a zero-energy level.

This proposal is located within a strategic area of the City of Chicago, the birthplace of skyscrapers. At the entrance of the Chicago River and at the head of the Outer Driver Bridge, three mixed-use glass towers, a vertical village of sorts, face Lake Michigan and offer outstanding downtown views. They integrate into the current skyline linking itself to a continuous linear park along Chicago’s waterfront. A pedestrian-friendly promenade at its base with shops, retail, and marina play into Chicago’s dynamic downtown. Its main components are a hotel, office space and residential units served by a multimodal transportation system anchored by a futuristic landing port for autonomous electric flying vehicles, Evtols, which will serve the project and areas nearby. This skyport can handle over 150 landings and take-offs per hour. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Jitendra Shrawan Farkade
India

Flux Haus is a parasitic housing scheme, that would engulf five towers in Hong Kong with single-person pods. The grid structure covered in moving single-occupancy pods is designed to be a “more dignified” alternative to cage homes – tiny dwellings enclosed by a gridded metal walls and large enough for only one bunk bed. It would be built on another building that would contain support facilities, in this case, a housing complex in the Sham Shui Po district in Hong Kong. Given current socio-economic conditions and how they spill into Hong Kong’s housing disparity, it offers a futuristic response to inadequate and undignified living conditions.

The proposal is based in Sham Shui Po, a district in Hong Kong with a high cost of living that forces locals to settle in substandard dwellings such as cage houses. A look into Hong Kong’s cage homes gives us a glimpse of how bad the problem of land scarcity is already. Hong Kong has been ranked the least affordable city nine years in a row.

This project is an attempt to use AI and technology to solve the problem of space scarcity. This combination of intelligent machines and humans is an adaptive and evolutionary way of living. As people change, so do their houses. The house understands the inhabitant and provides for their needs. So you won’t own a specific pod. You can board any pod and that pod will adapt according to your needs.

Each pod would be suspended from the grid that would encompass the five towers in the Green Harbour Tower complex. This structure is envisaged as a grid of metal rails. As part of the proposal, the existing building will be adapted to contain all the communal spaces, including bathrooms and kitchens. The pods will then be programmed to take occupants to these spaces when required. Robotic arms would allow for a self-constructing system through an ever-growing rail system that adapts to the population of the housing complex. As a result, the grid structure would autonomously expand over time. Along with this, Flux House’s AI system would also determine the movements of the pods, finding free spaces to dock them and arrange the pods to create communal spaces. This system would create an ever-changing environment adapting to varying conditions and requirements.  Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Anjan Mondal, Chaitanya Goyal, Chinmay Chowdhary, Dewesh Agrawal, Kartik Misra
India

‘All war is a symptom of the failure of man as a thinking animal.’

The Anthropocene has witnessed prolonged periods marred with plagues and calamities. But none has been of the magnitude caused by expansionist conflicts, and identity politics.

The turmoil caused by wars is unparalleled. Millions have lost their lives and millions have been forced to migrate and dwell in disarray. The world now possesses enough firepower to annihilate itself.

Upcycling fire
The proposal envisions a world order that is free from armed conflicts and the fear of the tendency to self-annihilate itself. It calls for complete demilitarization and destruction of military equipment throughout the world, with the subsequent upcycling of embodied materials and energy in the form of the peace-scraper. Major constituents such as steel and aluminum would be used to form the structure and the living pods. The weapons-grade nuclear material will be the source of clean nuclear energy.

Peace-scraper
The peace-scraper is envisaged as a vertical mixed-use development in regions most affected by wars. The community of the state-less migrants, torn apart by the exploits of wars, will populate the tower. It will stand as the emancipator of millions, created, ironically, from the very means that orphaned them of their land. The program includes a nuclear reactor to cater to the energy needs, skill development center, school, and higher education facilities and markets. The ground will be developed for sports activities. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Arnold Siregar, Patar Aprianus
Singapore

Background
Papua is the largest province of Indonesia and located in the west part of the island of Papua. Its great natural beauty and resources have provided a living for a population of more than 1 million people. The amount of tribe in Papua is more than a thousand tribe which give its complexity of living in its natural habitat. To this day, most of this tribe is still living in primitive life with no touch of modernization. Poverty, health, and education issues have been the main issues over the years.

Main Idea
The idea of Jungle Fair-Scraper is a springboard for a bright future in Papua as this tower can link each district and as a landmark of their location who stay in the midst of the jungle with difficult access due to an extreme topography and minimum infrastructure to connect one to another district around. Jungle Fair Skyscrapper as a torch of new hope for young Papuan in the future without even forcing someone away from their lovely hometown. The tower provides education facilities, health care, and government services. Jungle Fair Skyscrapper is a “SQUARE” for the neighborhood. Also, the skyscraper idea is so relevant for the extreme nature of Papua as it’s surely can reduce the carbon footprint of the development in this scenic place.

Inspired by the local traditional houses, Rumah Honai and Rumah Pohon (also known as Rumah Tinggi), the building is a hybrid concept of both local architectures. The vertical accents on the wall of this both traditional building also shown again on the exterior of the building. We decide to adopt the idea of Honai and Rumah Pohon and mix them together to create a new face of local architecture that can represent Papua from all cultures and backgrounds. Read the rest of this entry »

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Skyscraper Competition. The Jury selected 3 winners and 22 honorable mentions from 473 projects received. The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas that through the novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The FIRST PLACE was awarded to EPIDEMIC BABEL designed by D Lee, Gavin Shen, Weiyuan Xu, and Xinhao Yuan from China.  The project envisions a rapid-deployment healthcare skyscraper for epidemic outbreaks. The building consists of a steel frame in which pre-fabricated programmatic boxes would plug-in according to specific demands.

The recipients of the SECOND PLACE are Yutian Tang and Yuntao Xu from The United States for the project EGALITARIAN NATURE. The proposal imagines a man-made vertical park for recreational activities within high-density urban areas accessible to all its inhabitants.

COASTAL BREAKWATER COMMUNITY designed by Charles Tzu Wei Chiang and Alejandro Moreno Guerrero from Taiwan received the THIRD PLACE. The project envisions a vertical housing community for fishermen in St. Louis, Senegal where rising sea levels have forced the inhabitants to move inland. The proposal is inspired by the traditional wooden architecture- a system of pillars, arches, and tensile structures.

The Honorable Mentions include a skyscraper for terraforming the permafrost, a proposal for repurposing decommissioned airplanes, a vertical cyber-mall, a water-scraper, and a reforestation skyscraper among other innovative projects.

The Jury was formed by Berrin Chatzi Chousein [Editor-in-Chief, World Architecture Community], Alper Derinboğaz [Founder, Salon Architects], Jürgen H. Mayer [Founder, J. MAYER H. and Partner, Architekten mbB], Manuel Navarro Zornoza [Principal, Latitude Architectural Group], Michael Neumann [Principal, Synn Architects], Ryuichi Sasaki [Founder, Sasaki Architecture], and Lu Yun [Founder, MUDA Architects].

First Place
2020 Skyscraper Competition

D Lee, Gavin Shen, Weiyuan Xu, Xinhao Yuan
China

The Epidemic Babel is a rapid-deployment health care skyscraper designed as a response to the current Coronavirus pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China. The project takes into consideration that an epidemic outbreak is usually fast, leaving no time for governments and policymakers to react. Under these harsh circumstances, a weak healthcare infrastructure will soon be torn apart turning the epidemic into a deadly catastrophe.

The Epidemic Babel features two very important advantages: simple construction and rapid response. The entire building consists of a steel frame with several functional boxes with a very small footprint. The building pattern is simple enough that any qualified construction team can have it ready in five days. Once the steel frame is erected, the healthcare team will choose the appropriate functional boxes to be attached to the steel frame. This building pattern allows the skyscraper to respond to the outbreak in a very short time and relieve the burden of the existing health care infrastructure. All the programmatic boxes are pre-manufactured in factories and need no extra time for construction. The lightness of the frame and boxes also makes it easy to transport to remote locations. Compared to the temporal hospitals currently built in China, the Epidemic Babel is faster to construct and potentially less expensive. Read the rest of this entry »

Second Place
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yutian Tang, Yuntao Xu
United States

The Egalitarian Nature skyscraper imagines a new building typology driven by the human urge for nature instead of capital. It is a new kind of infrastructure conceived to serve the whole society. The traditional skyscraper is reimagined as a mountain range that provides a new way to experience nature within an urban environment. A zigzag-climbing path is developed along with abstract spaces that encourage an unexpected engagement between people and nature. Accessing the tower is not decided by capital but individual physical strength. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Charles Tzu Wei Chiang, Alejandro Moreno Guerrero
Taiwan

St. Louis, Senegal, located in the northwest part of the country, near the mouth of The Senegal River, has been home to fishermen for generations. It is a hostile territory where there are constant confrontations with the neighboring countries regarding the established fishing boundaries and territories. In addition to the political and social problems, the region is affected by the rising sea level. Such natural phenomenon has forced the community to move inland, away from the shore.

This proposal is based on traditional pillar structures, which are used to prevent erosion. These structures will serve as a foundation for the new vertical housing units. The project is also inspired by Senegal’s traditional wooden architecture that uses a complex arch system with tensile structures.  The system allows a high degree of adaptability and extendibility to create a new community by the sea challenging the rising sea level. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Xuejun Bai, Chucheng Pang, Lei Zhai, Yuyang Sun, Dianao Liu
China

With the accelerating process of urbanization, people’s demand for energy is increasing day by day. The existing oil, coal, and other energy can only be used for about 50 years, and their combustion will bring serious air pollution problems, such as urban haze, so the discovery and exploitation of new energy is imminent. Recently, more and more countries have found new clean energy combustible ice in the deep sea. Its reserves can be used by human beings for 1000 years, and it can only be converted into water and methane, so the exploitation of combustible ice is very valuable.

In addition, the problem of marine garbage is becoming more and more serious. It not only causes the damage to the marine landscape but also brings great harm to marine animals. Among them, most of the marine garbage is plastic garbage. Because of its structural characteristics, it will not be easily corroded by the seawater. Therefore, we come up with the idea of using local materials, turning plastic waste into 3d-printed materials, as our own building materials, and filling cracks in the seabed caused by combustible ice mining to prevent secondary disasters. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Ngo Thanh Ha Tien, Dao Duy Tung
France

According to the report of the Swedish Global Challenges Foundation in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, there’s a 5 percent chance that in the next 100 years, humans will be wiped out by a global pandemic or a nuclear war. A century ago, a strain of pandemic flu killed up to 100 million people—5 percent of the world’s population. In 2013, a new mystery illness swept the west coast of North America, causing starfish to disintegrate. In 2015, a big-nosed Asian antelope known as the saiga lost two-thirds of its population—some 200,000 individuals—to what now looks to be a bacterial infection. Faced the risk of Biological warfare (BW)—also known as germ warfare—which is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war; and the evolution of unidentified influenza, are we human beings on our way to meet the end of the world? Read the rest of this entry »