Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Maurizio Pino, Filomena Francesca Pastore
Italy

One of the most discussed topics in Italian politics is the construction of a bridge over the Strait of Messina which will link Sicily to the main land. The shorter distance between the cities of Messina  and Reggio Calabria is 3,150 meters and the average sea depth is between 80 and 120 meters. In 1968 the Italian Road and Motorway Network held a competition to design this bridge and the winning project “Future Metropolis of the Strait” by Alberto and Giuseppe Samoná considered both areas a single entity and proposed one city on both shores.

The main idea of our project is to further develop their concept and design this bridge as a skyscraper and a place to live. The building is configured as a modular three-dimensional grid that rises from a hollow platform below the sea level. The volumes are articulated according to different functions such as residences, public spaces, and cultural and entertainment areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Jiang Yuan, Xu Yang
France

Vertical Confluence is a contemporary skyscraper that integrates to Paris’s historical urban fabric. The volume morphs according to its program and relationship with the existing urban spaces and landscape. The lower volume contains an auditorium and an open-air theatre facing the Seine River. In the middle there is a public library with views toward Paris’s biggest green space known as “The Bois de Vincennes”. In the upper levels, facing the city’s skyline, there is a museum, a restaurant, and a café. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Dae-ho Lee, Byung-hwa Kim
South Korea

Cities like Dubai and Seoul are developing hundreds of extravagant skyscrapers as way to express their economic prosperity and geopolitical power. Architecture has been transformed into a marketing tool for individuals, corporations, and countries in which, unfortunately, there is a lack of responsibility towards the existing urban fabric and the environment.

This proposal departs from formalism and focuses on the interaction between programs and the transformation of the building volume according to its relationship with the inhabitants, the city, and the landscape. The structure consists of three main building blocks for housing, offices, and gardens. There is a set of rules to plug each block and optimize the space while creating a novel program distribution. The result is a porous tower with gardens and terraces distributed throughout the entire building. An environmentaly responsible cladding is equipped with photovoltaic panels and manual windows. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

ATELIER ZÜNDEL ET CRISTEA
Gregoire Zündel, Irina Cristea, Nicolas Souchko, Mario Russo 
France

During the last couple of decades, Paris, like any other major city has exponentially grown. Nowadays it requires 70,000 new homes per year; a situation that has created a lot of controversy as urban planners propose skyscrapers and Parisians drastically refuse to change their beloved city. Paris is a city of low buildings that recognizes street life and human scale as one of its most important aspects. The few skyscrapers located in La Defénse have been criticized and almost no one believes that skyscrapers could be the solution to their housing problem.

This project proposes a possible solution by creating a city-like skyscraper that takes Paris’s street life to the sky. The volume of the entire building is fragmented by a spatial ribbon that begins at street level and moves upward to create community areas, restaurants, auditoriums, parks, and cultural spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Muchan Park, Luc Wilson
United Sates

Beyond Manhattanism
The New York design and development community arguably has been the leading international nexus for innovation in skyscraper design over the past 150 years. Roughly every other generation, in interaction with changing technology, design theory and zoning codes, it has innovated a new building type. We leverage existing NYC zoning, and rearrange the traditional elements of the city to produce a new skyscraper: the Elevated Street and Plaza Skyscraper.

Call and Response Cycles
Innovation in skyscrapper design proceeds through a call and response dialogue between zoning and building type. First, an existing building type is called into question by technological change, or health and safety concerns. As part of the public discourse around these issues, architects begin to reform the existing building type, eventually developing a new “better” building type. This discourse (including design experenentation) leads to the revision of building and zoning regulations. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Viktor Ramos, Richie Gelles
United States

The ubiquity of the high density residential podium city typology throughout Hong Kong has made it one of the densest cities in the world.  The typical podium city consists of a huge mega-block shopping mall (in plinth form) with 8 to 16 high-rise residential towers sitting on top.  Upscale podium cities have resort like amenities on the surface of the plinth such as spas, tennis courts, and giant swimming pools.   These amenities, while a primary selling point, are in fact rarely used by the residents, particularly in comparison to public amenities located in the rest of the city.  The overwhelming genericness of the actual residential units themselves has caused developers to advertise the buildings as a chic lifestyle choice rather than focus on the details of the actual living space.  The podium cities’ relentless high density efficiency has destroyed street life in the areas where they are located and eat up huge amounts of potential public space with their underutilized private amenities. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Mikhail Belyakov, Vyacheslav Borisenko, Pavel Pechurkin
Russia

Does a skyscraper have a soul? If it does than this is a soul given by humans. Taking away a material shell from a skyscraper we provide it with a possibility of transformation so it can get closer to a Plato’s idea of a skyscraper (At this point we need to insert a smiley). Still, seriously enough we do move from a totem to a pure spirit that keeps skies untouched and pure no matter how sexually unappealing it sounds. 

Though having had said that we have told only half of the story. The second half of the story is connected with a crispy fresh history of Saint-Petersburg, where a fight with the Okhta Centre skyscraper that ruins the historical cities’ skyline has become a real and unique example of citizenship and a symbol of human spirit prevailing over the power of money. We want a different “non-material” skyscraper to emerge every night on the spot of the Okhta Centre tower.

Imagine a skyscraper made of light, or more exactly, of laser rays and a net lifted by a zeppelin into a night sky. This is a skyscraper that becomes a skysaver. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Sergiy  Prokof`yev, Arsenii Kuznetsov, Oleksandr Garashchenko
Ukraine

Technocratic society of the 21st century establishes its own laws and rules for almost all spheres of life. Not an exclusion is its influence on architecture, especially in question of design of the most large-scale, significant and expensive projects, which are the skyscrapers. The look of these buildings is dictated by the latest technologies and achievements in materials science, implementation of the cutting-edge construction, energy saving, aerodynamic and ecological solutions. Often the shape of skyscrapers is conditional not on architect’s creative approach but on a calculation of optimal solution by technical software. The final result of building look depends on one specific team of designers and their preferences in style. It’s also worth mentioning that we can always see the result of the project before starting the construction, and after it’s over the building inevitably retains its invariable shape. Like each room is dead without people, similarly the skyscrapers, hiding their inner rooms behind the single facade, look lifeless. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Ryszard Rychlicki, Agnieszka Nowak
Poland

Capture the Rain Skyscraper is a building whose roof and external shell ,which consists systems of gutters, are aimed at capturing as much rainfall as possible to meet the daily needs of its inhabitants. Average daily consumption of water per person is 150 liters, out of which 85 liters may be replaced by rain water. Within the last thirty years water consumption has significantly increased. There are lots of factors that contribute to such an increase such as increasing number washing machines and dish washers, increasing popularity of garden showering devices and flushing toilets. A third of water being used in households in western countries is flushed in toilets. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Metamorphose
Axel Cailteux, Céline Hautfenne, Julie Neuwels, Delphine Termote
Belgium

Valdrade brings a new definition of a city dense space, based on 3 interdependent vectors: density, sustainability and diversity. We must consider the city as a true ecosystem, able to manage its self-sufficiency and its self-generation.Valdrade expands as an “upper city” above the existing “lower city” to enable a zero ground occupation and to compensate the deficiencies.

The lower city consumes whereas the upper city produces by the plug-in of self-sufficiency generators. So the entirety of the infrastructures, necessary to the city life, is replaced in the urban network. These infrastructures are currently off shored in suburban areas, participating to the urban sprawl and energetic expenditures. These plug-in create positive energy poles to compensate the current buildings over-consumption. They provide different ways of recycling, so that the whole cycle can slide back, in such a way that someone’s wastes become some other’s raw materials and sources of energy.
The self-sufficiency generators propose a photovoltaic skin and wind turbines for the electricity production, lagooning for the waste water purification and recycling area for the organic and paper waste recycling and production of recycled paper, compost and gas by methanization. Read the rest of this entry »