Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Paula Tomisaki
United States

Special Mention

The complexities and the dynamism of contemporary life cannot be cast into the simple platonic forms provided by the classical canon, nor does the modern style afford enough means of articulation. We have to deal with social diagrams that are more complex when compared with the social programs of the early modern period. Instead of forcing the program to fill spaces of a static typology, a revision and expansion of the skyscraper is considered. The project “Chimera” challenges typological classification. Chimera is a name borrowed from the hybrid mythological creature made of parts of multiple animals. The hybrid acknowledges and celebrates the heterogeneity and complexity of our world. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Nenand Basic, Keeyong Lee
Bosnia Hercegovina / South Korea

Special Mention

The project questions the possibility of coexistence between a high-rise building and a horizontal city. It is placed in a typical Western European city, characterized by high density of historic urban fabric, materialized in the historic Place des Vosges, in Paris, France. Any kind of intervention here seems impossible. Finding a way to integrate the high-rise building into this urban tissue, and at the same time provide it with minimum impact to the surroundings, while giving it maximum surface / program capability, is the main objective. We wanted to avoid the usual way of imagining skyscrapers, the one that imposes its own, strange, and often totalitarian law. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Mathias Koester
Germany

Special Mention

Along with space tourism and adventurous tourist destinations, the Waterscraper offers an opportunity to experience the world’s most voluminous element – water and its amazing habitat. Built as a skyscraper upside-down, into the sea, the Waterscaper creates a habitable link towards the lower levels of the sea and features a unique hotel with a distinctive combination of recreation and scientific facilities. Half building and half vessel, the Waterscraper’s design and construction is purely driven by the analysis of aquatic forces. The circular setting provides an effective ring structure to withstand the water pressure. The floor plates diminish in size as the water pressure rises in the lower levels. The submerged main body is stabilized by the floating ring which connects via a dampened bridge structures to ensure the vertical position of the Waterscaper at all times. Read the rest of this entry »

1st Place
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Changhak Choi
United States

First Place

Even though we have reached an era of advanced technology, the majority of the skyscrapers are structures that don’t provide sustainability to their social, cultural, and ecological environment. In a contemporary and diverse metropolis, such as New York City, the skyscraper should be a reciprocal organism that interacts with its many different layers. In this case, the proposed skyscraper recognizes New York as a temporal residence for millions of students, artists, and tourists. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Manuelle Gautrand
France

Special Mention

Phare Tower is a 300 meter-high new-generation tower at La Défense, on the western rim of Paris, France. The program consists of 140 000 m2 of office space with two restaurants and a rooftop viewing deck for the general public. The concept we are evolving aims at two things. First, express power in a high-rise structure that is a communication device without precedent. Second, introduce poetry by creating a unique building the size of the Eiffel Tower. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Drew Mills, Sebastian Messer, Paul Warrior
United States

Special Mention

Central London is amongst the most expensive locations for land and real estate in the world despite having a 19th Century transportation system at full capacity that puts the city in danger of stagnating and losing its pre-eminent world city status. The long-delayed Cross Rail Project, which will form a rail link between Heathrow, Brentwood, and Shenfield, via the West End and Canary Wharf, will likely begin construction in 2008. It will not be completed until 2015, three years after the London Olympics. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Laurent Saint-Val
France

Special Mention

At a time when Mankind understands the need to respect and protect nature, in order to enable the continuation of life, architecture draws its inspiration from nature and attempts to use nature’s energy in the most ecologically friendly manner. A skyscraper cannot be built on a site as a vulgar object, without link with its urban environment; it must grow from the ground. Is there a tree without roots? To live, plants need to be in contact with the ground, so their roots draw water and rock salt necessary for their development. In the same manner, it seems to me that the new skyscraper needs to weave a link between the basement (its foundations), the ground, and the sky. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Richard Porter, Chris Allen, Cam Helland, Stephen Phillips
United States

Special Mention

Spacescraper creatively invents a new speculative world structure with advanced NASA technology that expands urbanity into outer space. Innovative photovoltaic elevators, powered by lasers, carbon nanotube fiber structures, and advanced environmental control systems, support an extensive universal cable system that houses societal needs on mass scale. Space for individuals, corporations, and entire cities grow to organize within Spacescraper’s continuous exoskeletal form. Derived through a series of digital scripting explorations initiated alongside study of carbon molecular structures, Spacescraper performs as a habitable biomimetic network tethering the Earth’s atmosphere. Read the rest of this entry »

2nd Place
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Gonzalo Pardo, Susana Velasco, Victoria González
Spain

Second Place

When you visit Manhattan as a tourist you keep the city in your memory as a series of fragments, bodies, perceptions, sounds, and atmospheres. The position of everything is engraved in your memory; a new psycho-geographic map of the city is born. We have chosen seven fragments of Manhattan, (5th Avenue, Broadway, piers, Financial District, Brooklyn Bridge, and Central Park), that could be thought about as individual cities; autonomous bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures. Read the rest of this entry »

3rd Place
2006 Skyscraper Competition

Neri Oxman, Mitchell Joachim
United States

Third Place

Peristalsis: The rippling motion of muscles in tubular organs characterized by the alternate contraction and relaxation of the muscles that propel the contents onward.

The core of the skyscraper, its structural and circulatory conventions, as a central obstacle to tall building design is well known. Should the elevator, of all things, persist as the non-negotiable limit of our vertical habitats? The limit is vexing, for not only does it determine compositional forms but, more significantly, the arrangement of social practices with regards to both our labor and leisure. Elevators stifle more than facilitate our movement by virtue of their rigid planes and fleeting occupations. That is to say, the vast space which the elevator shaft occupies is, temporally speaking, useless. But suppose we involved ourselves with a different interpretation of that inactive, rigid, and sequestered domain which much of this central shaft represents. It would demand a vital shift, or at least a conceptual reworking, towards an active utilization of such space. Read the rest of this entry »