Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Alexander Carolan
United States

Issue
One of the largest challenges in the world is the refugee crisis. In 2017, the crisis had affected an estimated 65.6 million people and the number continues to grow. As of 2019, the total number of migrants who have lost their lives on the journey out is a shocking 377. The term refugee is defined today as a group of people displaced from their home country due to persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations. As the number of struggles continues to increase around the world, the population of displaced people proportionately increases. It is reaching an all-time high. As they assimilate, housing should provide a bridge between refugee status and permanent residency. Currently, refugees have inadequate housing. Not only is there too little housing, but the current camps also do not provide adequate support to find jobs, gain an education, support cultural activities or build communities. Camps are meant to be short term housing solutions. A more permanent housing community can provide support to establish new roots, to allow refugees to rebuild their lives and become engaged members of the community. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Jo Jin-Woo, Park Ji-Su, Lee Hui-Yeol, Woo Jong-Sung
South Korea

New architectural, social and cultural activities through recycling of waste
We are trying to find ways to deal with living and industrial wastes in the world. There have been various attempts, but the method of utilization is not enough, only focusing on the treatment of waste. Only 33% of the 1.3 billion tons of garbage per year are recycled, and another waste is incinerated and buried, polluting nature and the city. We propose a self-sustaining and recycling center that handles the waste of each area of ​​the city based on easy transportation and management by locating the existing suburban treatment facilities in urban areas.

It is installed in urban parks and idle sites with structured process systems. It not only promotes production and consumption activities through recycled products but also attracts citizens with a vertically expandable space and Pilotti based on the absence of recycling, thereby providing architectural possibilities and cultural diversity as well as providing the symbolism of the building itself.

In this building, the waste in the designated area is collected and recycled, and the recycled items made are again given new value. To treat each zone waste, it is suggested to classify the waste into 7 types (paper, plastic, iron, food, wood, glass, concrete). The materials that have undergone sorting and crushing are subjected to a detailed recycling process, and each raw material is largely produced as a recycled product having three uses.

First, it becomes the self-supporting material of a vertically expandable building. Aluminum cans and waste rebar are melted to produce reinforcing bars to be the frames of trusses. Waste concrete is used as building materials to build buildings, such as recycled aggregate, which plays the role of building the foundation of the building. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Hao Wang, Xiaoyu Cao,  Junyi Zhao,  Dingyuan Lu
China

Since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, humans have gradually begun to live in groups. Initially, humans spontaneously formed a settlement of human factors.

With the improvement of productivity and the factors of production, the settlement has developed into a county with a city wall as the boundary. Along with the large increase in population, the elements of human survival exceed the capacity that can be carried by the state and the county, and cities with density requirements appear.

When people got into high-density cities, the stereotyped urban form brings a lot of contradictions to people’s production and life. With the increase of volume fraction, where will the steel forests go?

In Koolhaas’ ‘Delirious New York’, in the tradition of the science fiction tropes of Jonathan Swift and Jules Verne, Russian Modernist architects used a portable pool infrastructure to escape Soviet oppression and make it to the United States of America. Meanwhile, the architects of the”Wandering Turtle’, Brodsky and Utkin, opted instead to remain in Russia to produce” an escape into the realm of the imagination that ended as a visual commentary on what was wrong with social and physical reality, and how its ills might be remedied”.The decisions to relocate or to remain are both basic human rights and can be applied as strategies for the making of utopia. According to the 2006 Stern Review, around 200 million people will be permanently displaced by 2050, through an amalgamation of complex economic, social and political drivers, exacerbated by increasingly unpredictable environmental conditions. Rather than ‘fighting’.governments, together with planners and architects, need to envision built environments that embrace the enemy.

When people got into high-density cities, the stereotyped urban form brings a lot of contradictions to people’s production and life. With the increase of volume fraction, where will the steel forests go?

Here we explore the possibilities of future urban development. Looking at the path of urban development, the future development of the city will no longer be gradually developed along the original path but will produce a breakthrough change. The city no longer has a standard definition but evolves into a human survival complex.

We have the theory of ancient sages, based on their setting of ideal cities, abstractly design our prototype city. The cinema city has a strong regularity and is a typical circle structure, which is divided into five layers from the inside to the outside. People and functions of different classes are distributed between these five layers.

Although the prototype city you want, because of its perfection, people’s lives are not perfect, so spontaneous spatial distortions have arisen. These spatial distortions are rooted in people’s lives. They connect the entire city in series, making the city more connected and making the city more vibrant.

When these basic spaces are more and more, they will spread throughout the city, and their appearance will be that the city becomes more integrated, and the space they fill is integrated with the space of the original city, making the city nearly one. Kind of materialization. The circular urban layout naturally has a kind of centripetal, people will involuntarily gather to the center, and the center towers will not be squeezed by the surrounding buildings to become higher and higher.

In the end, the city gradually became a tall tower, and the whole city became our skyscraper. Our utopian skyscrapers.

The above is our vision for the future city that is a skyscraper.

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Li Yuang
China

Liangshan Prefecture has a large number of elderly people. Therefore, the pension skyscraper will be located in Liangshan Qionghai Sea. The site has a large number of water resources and is located in the seashore and mountains. In the design, considering the local sunshine intensity, we want to adopt some methods to reduce the temperature of the building and shield the sunshine. Water has good specific heat capacity and can absorb long and short wave radiation, so it can effectively reduce the temperature and shield the sun.

Water collection can be divided into two ways: collecting rainwater through building platforms: extracting water from the Qionghai Sea through pipeline equipment. Rainwater collected through the platform can be divided into two categories after purification: hot water and cold water. Hot water can supply indoor swimming pools and showers. Coldwater forms waterfalls between the layers of the building, which can effectively shield the incoming sunlight and reduce the indoor temperature. Coldwater can also irrigate roof gardens and some green plants in the house. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Daffonchio & Associates Architects
South Africa

Introduction
The first shelters were built to protect Man from Nature. Human technology has become so powerful that the building of cities should be used to protect Nature from Man. New materials, combined with parametric design will allow us to build ultra-lightweight megastructures. Real-time data mapping combined with AI, will allow hyper-efficient transport and other urban services. We propose a structure that by its shape, size and technology can change the climate.

We propose to solve the increasing reality of desertification through architecture. A cluster of tree-shaped high-rise towers can create a microclimate for a more livable urban environment in desert climates. The idea is to create a ‘forest’ of towers that are designed to cast permanent shadows on the ground below. The vast surface area of the roof is entirely employed for Photovoltaic and energy harvesting, though a high-rise megastructure which can be scaled indefinitely and change the climate through shape, scale, and technology. Read the rest of this entry »

2019 Skyscraper Competition
Editors’ Choice

Sheng Fang, Ran Chen, Yingqi Kuang, Yu Zhong, Ling Li
China

Dear Diary,

Tuesday, Rainy

I was living in Dharavi, the squatter where my family had been struggling in for decades. I know that life outside is totally different from Dharavi. Gradually, I became unwilling to stay here. I was thirsty for getting rid of here and the life that is full of poverty and hunger. But there was no chance for me to change my life. Until that day……

Some guys showed up in here and announced that they had a theory that may eventually change our lives in the squatter. However, the theory was somehow just like an experiment which sounded totally useless for us. But I knew my chance had come. After all, no gain without paying. So I joined them.

It’s really hard to time, building and planning. Through our efforts, a towering dwelling had been built. The residence was not only a place that continued the form of trade in the Dharavi but provided us a new purchaser.

Yet at some point, we can’t settle for the scattered stalls, instead, we quested for a broader and more concentrate marketplace in order to trade more conveniently. Therefore, we cooperated with the people who lived in the other two dwellings and built a broad marketplace.

Now, 10 years have passed. More and more people are moving here and coming to the marketplace. I can even find that the dwelling is growing based on what we have built.

Watching the people go by, I can’t help to imagine that maybe I can own my own store here in the near future that I would never even try to think of before, which makes me too excited to fall asleep……

Yours, Prasad Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Kiwon Hong, Namjung Kim
France, South Korea

NOMADS
The nomads of Mongolia still choose to live on wildland in the 21st century despite global urbanization. This is the traditional Mongolian way of life that has existed for over a thousand years. The Mongolians live with their herds scattered across a vast landscape and is considered as the world’s second most sparsely populated country. Three million people currently live in Mongolia and it is estimated that 24 to 40 percent of them are living as nomads.

TECHNOLOGY
With the rising accessibility of drones today, their use is rapidly expanding to commercial and scientific fields but also they are being increasingly utilized in daily life such as product deliveries, aerial photography, agriculture and surveillance just to mention a few points. Drone technology can bring to nomadic people all the expected benefits of what urban facilities can offer, adequate provision of tools which is essential to keep their thousand years old lifestyle without the need for any new construction of space-consuming horizontal infrastructures/footprints in one of the greenest country in the world. Independently to the raising of the general standards of living, access to modern medicine has been rather difficult for those who have adopted a nomadic lifestyle disconnected from the urban infrastructure and all facilities that come with it. Drones could respond to these critical situations where there is a need for quick access to drugs, blood, and medical technology. Also, for herder families who live in remote areas, far from school, drones could be a perfect solution for better schooling for nomadic children. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Bartosz Kołodziejczuk, Maciej Marszał, Marta Wróblewska
Poland

As I stand here beside you, I reflect on the hardships the African people have suffered. We all know of the harsh climate that haunts this land. Furthermore, history taught us about the brutal era of colonization and about the following years filled with turmoil. Even though Africa was the origin of civilization, it has never had a chance to keep up with the world. The situation is slowly changing and someday we might finally see the true spirit of this continent. However, due to global warming, I fear for the future. It is said that climate changes become more visible, where the climate was challenging in the first place. Cape Town is a city that can confirm this like no other.

Just by analyzing basic statistics, everyone can conclude the situation of the city. A high percentage of adolescent people is characteristic of developing countries. Cape Town’s population grew from 2.4 million in 1995 to 4.3 million people in 2018. This tendency can be observed in the vast suburbia regions emerging around the city. Furthermore, significant differences in income add up to the whole image. However setting aside social and economical situation, Cape Town faces a much bigger problem that could determine its future existence. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Adam Fernandez
France

Badgir (In Persian literal translation: bâd « wind » + gir « catch ») is a traditional element of Persian architecture used from centuries to create natural ventilation and to refresh inside the buildings, more particularly in the living room area. These wind towers are vertical ducts looking as large chimneys allowing to capture and to direct the winds towards the interior of buildings. We can see them in important quantity in the desert area of the center of the country.

The interior of the tower is vertically separated into several ducts to allow the circulation air descending flow (bringing freshness) and air ascending flows (expelling hot air) currents thanks to the differential atmospheric pressures created.

The concept is simple: reuse this traditional process by integrating turbines to generate electricity and to turn this tower into a wind turbine. Higher is the tower, easier it’s to capture air flows (5km/h as minimum) and stronger will be the pressure. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Tony Leung
Hong Kong

In the age of “Level 5” (fully automated) autonomous driving, a vehicle (e.g. Toyota E-Palette) can be adopted as Mobile Greenhouse, traveling between farmers and buyers directly.

These vehicles can be charged at vertical “docks” equipped with PV charger and drainage system when idle. The best dock available will be selected by the central computer and directed by GPS automatically to suit solar demand of different crops. The “dock” becomes an ever-changing organism with its own ‘metabolism’.

The recent development in hydroponic technology makes vertical planting possible. Not only farmers but enthusiast or family can hire or own a mobile greenhouse for weekend farming. The docking ports are connected by double spiral ramps; car lift and staircase are provided for services and pedestrian circulations. Read the rest of this entry »