Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Xiangyu Zhang, Jingwei Tang, Qiuyuan Yang, Linxiao Li, Pengfei Li
China

The Mekong River is the river of life in Laos which is the only inland country in Southeast Asia. Khone Falls is the largest waterfall in the world, which provides an important financial resource for local fishermen. In the rainy season, the waterfall brings an abundant variety of fishes which only clusters around the rapids of the Khone Falls. It is not only hard but also dangerous for fishermen to catch fishes there. In the dry season, the water flow is almost dry, which shuts off the supply of fishing on which its economy depends. Fishermen can only build bamboo dams and ropes that are used for fishing in the rainy season. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Johannes Schlusche, Paul Böhm, Raffael Grimm
Austria, Germany

A fair distribution of resources is the basis of a well-functioning society. Pipelines seem to be an important part of such a distribution in the context of energy, but are always the focus of political conflicts and often encounter local dislike. A densely developed pipeline network with its infrastructure is an important requirement for the global economic system based on oil trading. The climate crisis we are currently facing must be reason enough for us to rethink these systems to get independent of oil and gas, which at the same time requires the development of new ideas for the reuse of these pipelines.

The European continent has a vast network of existing oil and gas pipelines like the transalpine oil-pipeline which connects the Italian seaport Trieste with Germany, special the metropolitan area of Munich. It is 470 kilometers long and has a dimension of 100 centimeters each tube. The network primarily serves to supply the refineries in southern Germany but is also connected to other metropolises in Europe via the extensive infrastructure. The towers are designed to be connected to this specific distribution system for alternative use of the pipelines. New systems for renewable energy generation have been known for a long time, but finally, they have to be implemented on a large scale. Decentralization and focus on resources in the respective areas should be in the foreground. Algae as energy resources are in their beginnings and are seen as high potential. Extensive research work has dealt with algae as an energy source in recent decades. As a biofuel, they are up to 6 times more efficient than e.g. comparable fuels from corn or rapeseed. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yahia Ahmed Yahia Kheder
Egypt

It doesn’t require many fires or many people to deforest a whole country over a certain period of the earth’s life. Deforestation drivers are; human impacts through deforestation, overexploitation, promotion of faster-growing tree species, clear cut forestry, improper management, air pollution, animal grazing, and many more (Euforgen).

There are different cases of countries used to be much more wooded and now become among the worst examples of deforestation. Basically, the soil is exposed in parts, then it starts washing away or blowing away. That is what we see in a very large part of many countries. Seeing those trees setting out there dead in the landscape without having money to do something with the land becomes a global challenge.

This proposal aims to maintain the evolutionary potential of forests’ trees. To support growing more forests and better forests, and to make the land more productive and more able to tolerate the pressures we put on it. Moreover, increasing forestry in developing countries raises people’s living standards and improves life’s conditions. Through providing firewood, food, building materials, shelters, and increases the potential sustainable green stack for the solar biomass. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Zhou Yun, Zhao Wenxin, Kong Jining, Wang Xiaojing, Dong Junfeng
China

At first, cities and nature were distributed horizontally, but the small scale of cities ensured the contact between people and nature. Gradually, due to the expansion of the city, the city and nature became more and more distant, almost showing a state of separation. Only a small part of people on the edge of the urban areas can enjoy the natural environment. Therefore, we want to build a High-rise architecture to seek an ideal model for the harmonious coexistence of city and nature. In this model, people will not only enjoy the convenience of city life in architecture but also get the intimacy and comfort of nature.

We redefined the horizontal distance between the city building and nature, then changed it into the vertical distance to shorten the distance between city life and nature. Our initial idea was to extract the skyline of the city and attach a mountainous “natural shell” that matched the skyline, so as to minimize the distance between the city buildings and nature. However, such ideal conditions cannot meet the needs of lighting and ventilation that architectures need and cannot be realized. Then we re-examine this issue from the perspective of “handstand”. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Arman Salemi, Laura Clark
United States

This project aims to speculate on the potential future of incentivized zoning in New York City. The proposal is for the tallest building in Manhattan, surpassing the new World Trade Center and the slender towers in midtown. This proposed site for this project is Billionaire’s Row, located in midtown Manhattan – an area known for its extreme wealth. Though New York City is a diverse urban landscape, this area is known for its extreme gentrification, resulting in a neighborhood that is largely commercialized that lacks affordable housing, public space, and a sense of community. The proposal aims to build a Vertical City, one that reflects the diversity of New York City into a single tower.

The resulting tower has bespoke villas for the eight richest men in the world – Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffet, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg. Each of the villas was designed by a different architect, ranging from Robert AM Stern to Bjarke Ingels, that have been matched with each billionaire. The result is a sky-high display case for the world’s greatest starchitects. We are marketing the next level of luxury – buying air space instead of an apartment. We are aiming to sell air rights to 0.01% – with our new model of real estate you can now “buy the sky.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Layton Reid
United Kingdom

Ethos
This project seeks to use the detritus and waste elements of production to create an attractor, both economic and social, a free territory for the dispossessed, offering accommodation, leisure, employment, and health.

Typology
The building takes the form of a series of ribbons rising from the landscape to a stoa above this augmented market of interchange, celebration and shared hope, self-administrated, a patria of the air.

Concept
The issue of inequality plagues the world, and refugees and migration receive little credit for their life-giving entrepreneurs, This project creates a vessel for an opportunity, a new territory forged from the industrialized world’s detritus, a land above borders which cleans and links the oceans, a  new tech business-focussed Dubai-Vegas, where the ethos of the migrant can be celebrated, a  yearning for freedom and a search for success. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »