Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Isra Kamal Khurshed
Iraq

Major types of pollution include air pollution, light pollution, noise pollution, thermal pollution, and water pollution. Pollution is one of the most serious problems in the world that we are facing now, it consists of chemicals, particles in the atmosphere- most of the substances that come from human activities.

Most of the pollution comes from fossil fuel, greenhouse gases, transportation, and industrial plants, pollution sources will enter the atmosphere then they will be dispersed around the globe, leading to global warming.

The Middle East is suffering from rising in temperature, especially Iraq, the amount of air pollution in Iraq is more than other neighbor countries according to research and accurate data. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Dennis Byun, Sunjoo Lee, Harry Tse
New Zealand

INAAOMATA is a disaster adaptation tower set around the Pacific islands. The tower acts as the last resort to save what is left, which holds important value to the people of Kiribati. It is confirmed that Kiribati will be the first island to sink completely underwater in less than 50 years due to climate change and sea level rising. With these irreversible changes, we have no choice but to adapt and survive.

Alternative survival method has been presented to the Gilbertese to move to a different country and settle down with a different culture and lifestyle. Local elderlies who tooled the culture and sentimental value of their identity and space refused to move to another country. To show the independence of the people and their standing with their culture, the tower is anchored down with a massive dolphin structure in the core to hold everything up, the whole tower floats on the water as the dolphin allows the tower to rise with the sea level. As it’s risen, the tower will be fixed in position until the next rise. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Carlo Alberto Guerriero
Italy

In Africa, in the Sahel regions, the drying of wetlands is proving catastrophic for both biodiversity and the economy of local populations. In fact, the fall in rainfall, exacerbated by the poor management of water by man, is leading to the fight against desertification, and more and more villages are held in the dry grip of the Sahara. All this has pushed thousands of environmental refugees to flee to Europe and caused the emergence of numerous internal conflicts.

Lake Chad is emblematic of the natural and human drama that the Sahel is experiencing. Lake Chad has always been a fundamental habitat for the survival of sub-Saharan populations and an important cultural crossroads. But in just 60 years Lake Chad has lost more than 90% of its surface, currently reaching a size of 2,500 km2, with the forecast of a total disappearance in the coming decades.

To determine such a change, as well as a decrease in precipitation, it was the construction of large dams on the Yobe rivers (in Kano in Nigeria) and Logone (in Maga in Cameroon) the main tributary of the Chari. Both rivers have lost almost 80% of their flow, with the consequent loss of alluvial areas necessary for agriculture, a reduction of pastures and a strong limitation of fishing activities. For millennia the Lake Chad basin has been subject to great variations, but today unlike in the past, about 10 million people survive thanks to the lake. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Abdulkarim Fattal, Baran Akkoyun, Burcu Kismet, Gorkem Kinik, Martyna Katarzyna Duras, Pinar Beyazit, Sena Polatkan
Italy

Nowadays, the human impact on our planet has become the most disputed topic. In fact, every problem related to the biophysical environment, ecosystem, biodiversity and natural resources is accelerating as we continue to grow. Curiosity backfired. Countries, associations and private companies are highly investing in space related topics with an urge to find life on another planet which leads to many serious consequences. We basically pollute everywhere we go, that even outer space is littered with remains of used rockets, satellites fragments and other, which we call “DEBRIS”.

Debris can be referred to either natural debris such as asteroids and comets, or the mass of artificially created objects in space. In fact, space junk is increasingly becoming a problematic issue for both space and life on earth as they can eventually block earth’s orbit in addition to possible damage of solar planets, telescopes, trackers, satellites and other assets orbiting around our planet. Several solutions are proposed to deal with the debris problem, and one of the leading solutions is to recycle these non-working satellites. In fact, harvesting these parts is not an easy procedure. The Universe Tower will allow scientists to develop new strategies using advanced robotics and technologies to perform deeper research in order to bring these parts back home. A replica of the solar system is imagined inside the building, allowing scientists from NASA to have access to all different planets and therefore minimizing the amounts of trips to space. Each planet will have its own labs and experimental zones along with a simulation area, having the exact same conditions and environment, allowing scientists to explore further innovations, only a few steps away. Other technological solutions are proposed and placed at the top of the building, letting a direct treatment of space junk such as the Laser Broom and Space Nets. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Umut Baykan, Doğuşcan Aladag
United Kingdom

Tourism is a socio-economic phenomenon. It enables people to encounter new experiences all around the world. Contributing significantly to the global economy, it benefits local employment figures whilst providing opportunities for cultural exchange. The number of tourists has risen dramatically since 1950: from 25 million to 1.2 billion in 2017. Movement of so many people at seasonally determined periods of time creates massive demand for accommodation. This demand presents a problem across urban and environmental scales.

For the majority of touristic destinations, demand spikes in certain parts of the year. Traditionally, the model has been to build hospitality facilities such as hotels to meet this demand. As a result, they account for a disproportionate percentage of the built environment. Since these facilities are vacant of people and purpose outside of peak season, they are routinely shut down in order to limit maintenance and resourcing costs. Unfortunately, for settlements that are reinvented as tourist destinations, the impact is significant and detrimental. The local economy becomes fragile, the cultural life is undermined, all to the point whereby towns become more like ghost-towns when the tourist season is over. Profit becomes a higher priority than the conservation of local beauty for developers. This attitude is unsustainable, as the quality of the landscape is often what attracted tourists in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Dimo Ivanov
Switzerland

Inspiration
Inspired by professor Donald r. Sadoway’s notion of giant container-sized liquid metal battery, Ephemere high-rise proposes the idea of a floating power station and liquid metal battery charging station.

Liquid metal battery
The team of professor sadoway – ambri aims to develop a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field. And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours. That’s enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 households. Ambri’s cells are strung together within a thermal enclosure to form an ambri core. The ambri core is ‘self-heating’ when operated every couple of days, requiring no external heating to keep the batteries at temperature. The ambri system comprises multiple ambri cores that are strung together and connected to the grid with power electronics. The configuration of the ambri system is modular and can be customized to meet specific customer needs.

Offshore wind, wave and tidal energy
Ephemere high-rise uses 100% renewable energy sources for electricity production. Harnessing energy from offshore winds, waves, and tides holds great promise for our world’s clean energy future. Energy production is just one of the valuable resources our oceans and coastal ecosystems provide. We can successfully develop offshore renewable energy by ensuring that energy projects are sited, designed, and constructed in a manner that protects our fragile ocean ecosystems. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Jo Palma + Partners Corporation
United States

The Atlântica self-rising tower investigates the future of construction and explores the boundaries of automated building assembly and self-organization. Inspired by the behavior of insects like ants, termites and bees and their ability to construct large-scale habitats for their communities, research and investigations on self-assembling components demonstrate the potential future for construction. Envisioning that building parts can organically self-assemble into optimal, self-supporting configurations in an oceanic environment, the Atlântica tower concept challenges the ordinary construction process by building from top to bottom and from underwater up.

By utilizing a magnetic system embedded in the structural frame of the individual components, the building members could be joined together based on predefined and optimized geometry and construction sequencing algorithms. The building form would change based on the number of members deployed underwater, which could be continuously modified by addition or subtraction. These modular components would be produced off-site, shipped to desired assembly location and released underwater, allowing the self-assembly process to begin. Triggered by increased water entropy, the individual pieces would find their adjacent matches and start the forming process of the structure.

The modular framework of the Atlântica tower allows for different program types with easy adaptability. From housing, lodging and working uses to vertical farming and sky gardens, Atlântica could become a community within itself. Read the rest of this entry »

2021 SKYSCRAPER COMPETITION

The Blindspot Initiative: Design Resistance and Alternative Modes of Practice
Jose Sánchez
eVolo Press
Hardcover
238 pages

The Blindspot Initiative: Design Resistance and Alternative Modes of Practice documents the professional work of twenty-one design practices that are expanding their respective fields and hybridizing traditional design outputs through the intersection of other disciplines. The expansion of architectural and design practices toward the domain of robotics, material science, film, simulation, or software, redefine the skillsets required to engage with a creative output that challenges the conventions of established domains.

All practices curated in this volume, propose an autonomous approach towards design research, resisting the pervasive design competition model that requires free labor and speculative remuneration. The critique of such a model is present throughout this volume, rejecting the wasteful discarding of immaterial labor that is commonplace in the ‘winner takes all’ paradigm that currently dominates the design marketplace.

The hybridization of practice has, in many cases, aided a creative business proposition, one that seeks to engage not only through its final output but also through reconsidering the means of production. By blurring the boundaries between fields, design innovation can become more aware of the systemic interdependencies that often live in our current disciplinary blind spots.

The Blindspot Initiative, in its first incarnation as an exhibition in Los Angeles, was the result of a collaboration between Jason King, Biayna Bogosian, Sacha Baumann, and Jose Sanchez, to explore the space of self-financing and self-commissioning of new creative work. From the critique of competitions, The Blindspot Initiative attempts to create an alternative loop between design and resources, one in which the propagation and documentation of new knowledge developed in design research can economically sustain its production, generating a positive feedback loop between innovation and knowledge propagation.

Texts by Jenny Wu, Jason Kelly Johnson, David Gerber, Mustafa El-Sayed, and Kate Davies, introduce the designers by offering alternative perspectives on the contributions of the field of robotics, software, film, product design and prototype thinking, to the practice of architecture.

Each chapter presents work at the edge of the architectural discipline either coming from inside the discipline or approaching it from the outside. In purposefully attempting to expand the boundary of architectural practice, this volume aims to offer new avenues for students and young designers to expand the imagination of architecture and reject unethical practices that have become commonplace during the first years of practice.

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Skyscraper Competition. The Jury selected 3 winners and 27 honorable mentions from 478 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 METHANESCRAPER designed by Marko Dragicevic from Serbia. The project is a vertical city-district in Belgrade that serves as landfill with recycling capabilities.

The recipients of the SECOND PLACE are Klaudia Gołaszewska and Marek Grodzicki from Poland for the project AIRSCRAPER. This proposal envisions a city-like skyscraper that cleans air of heavily polluted urban settlements.

CREATURE ARK: BIOSPHERE SKYSCRAPER designed by Zijian Wan, Xiaozhi Qi, and Yueya Liu from the United Kingdom received the THIRD PLACE. The project is a nature reserve skyscraper with research facilities.

The Honorable Mentions include an ice dam skyscraper that prevents further melting of the ice caps, a wooden skyscraper that pushes the boundary of the use of timber in vertical structures, and a horizontal skyscraper for the US-Mexico border among other innovative projects.

The Jury was formed by Melike Altınısık [Founder and design principal Melike Altınısık Architects], Vincent Callebaut [Founder and design principal Vincent Callebaut Architectures], Marc Fornes [Founder and design principal THEVERYMANY], and Mitchell Joachim [Co-Founder and design principal of Terreform ONE].