Winners 2012 Skyscraper Competition

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the use of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. This is also an investigation on the public and private space and the role of the individual and the collective in the creation of a dynamic and adaptive vertical community. The award seeks to discover young talent, whose ideas will change the way we understand architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.

The Jury of the 2012 edition was formed by leaders of the architecture and design fields including: Maria Aiolova [principal Terreform One], Chris Bosse [principal LAVA – Laboratory for Visionary Architecture], Gaël Brulé [principal Atelier CMJN, winner 2011 Skyscraper Competition], Julien Combes [principal Atelier CMJN, winner 2011 Skyscraper Competition], Marc Fornes [principal THEVERYMANY], Florian Idenburg [principal SO-IL  Solid Objectives – Indenburg Liu], Minnie Jan [principal MisoSoupDesign], Mitchell Joachim [principal Terreform One, professor at New York University], Jing Liu [principal SO-IL  Solid Objectives – Indenburg Liu], Daisuke Nagatomo [principal MisoSoupDesign], Alexander Rieck [principal LAVA – Laboratory for Visionary Architecture], Michel Rojkind [principal Rojkind Arquitectos], Michael Szivos [principal Softlab, professor at Pratt Institute], Tobias Wallisser [principal LAVA – Laboratory for Visionary Architecture], and Ma Yansong [principal MAD Architects] . The Jury selected 3 winners and 22 honorable mentions. eVolo Magazine received 714 projects from all five continents and 95 different countries.

The first place was awarded to Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao and Dongbai Song from China for their project “Himalaya Water Tower”. The proposal is a skyscraper located high in the Himalayan mountain range that stores water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains’ natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use.

The second place was awarded to Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia, and Zihan Wang from China for their project “Mountain Band-Aid”, a design that seeks to simultaneously return the displaced Hmong mountain people to their homes and work as it restores the ecology of the Yunnan mountain range.

The recipient of the third place is Lin Yu-Ta from the Taiwan for a “Vertical Landfill” to be located in the largest cities around the globe, both as a reminder of the outrageous amount of garbage that we produce and as a power plant that harvests energy from waste decomposition.

Among the honorable mentions there are underwater projects for ocean research, mobile skyscrapers, floating cities, and temporal buildings that attach to existing structures. These proposals offer us an exciting view of the world to come.

eVolo Magazine would like to acknowledge all the competitors for their effort, vision, and passion for architectural innovation and the members of the Jury for their knowledge, time, and enthusiasm during the long review process.

Himalaya Water Tower

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

First Place
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao, Dongbai Song
China

Housed within 55,000 glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains sits 40 percent of the world’s fresh water. The massive ice sheets are melting at a faster-than-ever pace due to climate change, posing possible dire consequences for the continent of Asia and the entire world stand, and especially for the villages and cities that sit on the seven rivers that come are fed from the Himalayas’ runoff as they respond with erratic flooding or drought.

The “Himalaya Water Tower” is a skyscraper located high in the mountain range that serves to store water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains’ natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use. The water distribution schedule will evolve with the needs of residents below; while it can be used to help in times of current drought, it’s also meant to store plentiful water for future generations. Read the rest of this entry »

Mountain Band-Aid

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Second Place
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia, Zihan Wang
China

Industrialization and mining are destroying China’s natural settings, especially mountains, which are excavated to the point of destruction in man’s search for minerals. These processes don’t just devistate regions’ ecologies; they also displace whole populations of people, separating them from their homes and also their means of living, as many in these rural areas work as farmers. The “Mountain Band-Aid” project seeks to simultaneously restore the displaced Hmong mountain people to their homes and work as it restores the mountain ecology of the Yunnan mountain range.

This is achieved with a two-layer construction project. The outer layer is a skyscraper that is built into and stretched across the mountain. By building the structure into, and as part of, the mountain, the skyscraper helps the Hmong people recover their original lifestyle. It is organized internally by the villagers to replicate the traditional village design they utilized before they were displaced. The building’s placement on the mountain means that its height is mainly determined by the height of the mountain. The design as a whole is one of “dual recovery:” the Hmong people living on the damaged mountain can keep the unique organization of space in their village, recreating it within the skyscraper, but they won’t be contributing to the mountain’s degradation. Instead, they help the mountain’s environmental restoration by recycling domestic water for mountain irrigation. It is this irrigation system that comprises the project’s inner layer: an irrigation system is constructed to stabilize the mountain’s soil and grow plants. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Lin Yu-Ta, Anne Schmidt
Taiwan

The designer of the “Monument to Civilization” asks you to reconsider what constitutes ‘spectacular.’

Skyscrapers are meant to wow, to impress. But other things within cities are also impressive, the designer says: “New York, for instance: If we put its annual garbage on a area of a typical tower footprint, we’ll get a 1,300 meter high landfill tower, which is about as three times tall as the Empire State Building (450 meters). Isn’t that spectacular?”

As landfill possibilities surrounding growing metropolises disappear and cities fight waste management issues, the power of trash needs to be reconsidered. The accumulation of waste, for example, actually creates potential energy-recycle opportunities, such as when gas is emitted during decomposition. The Monument of Civilization proposal suggests locating trash vertically in a tower and using the energy generated from its decomposition to help power the surrounding city. By locating the tower in the heart of the city, energy is provided in immediate proximity, and money is also saved in transportation costs when garbage no longer needs to be shipped out of town. Read the rest of this entry »

Citadel Skyscraper

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Victor Kopieikin, Pavlo Zabotin
Ukraine

Natural disasters, the threat of technological meltdown and even the possibility of visitors from space all present a need for cities and even countries to reorganize to implement infrastructure that can protect people from possible catastrophes.

The “Citadel Skyscraper” project is imagined for Japan because of the numerous natural and manmade disasters that have struck the region in recent years. The project proposes a three-part implementation of new structures with an end result of protecting the island with a fortress-like defense shield. The first part involves a restructuring of the land use of all of the country’s major cities as residents are moved out of the city proper. Businesses and commercial endeavors will stay located within the cities, but residents will move out to sea and live in self-supporting residential skyscrapers, or citadels. The second part specifies the location of these citadels: They will be lined up as a single “sheet”, creating a barrier 2-3 km from the shoreline that can protect the mainland from tsunamis. The skyscrapers themselves are connected by a system of breakwaters and drainage channels, and are able to withstand waves up to 50 meters tall. These are further bolstered by a connected series of fiber sails, buried as deep as 1,200 meters, that surround the island. When the waves hit the sails and meet the oscillations of its stretched fibers, such a dissonance is created that the wave is reduced to nothing. Read the rest of this entry »

Occupy Skyscraper

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Ying Xiao, Shengchen Yang
United States

Moved by the economic disparity in the United States brought to light by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, the designers of the Occupy Skyscraper propose creating a building that can further empower protesters and accelerate the Occupy movement. The temporary Occupy skyscraper can be erected on any protest site to provide shelter and meeting spaces for dissenters. By providing a means for protesters to take their movement from a horizontal plane to a 3-D vertical reality, the Occupy skyscraper strengthens and bolsters the event as a whole, but amazingly, it does so only using hemp rope and canvas.

The skyscraper’s construction begins as soon as a protest takes place: Ropes are woven into a vertical web by attaching to and climbing nearby buildings. The webs are woven thicker and thicker until they form nets that can support weight. At this stage, the “building” can be used for climbing, hanging flags and supporting sleeping bags in the vertical spaces, and can be used for gatherings on the horizontal plane. Canvas is then attached to create solid paneling to segregate space uses within the building. The designers envision several designated areas: orientation spaces, and other spots for recreation, sleeping, workshops, conferences, rallies and large meetings. Read the rest of this entry »

Folded City

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Adrien Piebourg, Bastien Papetti
France

How to live vertically? Building higher and higher does not seem to change the way we live. Most people wish to live in single-family residences, but the problem is the lack of diversity and density. How to have the benefits of suburbia combined with the intensity of living in the city?

The history of the skyscrapers goes back to Elisha Otis, who invented the elevator in the 19th century. This invention promoted the conquest of the sky with projects competing for prowess and size.  What would happened if within a house the elevator is used as a remote control to move from one floor to another, from one program to another?

This new “object” would challenge the function of living. The house becomes smart and incorporates multiple applications – one application per floor. The elevator is for the house what that Internet is for a smart-phone. A necessary parameter! Now you can “zap” your life spatially. Imagine yourself in your room, put on your slippers, go in your elevator, and zap! You will be in your living room, your garage, your favorite bar or business place; the park where you go jogging!

The new tower is born, or rather, the first cell. We must now find the idea of “Tower”. This cell is only anecdotal, but multiplied and intensified, it marks its existence. It is now clearly identifiable as an “object”.  The idea of “Tower” is inseparable from the idea of city, so we have now an object in the city, which looks like a city.  Perceptions are distorted. The object in the city became literally the “city-object”. Read the rest of this entry »

Migrant Skyscraper

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

Damian Przybyła, Rafał Przybyła
Poland

The “Migrant Skyscraper” is literally mobile: A giant, thin tire with a building and green space in the center, this skyscraper is ready to roll.

The concept behind this structure is that in an unstable world, people need the stability of self-sufficiency to truly be free, and the future of the architectural field can help provide that to people. By constructing a safe haven for residents to live in that ensures they will have food to eat and water to drink, the Migrant Skyscraper affords people freedom despite what natural and social disasters may come. The building-inside-a-wheel can stay stationary for however long residents please, but, for example, if political upheaval destabilizes a region, residents can fire up the biofuel-powered engine and cruise to a new location.

The structure’s exterior tire is clad in recycled rubber. Inside, two buildings and surrounding green space provide everything residents need to survive, making the tire-encapsulated unit completely self-sufficient. Outside of the buildings there is space for agriculture, including crops and livestock; within the tire, plumbing systems circulate potable, gray and black water for drinking, waste facilities and irrigation. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2012 Skyscraper Competition

MADETOGETHER – Nikita Asadov
Russia

The race between countries, cities, and corporations to construct the highest structure is a challenge of pride and power. Our technological advances allowed for the construction of super-tall buildings – the higher they are, the more space they loose and the harder the engineering challenge becomes. The global financial crisis was the last decisive argument against such structures.

The House of Babel offers a radical revision for the common method of building a traditional home. With the help of aerostatic construction we can eliminate extra floors and elevate the building to almost any desired height. The post-crisis skyscraper is the house consisting of two floors connected with a high-speed elevator on a thin heavy-duty cable. Read the rest of this entry »

Plastic Fish Tower

By:  | March - 2 - 2012

Honorable Mention

2012 Skyscraper Competition

Kim Hongseop, Cho Hyunbeom, Yoon Sunhee, Yoon Hyungsoo
South Korea

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean sits a mass of garbage that is 8.1% the size of the entire sea. It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), and is estimated to contain over 100 million tons of waste. The debris gathers in that particular location as ocean currents convene in the Subtropical Convergence Region, and is causing grave harm to the immediate ecosystem and those within a broad surrounding swath.

The Plastic Fish Tower, a circular structure floating on the ocean surface within the GPGP, will collect and reprocess plastic, which estimates say comprises 90% of the GPGP and is often ingested by birds and fish, causing their demise. A large fence will circle the structure underwater in a 1 km diameter to capture all the plastic that floats its way. The plastic will be recycled within the structure and processed into plastic patches that can be assembled into fish farms to restore the ecosystem. In addition to helping mitigate the pollution, the fish farm will also have two added benefits: the buoyancy of the plastic fish farm elements will be enough to keep the entire structure afloat since plastic is in fact so buoyant, and it will position the structure as a tourist attraction. Bringing tourists to the GPGP would greatly help in disseminating widely the reality of this manmade ecological catastrophe. The tourists will be transported to and from the site by ships that are fueled by chemicals that will be collected from the processed plastics within the skyscraper in an as-of-yet-undiscovered method of chemical extraction. Read the rest of this entry »