Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Khem Aikwanich, Nigel Westbrook
Thailand, Australia

The Symbiocity project rethinks the way prisons are built and operated in an effort to better criminal justice and rehabilitation systems. Traditionally, say the designers of the Symbiocity, prisons act like a parasite on cities, sucking resources but giving nothing in return. By locating prisons in city cores, they propose, prisoners are surrounded by society (instead of isolated in prisons located in rural areas), and therefore inspired to better themselves so they can reenter society.

Other changes are also proposed: prisoners will be paid more for the work they do while locked up, but they will also be charged for their accommodations, food, and other amenities, inspiring them to work harder to earn perks like nicer cells or better food. Prisons will also be forced to become more self sufficient, instead of relying on taxpayer dollars: this will be done with inmates having to grow their own food in vertical farms and raise their own livestock. It will also take in money by renting out its facilities for functions in the busy, surrounding city, and also selling memberships to the gym located inside, as prisoners only have access to those facilities for part of the day. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Nam Il Joe, Laura E. Lo, Mark T. Nicol
United States

By extending the ethos of reuse to the aqueous environment, In Charybdis reconsiders the plastic detritus in the world’s oceans as building material. Harnessing the complex, dynamic system of forces of the oceans and its intensive gradients, this project coalesces plastic particulates into a self-limiting, dynamically formed, yet chemically inert, super-tall building structure that plunges deep into the ocean’s depths.

Utilizing advanced material technologies, it provides scaffolding for deep-sea research vessels. These vessels navigate through the water column, over time converging and dispersing within the structure, forming and disbanding spontaneous research communities as they venture to the depths and slowly return to air. By utilizing an existing material condition to build a research facility in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this project leverages cleanup and rehabilitation for the advancement science, creating a novel venue for the study of the last and great, earthly frontier—the deep ocean. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Park Sung-Hee, Na Hye Yeon
South Korea

The quantity of small plastic fragments floating in the north-east Pacific Ocean has been increased a hundred times over the past 40 years accumulating and forming what we know as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a great hazard to the earth ecosystems balance.

Studies estimate that the amount of plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the US State of Texas.

Kinetic Islands address this problem and propose a solution for disposal huge-amount of plastic and garbage patches in North-east Pacific Ocean, and take advantage of them as construction elements for a futuristic floating city.

The project propose a modular study on floating elements. Each module or element works as a flotation device, using 3 floats, that allow it to move trough the pacific ocean currents. Each module will recollect as much garbage as it is founding trough his path. Then when its full it will move to meet the nearest units to form a garbage chain. By the time many chains floating in Pacific Ocean, meet each other, they can be assembled like a Spiral Shape formed by ocean currents and centralized like a big island. That island can be covered by soil in order to have c a strongly solid founding that allow to develop farming crops. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Lee Seungsoo
South Korea

The Urban Earth Worm skyscraper uses one of the basest of creatures as its inspiration. Just as earthworms clean the soil and solve pollution problems, promulgating life in thriving ecosystems, this skyscraper will clean air and soil pollution in cities and also feed cities – literally.

The structure is in fact even shaped like a worm, horizontally extends and curves throughout the city, cleaning the air, processing waste and providing food in not just one but many points. The top part of the structure has growing tubes that are filled with soil and grow trees and plants. This green area cleans the city’s air and also provides crops for the city’s residents. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Ekkaphon Puekpaiboon
Thailand

Mankind has always face the threat of extinction, from an extreme natural disaster.

“Zero” is a radical skyscraper, designed to ensure mankind’s survival after global devastation. Like an emergency toolbox, it will be the starting point to the reestablish social order through digital communication and information exchange.

“Zero” will provide the crucial elements to support life and to rebuild our existence, even if we had to start from zero. The key element to ensure that humanity is not lost is information. We live in the digital age. Communication and knowledge It is our most important resources today.

“Zero” is dedicated to gathering information; an online data vault to make sure human knowledge is not lost. Government, institutes and organization around the globe are able to upload information to “Zero” data vault. Anything considered important from architectural construction, agricultural planning, scientific records, language translation, or even family photos can be stored within this data vaults. If a “Zero” is destroyed, the data will not be lost as they are duplicated and shared around the world among other “Zero” units. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Jong Hyuk Lim, Seung Jun Park, Sung Wha Na, Jae Chung ko, Ho Young Yeo, Gyoeng Hwan Kim
South Korea

The massive amount of waste and debris accumulated in the Pacific Ocean is known as the Pacific Garbage Patch. The Scraper is a floating building designed to collect and compact the garbage into cubes with the use of automated robots. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Michael Charters
United States

“Big Wood” is a prototype on mass timber construction that offers the possibility to build more responsibly while actively sequestering pollutants from our cities. Sited in Chicago; “Big Wood” aims to write a new chapter in high-rise construction.

Steel and concrete structural systems have been the primary materials of choice in skyscrapers construction over the years. Unfortunately, these materials have a heigh energy production and recycle costs considering the entire life of a structure.

Understanding that the construction industry accounts for 39% of man-made carbon emissions, it’s imperative that we develop more intelligent and less environmentally destructive strategies for construction. Recent studies had proved the success of 20-30 story mass timber structures with the potential to go higher using hybrid systems.

“Big Wood” is a mixed-use university complex sited in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood. The structure consists of a mass timber system utilizing lumber grown and manufactured on a brown-field site in South Chicago.

Known as “South Works”, the tree farm site was once home of a steel mill, where raw materials were brought in via barge on Lake Michigan. A majority of the steel used to build Chicago’s famous towers (including Willis and John Hancock) came through the South Works steel mill. Implementing a tree farm will extract toxins from the soil as well as carbon dioxide from Chicago’s air. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Shinypark, Liu Tang, Lyo Heng Liu
South Korea, China

Building an underwater city is the main goal of this project that responds to the sea level rise in the upcoming decades. The US National Research Council estimates that in this century alone, the sea level will rise between 50 and 200 centimeters – leaving some existing cities underwater.

The project has been designed as a floating bowl with a massive atrium open to the sky where sunlight will be able to reach all the underwater levels. The geometry is composed of an array of boxes in different sizes that allow for very specific program delineation. The stepping and shifting of volumes create and intricate system of terraces and voids imagined as community and leisure areas. The project also resembles a traditional hillside town with a network of stairs connecting the various levels. Providing views to the mysterious world beneath the water surface is a priority of the design while vegetation also plays an important role in the design. The idea is to provide as much green surface as possible for parks, farms, and oxygen generation. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Milos Vlastic, Vuk Djordjevic, Milos Jovanovic, Darki Markovic
Serbia

Moses is a decentralized, self-sustaining city unit, populated by approximately 25,000 inhabitants, which offers the transition of men from land to sea, so that the land could be used for food production and the Earth could start its process of self-regeneration from the negative human impact. It functions independently as a city-unit, as well as a cluster of units, which share information, energy, and goods.

Each city-unit is placed on the intersection of perpendicular traffic lanes, which form the grid that serves as a connection between cities and land through a network of ultra fast trains. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2013 Skyscraper Competition

Santi Musmeci, Sebastiano Maccarrone
China

By 2100 it will be extremely unhealthy to live in megacity areas and people will migrate to the countryside seeking cleaner air, food, and water. By 2150 megacities like Beijing, Jakarta, New York, and London will be abandoned ghost cities and automated bulldozers will be sent to demolish buildings and infrastructures, saving only sites of historical value. By recycling the demolished material, the bulldozers will start the construction of Sphera.

Sphera is a new type of living environment, where the citizens of the world will live during the “earth’s regeneration”, by using innovative and sustainable energies. At the same time, the purpose of Sphera is to build an entirely new civilization, where people will try to redesign their culture and generate a sustainable society by creating a global-resource based economy that enables all people to reach their highest potential, a society that protects and preserves its environment.

All people, regardless of political views, social customs and religion, ultimately require the same resources, such as clean air and water, arable land, medical care, and relevant education. Read the rest of this entry »