eVolo Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Skyscraper Competition. The Jury selected 3 winners and 22 honorable mentions from 444 projects received. The annual award established in 2006 recognizes visionary ideas for building high- projects that through the novel 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 Pawel Lipiński and Mateusz Frankowski from Poland for the project Mashambas Skyscraper. The design proposes a modular and scalable skyscraper conceived as an educational center and marketplace for new agricultural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. The design seeks to increase farming opportunities and reduce hunger in these regions. 

Vertical Factories in Megacities designed by Tianshu Liu and Linshen Xie  from the United States received the SECOND PLACE. The design investigates the benefits of moving factories back to megacities. The proposal calls for a series of alternating architectural layers- factories and recreational areas stacked together to create a vertical structure. Each recreational layer would feed from the waste and resources of these factories. 

The recipient of the THIRD PLACE is Javier López-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar from Spain for the project Espiral3500. The project introduces the streets and complexity of the city’s horizontal plane into a spiraling vertical structure.

The 22 honorable mentions include skyscrapers inside giant sequoias, villages embedded and hanging from mountains, automated plug-in cities, iceberg skyscrapers that reverse global warming, and wind harvesting structures among other fascinating projects.

The members of the Jury are: Eric Bunge [principal nArchitects], Manuelle Gautrand [principal Manuelle Gautrand Architecture], Ferda Kolatan [founding director su11], Andrea Morgante [principal Shiro Studio] Marcos Novak [professor and director at transLAB], Yitan Sun [winner 2016 Skyscraper Competition], Boštjan Vuga [principal Sadar+Vuga], and Jianshi Wu [winner 2016 Skyscraper Competition].

The 2017 Skyscraper Competition was made possible with the sponsorship of our media partners and v2com.

First Place
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Pawel Lipiński, Mateusz Frankowski
Poland

Mashamba– Swahili, East Africa
An area of cultivated ground; a plot of land, a small subsistence farm for growing crops and fruit-bearing trees, often including the dwelling of the farmer.

Over the last 30 years, worldwide absolute poverty has fallen sharply (from about 40% to under 20%). But in African countries, the percentage has barely fallen. Still today, over 40% of people living in sub-Saharan Africa live in absolute poverty. More than half of them have something in common: they’re small farmers.

Despite several attempts, the green revolution’s mix of fertilizers, irrigation, and high-yield seeds—which more than doubled global grain production between 1960 and 2000—never blossomed in Africa, because of poor infrastructure, limited markets, weak goverments, and fratricidal civil wars that wracked the postcolonial continent.

The main objective of the project is to bring this green revolution to the poorest people. Giving training, fertilizer, and seeds to the small farmers can give them an opportunity to produce as much produce per acre as huge modern farms. When farmers improve their harvests, they pull themselves out of poverty. They also start producing surplus food for their neighbors. When farmers prosper, they eradicate poverty and hunger in their communities.

Mashambas is a movable educational center, which emerges in the poorest areas of the continent. It provides education, training on agricultural techniques, cheap fertilizers, and modern tools; it also creates a local trading area, which maximizes profits from harvest sales. Agriculture around the building flourishes and the knowledge spreads towards the horizon. The structure is growing as long as the number of participants is rising. When the local community becomes self-sufficient it is transported to other places.

The structure is made with simple modular elements, it makes it easy to construct, deconstruct and transport. Modules placed one on the other create the high-rise, which is a form that takes the smallest as possible amount of space from local farmers.

Today hunger and poverty may be only African matter, but the world’s population will likely reach nine billion by 2050, scientists warn that this would result in global food shortage. Africa’s fertile farmland could not only feed its own growing population, it could also feed the whole world. Read the rest of this entry »

Second Place
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Tianshu Liu, Linshen Xie
United States

Bring factories to the city
By 2025, the number of megacities, cities with a population over 10 million people, will grow from 23 to 36, and the population in the top 600 cities in the world will grow by 500 million. In the near future, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in these megacities.

Factories moved to areas outside cities because they were noisy and polluting. But now, many factories are cleaner and could have a new place in the urban environment. Moving them back into the city would provide a higher quality of life, by allowing employees to walk to work rather than commute in cars. Urban factories would be closer to populations of skilled workers, suppliers and technical and research centers.

This is the vision we have for the cities of tomorrow: factories will be dissolved into small pieces and then be stacked together into high-rise vertical factories. By bringing factories back to the city, we can achieve zero CO2 emissions, be energy efficient, and provide higher quality of life to the inhabitants.

Sustainable waste management.
The Philippines’ National Capital Region, Metropolitan Manila, has 14 cities (Las Piñas, Makati, Malabon, Mandaluyong, Manila, Marikina, Muntinlupa, Parañaque, Pasig, Valenzuela, Kalookan, Pasay, Quezon and Taguig) and 3 municipalities (Navotas, San Juan, and Pateros). The region has a population approximately growing at a rate of 4% annually; the increasing population and urbanization of the region results in the creation of more industries and establishments.

Inadequate collection vehicles and lack of disposal sites have contributed to the reduction of waste collection efficiency. The main problem of too much garbage generation will hardly be solved when the solutions are not really targeting the main problem. Each dumpsite can only contain a specific capacity or amount of garbage and when it gets reaches its threshold it eventually becomes non-functional and will be shut down. The Metro Manila Development Authority reacts by searching for alternative location for dumpsites. Metro Manila’s dumpsite problem will never end until local governments are able to drastically reduce their garbage output as mandated by Republic Act 9003.

Metro Manila’s poor drainage system, pollution, and garbage problem might have worsened the effects of the heavy downpour that ‘Ondoy’ brought to the area. Metro Manila city mayors claimed that it was the garbage problem that was a major factor in the heavy flooding caused by Ondoy (Calonzo GMA News, 2009).

Bring nature back to the city
Due to the large population in Manila, a great amount of organic waste is produced daily. This waste will be the resource of the new vertical factory. All the waste will be dumped at the bottom level of the factory, and then they will be transformed into valuable products including water, fertilizer, heat, and electricity. We use these products to create different kinds of natural environment. The landscape is shaped according to the scale and shape of factories. Organic waste then can be turned into new city landscape while factories hide beyond natural surfaces. The main concept of this design is to let people be aware of the truth that the natural environment is a loop, everything you produce will then form the new world. Instead of criticizing the pollution problem we create the most ideal way for people to understand the best interaction between human and nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Javier López-Menchero Ortiz de Salazar
Spain

The eastern coast of Spain, containing the most highly populated seafront areas in the country, has suffered an indiscriminate urban expansion. Criteria for construction have erred on the speculative side rather than being the rational consequence of studying the urban needs of the territory.

Espiral3500 is situated in “La Albufera”, an agricultural natural park which has been subjected to speculation based development and expansive growth. Tourism has become the main force of attraction. With it, it has produced an urban sprawl, which has disfigured the landscape. Tourism in the area causes an increase in population density of up to 1000% in some localities, turning them from ghost towns in winter to areas of high most density in summer.

Would a more coherent model have been possible in “La Albufera” given knowledge of its operation?

A model that advocates management of the territory and its demands over selling its most precious good, the land; this is where the typology of the skyscraper becomes relevant as a figure that can absorb most of the anxieties and demands of the population. This element would be capable of seeing to the touristic needs without greatly affecting the natural resources of the territory. The gaps produced by the cyclical nature of tourism in the vertical construction could result in additional maintenance costs. However, the gaps experienced during winter in territories of the extensive model leave a far more devastating scenery behind, producing a total disassembly of most services and urban functions due to reduction of their density.

What type of skyscraper should be introduced?

The successful level repetition skyscraper model of the 20th century must be transformed. To this end, I focus on initial theories on verticality, in which the concept of verticality is seen as the possibility of reproducing and extending all that happens at ground level.

Then, why not place public spaces inside buildings? This tower would no longer be an element where solely private dynamics take place. The Spanish eastern coast city is the quintessential city of public and open spaces. This skyscraper explores the interesting standpoint of introducing the streets and all of the city’s horizontal plane complexity into the vertical realm.

The main investigation of this project is to understand the relationship between and the role played by private and public spaces within the skyscraper. Here, I use a spiral system in which the public spaces (namely the different types of streets) form rings that rest on a structural element. Spaces for private use hang from this structural element. This “inverted street” system allows for an immediate linking of public and private, while allowing for sufficient dissociation to grant desired privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Wenjia Li, Ran Huo, Jing Ju
China

Manhattan is a paradise of skyscrapers, which not only decorate the city’s skyline, but also provide more usable space for people living there. This design scheme starts from a most basic architectural component, an arch that undergoes transformations through the changes of light, human behavior, and other factors to form different spaces/units, which overlap one another vertically to form the final design.

Arch and hidden transportation
In both, Middle Ages cathedrals in Europe and ancient pagodas in China, we found that double-layer arches could create a mezzanine, which we cunningly combined with vertical transportation, which works exceptionally well to service spaces. This hidden space inspire us invent a new relationship between arch and transportation.

Arch and spatial transparency
Either in a Gothic cathedral or a Chinese Buddhist pagoda, lighting is altered by the height and span of arches. In this project, we reconsolidate the acknowledged form of the arch and tend to reinvent a new arch system that is defined by direction, dimension, and memorial distortion. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Zhonghan Huang, Wen Zhu
United States

Tracing back to two hundred years ago, urban growth came with the demolition of old buildings, which then were replaced with clusters of new larger and denser buildings. The original residents, in many cases, were forced to move out and were reimbursed for a monetary loss. Urbanization was based on this constant cycle.

Today, however, there is a new era that people have been waiting for but was not imagined. Contrary to demolishing old buildings to achieve urbanization, the early generation legislated a rule that all of new constructions cannot be built at the sacrifice of demolishing old ones. The past buildings remain in physical forms various mirrors to tell who we used to be and where we had been. As a return, the original residents of old buildings are able to stay, to hold high value of properties, and to enjoy the majestic view. In order to keep the past and to accommodate the future on limited land, every generation starts to construct new buildings from the bottom of existing ones. Consequently, older buildings constantly rest on top of newer blocks. They gradually, generation by generation, penetrate clouds and become memorials beyond the sky. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Haseef Rafiei
United Kingdom

City’s Affinity for Automata
Tokyo has long been the leading city for robotics and manufacturing. The city’s fascination towards science and engineering has changed how society interact with machines. Its culture and social patterns have long revolved around its obsession with automation and its high regard for automated systems. The proliferation of vending machines in Tokyo is impossible to ignore. They are on nearly every block in Tokyo down alleyways, in front of convenience stores and almost in every neighbourhood. As a result, these machines have minimised the cost of human labour, eliminating the need for sales clerks. The Pod Vending Machine explores the possibility of converting the real estate industry into an automated vending system.

Building on Demand
Abandonment of construction projects remains a serious problem in the construction industry. It results in the wastage of materials and resources. It affects not only the immediate house buyers but also other project players and the general public. In some occasions, it also involves the use of public fund for the revival of abandoned projects. In response to the problem, the scheme proposes a building is constantly under construction: A tower that grows in parallel with the city’s housing demand. Borrowing the Japanese maxim Wabi-sabi, the building remains an ‘incomplete infrastructure’ that changes and adapts over time.

Proposal
A skyscraper that functions as a home dispenser. It continuously grows according to the city’s housing demand. The building production method adopts an automated system. Ready-to-use pods are manufactured, plugged onto site and can be purchased instantly. A pod printer that 3D prints modular dwellings is installed above the building. The printer will dispense pods and will grow higher as the building grows. Inspired by a commonly used machine that dispenses nearly all of life’s necessities for the people of Tokyo, this vast framed structure aims to house a large number of pods equipped with basic amenities for residential and commercial use.

The design of the infrastructure suggests a dynamic environment where spaces for social interaction is established in several pockets throughout the building. The spatial structure of the building is designed to be flexible and mobile. Modules within the complex can move and regroup through mobile cranes and mechanical arms. The frame structure remains a constantly growing and developing spatial complex. The series of frames and individual pods are printed by 3D printer functions as the subsequent local consolidation and change.

The pods will be manufactured on-site creating an extremely efficient construction process. The pods are then transported below by cranes and plugged onto the megastructure. The positioning of the pods calculated by the building’s automated system. The 3D Printer which is constantly moving upwards receives materials that are pumped up by hydraulics on the sides of the building. Pods that are abandoned, after a certain period of time, will be dismantled and kept in storage or brought back to the printer – creating a closed loop.

The building creates a system that celebrates individuality as each pod can be customized differently according to user preference. The users are able to customize the pods based on their needs. They can do so by choosing from an array of ready-to-use sub-pods which are divided into basic amenities. For example, a user that does not require a kitchen, can choose to exclude it from the selection. When a family expands, they can choose to purchase an additional pod and reconfigure existing sub-pods which can be connected instantly. Aside from rental pods, the megastructure will also house small offices for start-up businesses and commercial centers that will grow within the structure. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Luca Beltrame, Saba Nabavi Tafreshi
Italy, Iran

Extract from the scientists report.
Planet Earth, March 16th 2039.

The world is a safe place again.
We went through the time when the complex patterns representing the world were doomed to collapse, climate was changing at a rate exceeding most scientific forecasts; oceans warming, air pollution and climate change were caught in a discernible self-boosting loop. Global warming was becoming catastrophic and irreversible. Thereupon, we grasped the urge to take action.

Carbon dioxide – the abundant greenhouse gas and primary driver of global warming – levels in Antarctica raised to an unprecedented number in 4 million years. “The far southern hemisphere was the last place on the earth where Carbon dioxide had not yet reached this mark”, Peter Tans, lead scientist, NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network (June 2016).

Climate migration, was not a prospective hypothesis, but the harsh reality. According to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, an annual average of 21.5 million people had been forcibly displaced by weather-related sudden onset hazards – such as floods, storms, wildfires, extreme temperature – each year since 2008. Thousands of others flee their homes in the context of slow-onset hazards, such as droughts or coastal erosion linked to sea level rise. Millions of people were foreseen to encounter migration movements and as a result, pursue habitat, expand the occupied territories and eventually spoil intact wild areas of the world.

But there was still hope.
Global collaboration and unity of nations targeting these worldwide aggravating circumstances by sharing technologies and knowledge, led to birth of project HEAL-BERG.

First HEAL-BERG unveiling ceremony: Antarctica May 27th 2022
Our vision for HEAL-BERG is to create independent complexes (in terms of energy and mobility), designed to cease, heal and reverse the process of climate change and its impacts on the earth. We went on a mission to collect some of the most recent innovative technology breakthroughs from all around the world, and combine them as elements of a greater embodiment operating as a whole to achieve a goal, survival. Our technologies are mainly functioning in four criteria, and have been proven possible in practice:

Cleansing and Purification
Converting carbon dioxide to oxygen by zapping it with laser (University of California, Davis)
Ocean water cooling

Energy Generation
Salinity Gradient Power: Generating electricity by two water streams with a salinity difference
Generating electricity from wind power: our specific aerodynamic design to channel the wind path through the turbines

Building Material
3D form of graphene (one of the strongest lightweight materials known) using extracted carbon from the process of converting CO2 to O2 (MIT)

Transportation
Hyperloop: fast access and connectivity
Drones: mobility of residential units between different complexes

Utilization of so-called technologies is not only to face the current environmental issues – such as air and water pollution and temperature rise – but also to provide residency for victims of the late changes, given the fact that HEAL-BERG is a source of clean energy, sustainability and entirely exempt from pollutions.

Climate change is a global matter, as well as its impacts; by addressing the fundaments (decreasing CO2 levels and producing clean energy), using high-speed transportation systems (Drones and Hyperloop) and requiring the least of preconditions (brine and sea water), HEAL-BERG is a unique solution overlooking all the physical borders; however, with the impacts not distributed evenly on our planet, there are some critical spots based on CO2 concentration, temperature rise, level of pollution, etc. that could become first priority for our location proposal.

We can succeed at only one condition, we have to act now. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Adriann Jeevananthan
United Kingdom

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, with a population of 4.5 million, with the city’s stable and high economic growth of 6.5% per annum over the last decade, it has become one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Due to large amounts of investments being injected into the construction, communication and mining sectors, Dar es Salaam is now prioritising infrastructural and commercial developments throughout the city. For this reason, many informal settlements are being destroyed for development, displacing hundreds and thousands of people, getting further and further away from the city’s infrastructure.

Due to Dar es Salaam’s huge shift in economy, the poverty rate has declined to approximately 28%. However, one in six people still live below the national poverty line, almost unchanged due to the high population rate.  While the city is growing, it is also rapidly urbanizing, but countless cannot afford to live within the city which leads to falling into informal settlements. 80% of informal settlements are overcrowded, lack clean water and adequate sanitary and are surrounded by garbage and toxic materials. With the expanding population, these problems will only escalate, putting more people’s livelihoods at risk.

The proposal seeks to address these problems by adapting and reconfiguring an alternative solution for slum-dwellers, by the means of a ‘Vertical Village’. This vertical village aims to provide a higher quality of life to the inhabitants, eliminating rough and unsanitary conditions for a cleaner and safer environment. The design also recognises the key factors associates with slum communities – autonomy, flexibility and a strong sense of community. This offers dwellers the opportunity to develop in synchronisation with the rest Dar es Salaam.

The boundaries of dwelling, work/office spaces, education and childcare, healthcare, leisure in one building have been blurred by diffusing the programmes, rather than isolating them within different sections, creates a distributed resilience, a rich and interactive environment which echoes atmospheres of slum communities. Additionally, each type of function is assigned a colour inspired by the highly saturated Tingatinga painting style, native to Dar es Salaam.

A vast amount of high-rise buildings in hot climates mimic western models with sealed facades, reliant on air-conditioning and have little solar shading. This proposal intends to protect inhabitants and take advance of the weather conditions of Dar es Salaam. The building provides a naturally ventilated, perforated, indoor-outdoor and shaded model to suite the tropical climate.

The project is modeled by slum-dwellers autonomous lives, by being self-sufficient, in mimicking nature’s closed loop system. The Vertical Village is constructed above an unused swamp, which will take advantage of the water by the means of agriculture and aquaculture. Small pods are used to create nested ecologies, broadening the variety of vegetation grown in Dar es Salaam and Tanzania, offering people a more nutritious diet.

A crucial part of the scheme is to teach occupants about safer and cleaner living, so they can share the knowledge and skills they have been offered to other communities. Small hubs of work stations, dwellings, leisure, childcare and healthcare facilities will be erect in and around the city and further, creating translocal, transnational and transglobal civic networks between poor communities. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2017 Skyscraper Competition

Ryan Ibarra
United States

The Mountain is a skyscraper located in California at Yosemite National Park. The structure reaches almost 3,000 feet in the year and is conceptualized to exist congruously with the existing environment.

Concept
The illusion of separation between man and nature continues to be perpetuated in the zeitgeist of a culture where forward thinking and technological advancement come at the expense of our environment. A relationship constrictively defined as occupant (man) and habitat (nature), the general consensus is that one is recurrently intruding on the other. In the pursuit to reconcile this dichotomy, The Mountain generates a spacial and functional relationship between context and program. To cultivate a harmonious environment, the structure combines synthetic and natural resources that equilibrate the necessities of man and nature.

Architecture
The Mountain takes the primitive idea of naturally cavernous space and combines it with the form of a modern skyscraper. Using a grid to establish a framework for the design, the mountain cliffside becomes the host for the spaces to be carved out of. These extrusions are negative spaces embedded in the towering natural structure of the earth. Individually, the habitats are able to occupy different programs varying in scale. When aggregated together the volumes form a monolithic skyscraper reaching thousands of feet into the the air.

Program
Against the background of a natural environment, the project seeks to encourage observation, exploration, preservation, and research. As an Observatory and Conservatory, science becomes the foundation for the program to thrive. It can respect a sensitive natural landscape and support mankind’s curiosity for knowledge and discovery. The goal is to begin an architectural typology that exemplifies the potential for a balanced environment. The Mountain draws from a primitive design concept, but in doing so is able to achieve a built environment that is forward-thinking in a natural and technical way. Read the rest of this entry »