Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Xinru Yang, Jiang An, Ning Sun, Yunwei Pan, Lifa Lin
China

For most local areas of cities, the content of an urban design is relatively specific. Gerald Crane once pointed out in the book “The Time of Urban Design”: “Urban design is the first level of design that studies the relationship between the main elements in the urban organizational structure. “In urban space design, architecture is the main factor that constitutes and affects urban space. Building form and volume have a direct impact on external space. The quality of individual buildings and group combinations directly affects people’s evaluation of the urban environment. The expansion of building scale and modern transportation development has changed the design concept of traditional architecture. In ancient times, people’s perception of buildings was based on walking or carriage speed (4~6 km/h), and they experienced 3~5 meters high vertical facades on both sides of the street: in modern cities, people’s perception of buildings Based on the driving speed of 30 kilometers per hour, feel the visual area from tens of meters to hundreds of meters on both sides of the street. Besides the emergence of large-scale buildings, super high-rise buildings and super-large comprehensive buildings, the rapid increase in population density, and the expansion of building scale from the past small scale to today’s mega-size, all of these have changed The relationship between man and architecture and the relationship between architecture and city. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Linnea Pettersson, Ludvig Sundberg, Carmen Povedano Olleros, Evelina Björndal
Spain, Sweden

One of the most urgent environmental issues today is the degradation of land, which is happening at an alarming rate. Around 25% of our total land area has already been degraded, and scientists predict that with 24 billion tons of fertile soil lost every year due to intensive industrial farming, 95% of Earth’s land will be degraded by 2050.

The importance of the Earth’s soil lies in its ability to store carbon and nitrous oxide, as well as hosting complex and diverse ecosystems containing thousands of microorganisms. Out of these organisms, more than a fifth are different types of fungi, which play a crucial part in the ecosystem. The root system of fungi, called mycelium, transforms organic waste into nutrients, binds carbon to the soil, and binds the soil together, making it resilient to heavy rain and floods. Mycelium is therefore the starting point of a long chain of processes that ultimately provides us with food, nutrition, and a healthy planet overall.

However, the destruction of this chain of events due to modern agriculture is resulting in soil degradation, making it poor in quality and ultimately infertile. With a growing population and an increasing demand for food, the Earth’s soil is bound to be destroyed by industrial agriculture unless something is done. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Lu Wang, Shuangjiang He, Ning He, Youjia Lv, Limin Wang
China

Due to the long-term global warming and “polar amplification effect”, the ice sheet formed naturally during the Arctic glacial period is much smaller than that reduced during the melting period, and the Arctic sea ice area has decreased by 95% in the past 40 years. Scientists predict that by 2040, there will be little ice in the Arctic Ocean in the summer. Sea ice is an important habitat, migration channel, and breeding place for polar animals, and plays a key role in regulating global climate.

Therefore, we propose a low-energy ice-making method: by reducing the salt content of seawater to make it easier for seawater to freeze naturally, using the method of “freezing a huge piece of ice layer by layer” to accelerate the freezing. When we use seawater, we also use pressure difference to make seawater enter the building naturally, so the whole ice-making process almost consumes no energy. In order to make it easier for the ice to form a complete ice surface, we design the ice cube as a regular hexagon. A regular hexagon is not only easy to assemble but also not easy to disperse. When a piece of ice forms, it is put on the sea and pushed to the shore of the ice sheet by an underwater UAV. Whether it is to make desalinated seawater freeze naturally or to transport seawater through pressure difference, it is our attempt to low energy consumption “environmental protection” building. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Daniel Hambly
United Kingdom

The biorefinery sits atop an old street roundabout, which is directly on the border between the London boroughs of Hackney and Islington. The site was chosen as it was plagued by multiple social and ecological issues that an elegant architectural solution could begin to solve.

Firstly, it is one of the most polluted areas in Hackney, with levels of n02 reaching 60 micrograms per cubic meter, exceeding the safe 40 microgram level. Similarly, the roundabout houses an old street tube station which is a well-frequented stop on the northern line, however, due to the busy nature of the roundabout above, permeability and access to the station remain poor. Finally, the borough of Hackney has pledged to reach net-zero emissions across all its functions by 2040 and plans to follow a ‘high tech’ approach to doing so, however little progress has currently been achieved.

These factors provide the opportunity to create a meaningful and beautiful piece of architecture that uses sustainable technologies to produce clean energy and cleaner air while providing additional housing and office space to the surrounding fabric. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention 
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Yinan Qin, Bo Wei, Jingting Yan, Chao Xie
China

Since ancient times, humans have coexisted with viruses and plagues which—from the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century to the raging coronavirus in 2019—threatens humankind’s survival. The relationship between humans and viruses implies and gives birth to a new mode of production and lifestyle. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has made people pay more attention to public hygiene and laid more stress on the need for isolation space than ever.

Based on the premise of the normalization of pandemics, the design features a new mode of human residence under extreme conditions where infectious diseases break out at any time in the future. It’s a fully enclosed three-part modular building. The lower part is a quarantine area for those who contract a virus; the middle part is a virus monitoring area for those who are in an unknown health status, which also serves as a buffer zone for people’s commuting and activities; the upper part is a space of residential units with absolute safety. A vertical structure connects the three parts with a magnetic levitation device, ensuring their functioning and mobility among them in the vertical direction. All people’s traffic and connections go through the health monitoring area in the middle of the building. This buffer zone is a “window of community” fully controllable under extreme conditions. Its height changes according to the number of healthy people, reducing the spread of the virus. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Dian Rui, Shuangyu Teng, Yucheng Feng
China

Problems of the Cliff Village
Cliff Village is located in Sichuan Province, China. It is an isolated ‘island’ in the mountains which is 800m above the ground deep. Hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of the village moved here to escape the war. The local villagers live a self-sufficient life. The only rattan ladder is important transportation for them to communicate with the outside world. Although the steel ladder has been rebuilt in Cliff Village, the poverty problem has become prominent due to inconvenient transportation. Thus, we hope to build a vertical traffic tower to solve the problem of inconvenient traffic in Cliff Village At the same time, we hope to increase industrial possibilities in the building to solve the poverty problem of villagers. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Shuxian Li, Qiuchen Zheng, Yujia Hu, Jiaxin Wen
China

The city is divided into several districts under artificial planning. People walk, commute, purchase, and outings according to the routes established by the planner. But in today’s pandemic of infectious diseases, free activities, as usual, carry the risk of infection, but to prevent and control the epidemic, the city is blocked and the city is paralyzed, and countless residents lose their freedom.

We imagine that in the post-epidemic era, in order to avoid the risk of infection caused by long-distance commuting and purchasing, people’s activities will return from the city to the community. We imagine that there is a spontaneously formed skyscraper in the gap between community buildings: the daily necessities (food, energy, and anti-epidemic products) needed by people are set up on the upper part of the building, and transported down to reduce the possibility of pollution. Build up the used space, and if necessary, it can be completely isolated from the outside. People are no longer bound by top-down urban planning and district jurisdiction, and spontaneously build their own activity spaces from bottom to top, realizing freedom from planning to freedom of creation. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Leonie Blum, Katharina Frank, Ritaj Albaje, Simon Sundin
Sweden

The history of man is a story of nomads, travelers, and migrants. Even though we had a year of unprecedented restriction in movement due to a pandemic, the demand for free movement will not disappear. Humankind has always been on the move.

However, not all move by lust or a sense of discovery. Sometimes you need to leave your home country. Poverty, war, family, love, the reasons why we migrate are as many as there are immigrants. But when you have arrived many of the struggles are similar. Understanding where you are, the customs of the new place, finding a job, learning a new language, and making a home for yourself.

The skyscraper named ‘Pathway of Belonging’ is located in Morocco. A quickly developing country which in recent migration history has only been a pit-stop for people seeking a new life in Europe. However, due to its growing economy, is Morocco now an attractive destination country for immigrants. A significant number of sub-Saharan Africans now call Morocco their home (ca 700 000 people in a country of 34 million). This building is for them to use. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Habib Shahhoseini, Mohaddeseh Eskandarzadeh, Ardalan Kiavar, Saba Salahpour, Ata Rad
Iran

With the industrialization of cities, the presence of pollutants has become one of the serious global environmental problems that have caused pollution of soil, water, air, ocean surface, and even it’s subsurface. The purpose of participating in this competition is to present a mechanism suspended on the surface of the oceans called the Skyscraper of Environmental Care that can be a response to eliminate human environmental pollution in the air, water, and seabeds at the same time.

In the design process, a fungal single-celled living algae (called Physarum) with animal-like behavior (with capabilities such as very high intelligence, self-healing power, rapid movement and growth, high adaptation to the environment, and ultimately immortality) that living in the oceans was used as the main constituent element of the studied skyscraper. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2021 Skyscraper Competition

Seyed Shervin Hashemi
United States

Debilitation in aspects of the built environment is one of the fundamental consequences of the pandemic.

Time Machine initiates a novel approach to constructing objects with spatial properties, one that integrates the construction’s technical solutions along with an aesthetic solicitude with composition, enforced to immerse functionality as an emergent property of both. Objects are to exist not merely to express the aesthetic of the artist’s perception but also to implement a comprehensive interpretation of the material, composition, and form manifested and entangled within the idea of multifunctionality. The object is to be operated as a whole with an infinite scale in multiple directions: Infinite in size, infinite in combination, infinite in detail, and infinite in function.

We are continually accelerating to a universe with more possible states, generating all sorts of intriguing implications. Pandemic nudged our visions to a new experience of the futuristic life with its compulsory dynamism, its needs to the immaculate affordance of the built environment, and its rare and disorientating qualities of space and time. Time Machine is an embodiment of our progressing society’s social state, calling for an objective critique of modern objects with an insight into their capacities to boost performance followed by the technical description of aesthetic. Read the rest of this entry »