Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

YiYing Zhou, Yang Pei, Shuwei Li, Jieliang Zhu, Bingxu Huo
China

In recent years, rapid urban and economic development, coupled with the swift concentration of populations in cities, has placed increasing pressure on urban areas—particularly major cities. Symptoms such as population expansion, traffic congestion, housing shortages, environmental degradation, and resource constraints have become frequent occurrences. At the same time, a lack of scientific planning has led to phenomena such as disruptive upgrades or the demolition-reconstruction cycle in attempts to address “big city problems.” This reflects the current state of the construction industry, which is characterized by high speed, high consumption, high pollution, and low efficiency.

As of 2023, there are approximately 30 cities worldwide with populations exceeding 10 million and population densities over 2,000 people per square kilometer, mainly concentrated in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. With accelerating urbanization, this number is likely to continue rising. Megacities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and New York have become primary targets for development. These cities feature dense clusters of skyscrapers, high-rise residential and commercial buildings, large and socially complex populations, and diverse industries including finance, technology, manufacturing, and services. Their functional structures are intricate and varied, with distinctive skylines and advanced infrastructure that nonetheless faces aging and overcapacity issues. Public green spaces and open areas are scarce, while education, healthcare, and transportation systems are under significant strain. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Zhiyu Wei, Sixiao Li, Wei Deng, Yinye Chen, Tianyun Zhang
China

The current development of the world economy has led to uneven distribution of resources and unequal opportunities, forming a fixed class division and differentiated lifestyles. Each class is confronted with numerous problems at both the spatial and psychological levels. For this purpose, Elysium equalizer aims to promote class integration and is a vertical utopian experimental site. Its core objective is to counter class solidification through a spatial revolution. It adopts innovative design schemes such as super high-rise park-style buildings, uses vertical Spaces to create buffer zones, promotes interaction among people from different social backgrounds, and enables remote participation and anonymous communication through technologies like VR to alleviate urban challenges, break down class barriers, enhance the symbiosis between people and buildings, and thereby build a more equal and interactive urban environment. Rebuild social relationships through a triple design strategy: spatial reset, eliminating physical isolation in vertical cities; Rebuilding rules, replacing capital privileges through a value economy, and promoting social contributions; Identity reconstruction breaks the actual class boundaries through virtual characters. This building reconstructs the skyscraper from a “capital totem” into a social experimental field through a triple mechanism of physical equality, spatial editability and behavior-driven environment, truly returning entertainment and resource allocation to a “people-oriented co-construction”. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Jae Woo Lee
South Korea

Architecture is no longer bound to the surface of the Earth. As humanity extends its ecological, economic, and cultural systems vertically into near-space, the role of architecture must transform from composing cities on land to shaping planetary-scale vertical habitats. This project envisions an integrated megastructure that merges building, infrastructure, and orbital mechanics into a single spatial organism. a new architectural typology for the age of Earth Orbit urbanism.

At its core is an 800 km hyper-tapered tower that rises from the equatorial ocean. Its geometry follows a precise structural and aerodynamic logic:
800 m in diameter at sea level, narrowing at 800 km.

The lower atmosphere demands a softened, aerodynamic skin; the upper strata transition to a cable-supported exoskeleton, and beyond that, to a radiation-shielded pressure hull. This continuous gradient expresses the tower’s central thesis: architecture, when stretched across the atmosphere, must evolve by altitude. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Haimiao Zhang, Biying Li, Yifan Ma, Linzhi Lu
China

The project is situated in the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert—Earth’s largest and most extreme arid landscape. Stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and spanning 11 nations, the Sahara covers nearly 9.32 million square kilometers. It endures less than 50 mm of rainfall annually, experiences decades-long droughts, and oscillates between scorching days of over 50°C and freezing nights. These relentless conditions render large portions of the region almost entirely uninhabitable.

Inspired by one of the desert’s most resilient native species—the cactus—the project reimagines how architecture might survive, adapt, and regenerate life in hyper-arid environments. Cacti possess an evolved suite of survival mechanisms: thick aqueous stems for water storage, waxy or hairy epidermis for solar reflection and moisture protection, and extensive root systems capable of absorbing scant moisture across vast ground areas. These biological strategies form the conceptual and technical foundation of the proposed architectural system.

At the urban scale, a digital generative method is used to determine the distribution of modular units. Each unit behaves like a particle released into the terrain, interacting through collision and pressure until reaching a state of spatial equilibrium. By filtering units that align with the existing dune morphology and connecting them through elevated walkways, the method yields adaptable settlements capable of being deployed anywhere in the Sahara—offering a new framework for both desert rehabilitation and inhabitation.

This process can be deployed anywhere in the Sahara and replicated endlessly, allowing the system to grow in clusters and form distributed ecological settlements across the desert. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Inseok Moon
South Korea

Humanity now lives in an age where technologies once imagined in fiction have become reality, yet natural disasters continue to threaten lives and ecosystems. Recent wildfires in Los Angeles, Australia, and various regions of Korea highlight the growing severity of these events. This project responds to that urgency by proposing an architectural system that anticipates disaster and minimizes damage. It seeks to explore how architecture, enhanced by current and future technologies, can evolve beyond the role of spatial design to become an active protector of human and natural life. The concept begins with the idea of a machine-built tree—an artificial organism rooted in the landscape, constantly observing, sheltering, and defending its environment. Like a tree that offers refuge, food, and structural stability, the tower aspires to function as a self-sufficient guardian within nature.

The project envisions a distributed network of towers arranged across the national landscape through a triangular grid system. With drone technologies capable of covering distances up to 100 kilometers, the towers are positioned at grid vertices to create a responsive surveillance field. Because a rigid grid cannot conform to Korea’s complex geography, the system is adapted to the contours of the land, resulting in twenty-one towers placed in locations optimized for coverage and terrain. When a wildfire ignites anywhere inside a triangular cell, the three towers surrounding that area deploy firefighting drones directly to the ignition point. The goal is to extinguish the fire before it grows to the size of a soccer field. To achieve this, the project calculates the water volume, drone capacity, and storage requirements for each tower. Additional analysis of logistics hubs, national parks, and high-risk regions determines the needed distribution of ecological monitoring and supply-chain functions. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Parv Shah, Reeshica Singh, Himanshu Sanghani
India

In laboratories around the world today, brain–computer interface experiments—led by companies like Neuralink—are pushing primate cognition into uncharted territory. These trials were originally created to treat neurological disorders, restore motor functions, and decode how the brain communicates with machines. Apes were chosen for their genetic proximity and their ability to participate in structured tasks. The goal was medical, contained, and human-centered.

But the results emerging in 2025 are far from what these experiments set out to achieve. Apes fitted with neural implants are now demonstrating abilities beyond scientific projections. They are solving complex cognitive puzzles, navigating multi-stage mazes, predicting patterns, and adapting to unfamiliar challenges with startling speed. Their learning curve is rising exponentially. What was meant to be a controlled clinical trial is becoming an evolutionary shift—one unfolding before us without frameworks to understand it.

And this breakthrough arrives at a moment when the built environment itself is under pressure. Cities are overheating. Forests are shrinking. Resources are drying up. Infrastructure is aging faster than it can be repaired. Even for humans alone, our cities are proving inflexible, fragile, and poorly adapted to the pace of global change. Yet architecture continues to operate under one assumption: that the only intelligent user of the city is the human.
Despite these rapid cognitive shifts, we remain reluctant to imagine the consequences. If apes begin to think like us but move, sense, and inhabit space as apes, how will they survive in cities built around human bodies, behaviour, and dominance? If another intelligent life form evolves beside us—capable of memory, problem-solving, and communication—our cities have no spatial strategy, no architectural language, and no shared system of movement, climate, or governance for coexistence. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

XiuMing Cui
China

As Shanghai Longtang, a symbol of the middle-class life in the 20th century, gradually faded away amid the roar of bulldozers, this high-rise complex attempted to preserve a fading memory for the city with a vertical narrative. The design systematically hoisted, migrated and recombined the demolished Shikumen door heads, bricks and components, so that they can break away from the original horizontal texture and re-collage, superimpose and grow in the vertical dimension. As time goes by, this building will continue to “grow up”, like a constantly writing city archive, analyzing and translating typical building types such as traditional Chinese houses, Colonial Style houses by western adventurers, and Grand Theatre of early 20th century , and completing a “folding” of space and time in the vertical field.

The project attempts to reconstruct the internal logic of Longtang life in the high-level form-through the public courtyards, vertical streets and alleys and semi-private transitional spaces between the platform floors, not only to achieve the recurrence of past life, but also to reproduce the traditional social form of neighborhood communication in the post-modern context and reconstruct the Jane Jacobs-style street-eye. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Junyang Chen, Xiaoqi Cheng, Huaiyu Li, Tonghao Liu
China

In a future scenario where global warming causes sea levels to keep rising, existing coastal cities are gradually swallowed by surging seawater. Yet humanity cannot easily abandon its established urban infrastructure and deep-rooted cultural memories. In response, an “umbrella-shaped city” rising from the water’s surface is envisioned as a new prototype of habitation.

The tower is entirely lifted above sea level, presenting an organic form somewhere between natural growth and artificial construction: a slender “stem” rises from the submerged old city, gradually spreading outward and upward to support a vast, concave canopy at the top. Inside the tower, a three-dimensional network structure organizes multi-layered spaces for housing, public activities, urban agriculture, and infrastructure, shifting everyday life from traditional horizontal neighborhoods to a vertically stacked, three-dimensional city. At the same time, fragments of iconic buildings from the original city are extracted, scaled, recomposed, and embedded at key nodes within the tower. Appearing as viewing halls, aerial streets, or memory gardens, these elements allow residents to maintain an ongoing connection with the images and stories of the old city within a new spatial order. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Chen Zhengwen, Zhang Hexiang, Chen Chi, Jiang Jiang
China

Under counter-urbanization trends, population growth in natural areas is driving the emergence of agricultural towns. Currently, such towns often prioritize farming conditions at the expense of living quality. For example, in Ningbo’s tea region, tea thrives in the humid mountaintop environment, while farmers typically live at the foothills. During harvests, they reside in temporary sheds, and processing occupies household space. This context creates an urgent need for an innovative vertical spatial model that reconciles optimal growing conditions with dignified living, resolving the inherent conflict in traditional horizontal layouts and meeting future demand for vertical farming villages.

This proposal explores a new adaptive vertical farming settlement system, using Ningbo tea cultivation as a case study to inform future agricultural communities. To balance living and farming, the system must dynamically integrate various functions within a vertical structure. Inspired by the interlocking logic of mechanical gears, we translate precise coordination into spatial relationships among farming, living, and processing, proposing the concept of a “Dynamic Adaptive Vertical Farming Settlement.”

The settlement core is an organic system capable of intelligent growth through self-regulation. Inspired by precisely meshed mechanisms, we establish a digitally coordinated relationship among three movable unit types: farming, residential, and processing. The farming unit, as the system’s core, is a highly mechanized intelligent device that autonomously manages light and water. Its surface panels unfold on cloudy days to capture diffuse light and close to provide shade; they also channel rainwater to storage for drip irrigation during dry periods, achieving fully mechanized climate control. The residential unit uses a fan-shaped rotatable modular design, allowing housing units to slide along the structure to adapt to varying seasonal needs, exploring new relationships between public and private spaces in a dynamic vertical community. The processing unit follows a mechanized workflow for tea production—drying, sorting, rolling—with a flexible position linked to farming areas via efficient logistics. Connected by a vertical circulation system, these units form a coherent organic whole operating like interlocking gears. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition

Abolfazl Malaijerdi
Iran

Contemporary urbanization has reached a geometric and ecological breaking point. Cities expand horizontally in a pattern that resembles an infinite open line—consuming land, erasing rural identity, destroying biodiversity, and exhausting infrastructures far beyond their intended limits. This project proposes a radical, mathematically defined alternative: a circular megastructure that transforms uncontrolled sprawl into a self-regulating urban boundary, allowing nature, agriculture, and community to re-emerge within a protected central territory.

The proposal is set at the edge of Reyshahr, a region where the city grows aggressively toward remaining agricultural grounds and historical rural settlements. The aim is not to design a vertical object but to redefine the skyscraper as a territorial system—one that reorganizes land consumption, energy cycles, and human settlement patterns. Instead of extending outward, the city becomes a continuous ring that contains its own growth. The interior, once threatened by expansion, is reclaimed as a large-scale ecological reserve: forest, productive farmland, natural water systems, and restored wildlife.

The circular geometry is not symbolic. It originates from the principles of pure mathematics. In topology, a circle is a compact set—finite, closed, and self-containing—an exact opposite of a divergent line. In Euclidean geometry, the circle distributes distance uniformly, enabling equal access, symmetric organization, and coherent spatial hierarchy. In real analysis, the circle represents the elimination of infinity: the act of turning limitless extension into a closed, stable, regulated form. These mathematical characteristics become architectural logic: the circular skyscraper becomes a limit, a boundary that stops sprawl, and a framework that reconnects the fragmented systems of modern metropolitan life. Read the rest of this entry »