Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Michal Gryko
United Kingdom

BACKGROUND
The Olympic events are not only known as the world’s principal sports competition but also as an opportunity as a host to showcase a nation’s legacy to the world.   As the games are pushing further through to the 21st century all the enticing prestige associated with hosting such a mega-event has proved to be riddled with economic drains including spiraling costs and ghost facilities remaining in post-event times.  From Seven modestly-sized venues of the first modern Olympics in 1896 to the 34 used in the last 2016 Olympics, the scaling of events and associated infrastructure and facilities has exponentially risen.  Juxtaposing the renowned success of Barcelona’s rejuvenation in from the 1992 Olympics and the dilapidated state of the 2004 Olympic events the post-Olympic inhabitation should be a carefully integrated scheme and not a mere afterthought. What legacy does the hosting country wish to impart in the following decades?

Currently, with preparations for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics moving to the final stages, the proposal takes the opportunity to deliberate the future form of the Olympics and uses for these megastructures using Japan as a case study.  The brief takes a scenario with a twofold approach; first to the scale of the events and associated construction and second to the Olympic park’s second life. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Jai Won Lee, Ryan Joongi Cho, Younchan Hwang, Woohyuk Choi
South Korea

Tree-tower carries a symbolism of preserving trees all over the world. By preserving all the varieties of the trees in one place, Tree-tower consists of over 50 thousand species which acts as the biggest air purifier in East Asia. Through a specialized modular system, each module not only transfers water and light, but it also has a splice which holds the building’s structure, presenting each tree’s environmental characteristics, allowing all trees to coexist at a shared location. The central part of the building has a park for the visitors when the basement of the building exhibits the seeds and saplings of trees all over the world, providing information on every tree in the world. However, because of the DMZ’s continuous management, the exit on the first floor doesn’t exist. Nonetheless, through the underground pathway, visitors can only view the interior of the building. Tree-tower is a symbol that shows the importance of conservation while preserving species diversity.

Tree-Tower will be located in DMZ. DMZ is a demilitarized zone followed by the ceasefire agreement that was signed after the Korean War in 1953. The government prohibits any citizen near the DMZ’s nature reserve and is therefore marked as Asia’s greatest nature preservation zone. In addition, DMZ’s district encompasses natural monuments and endangered species, such as the Asiatic Black Bears, foxes, musks, deer, goats, and otters, with its developed river and wetland. Therefore, by placing the TreeTower at the DMZ, it preserves the ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yilei Nie, Xibeini Luo, Bo Gao, Huan Wang
China

BACKGROUND
Beyond the landfills and trash heaps moldering in almost every town and city across the globe, manmade garbage has found its way into the natural landscape on a mind-boggling scale. It seems as though there are virtually no places left on Earth free of our rubbish. Junk can be found everywhere from the bellies of animals and the tissues of our own bodies to the world’s vast oceans. We are in a recycling system with other living things.  As Marine garbage producers, we are bringing disasters to other living things and gradually destroying our own lives.  What we throw away is gradually returning to us. It is urgent to improve the Marine environment and recycle Marine litter.

CONCEPT
The plastic trash floating in the ocean is not stationary. Instead, it keeps moving with ocean currents. If it is just point-to-point fishing, it will cost a lot of manpower and material resources. We conceived a building that could move continuously with ocean currents. It uses ocean currents to collect trash and turn it into other harmless materials as it travels. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yanru He
China, United Kingdom

Shanghai became the first city in China to recently enforce garbage classification. The program of this project includes waste treatment stations, publicity centers, vertical farms, and park facilities. The combination of various systems is to strengthen people’s awareness of garbage classification, solve the conflict between urbanization development and garbage disposal. This project mainly focuses on the Huangpu district of Shanghai to test the design system. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Jakub Kapral, Karolina Rusek, Marek Grąbczewski, Kamil Łępiński
Poland

Overview
NYC Grid is a project of urban megastructure that was designed to solve four main, present and near future, problems of New York City. However, the core of the idea is an attempt to answer the problems which apply to many other megacities in the world. The grid contains four complex technological and mechanical systems that together form one large-scale urban-architectural structure assumption. The structure attempts to provide an answer to problems such as urban sprawl, environmental degradation, pollution/noise/traffic due to traditional road transport and future inundation of the NYC streets. We think that this kind of megastructure could make a positive impact on the social, economic and industrial development of the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Maciej Worosilak, Dominika Kubicka, Alicja Prusińska, Karolina Kowalczyk
Poland,  United Kingdom

Over the last thirty years, the occident has been constantly confronted with an increasing lack of trust in public authorities. Years of a vicious circle when the arrogance of the elites has to lead the masses to the state of indifference. Society appears to be divided, consumed by passivity and susceptible to manipulation; full of disapproval for political classes, yet not concerned enough to fully supervise the elected authorities. Ancient Romans recognized this problem long ago rising the pivotal question – who watches the watchmen themselves? Centuries passed but we still fail to give the definite answer. Polish kings who sat in the Chamber of Deputies of the Wawel Castle were constantly watched by the crowd of heads overseeing the proceedings from the famous coffered ceiling. The ingenious design of Panopticon forced the inmates held in custody to behave properly under the pressure of being watched constantly. We use these precedents trying to bridge the gap between two sides of the system and to send an invitation for more active participation. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Milos Petrovic, Sara Stojkanovic
Italy

More than ever, the world is witnessing a high level of danger due to the constant increase in a number of natural disasters. Humanity is in demand of a fast-responding solution for evacuation and danger detection. Therefore, renewable energy and optimizing collaboration between program, technology, and architecture have come to the forefront of design approaches.

Giving an example of Tokyo, the project focus on tsunamis whose rapid growth has been reported in this region in the past decade. Earthquakes, the usual cause of tsunamis, aren’t uncommon in Japan as it sits within what’s known as the Ring of Fire, a chain of tectonic plate boundaries that hugs the Pacific basin. It’s home to around 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes. A decade ago, one of the deadliest natural disasters in history killed 227,898 people – nearly 170,000 of them in these regions. The people from Japan face an uncertain future as the next tsunami is predicted in a few years with 100% death rate in the area it affects, going 16 kilometers into the land. Is this country ready for the next one? Can it be saved by water force itself? Read the rest of this entry »

2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yusuf Aras Kalkan
Turkey

This Re-habitation project aims to achieve a special recovery and reevaluation process for large scale industrial wastes. Parallel to this idea, the project locates on a region where a power plant is operating for a couple of decades but facing a threat of being shut down because of its age and new filtration regulations for power plants in Turkey.

Rather than imagining how massive the natural and spacial impact will be caused by left-over structure, this approach of “re-habitating” the old structures tries to see the bright side of this condition and challenges to create a typology which offers a collecting and gathering system of industrial spaces which than proposes new ways of living and the concept of “residence” and “resident”. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Mojtaba Hatami
Iran

Pigeon Tower can be taken as an Iranian architectural wonder. This kind of architecture in the past, as agricultural infrastructure, has continued to be present in Iran. These towers were built on farms to attract pigeons. The pigeons were domesticated not for their meat (in general, birds are respected in Iranian culture), but rather for their droppings, which the locals collected and used to fertilize melon and cucumber fields. Pigeon dung was thought to be the best manure for these crops, and the tower was built for the purpose of attracting pigeons to them so they would nest in the towers and their dung could be harvested. The typical pigeon tower is cylindrical (circular ground plans) and because many animals prey on pigeons, the small size of the entrance prohibits large birds (predators) from entering inside. This is rooted in sustainable thinking in the native architecture of this land and the importance of this building in the field of agriculture and economics. Modern fertilizers and chemicals have rendered these magnificent structures obsolete leading to their abandonment in the fields, where they continue to deteriorate due to lack of maintenance.

Today, in Tehran, more than 170 species of birds have been recorded in the three main ecosystems (wetlands, woodlands, and mountainous regions), which, unfortunately, are reducing with the city expansion and destroying habitats. The current extinction rate of birds is several times higher than the normal rate. This means birds extinct at an incredible speed inflicting irreparable ecological damage.

On the other hand, soil fertility is a high priority among the many challenges ahead of agricultural production in the future. In the past, agriculture was a sustainable process, but the use of chemical fertilizers intensified with the increase in agricultural scale. This model which is based on cheap energy (production of chemical fertilizers requires a lot of energy) needs to be reviewed. Energy is no longer cheap and it’s necessary to take into account better options. The agricultural economy will change, and this is inevitable because the price of raw materials for fertilizer production has increased, which will attract attention to natural fertilizers. These organic fertilizers (animal manure, and especially bird manure) contain high levels of minerals and organic matter that can meet the needs of future agriculture. Read the rest of this entry »

Editors’ Choice
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yuanyuan Wu, Yifan Zhou
United States

Facing the pressure of population, land and natural resources, the airport in the contemporary world, most airports, as one of the most vital transportation buildings, are still left in suburban areas, isolated with inner-city, of large land occupation and high energy consumption. Vertical space organization method, which is of higher efficiency, lower land occupation needs to be applied into applied into airport, as a new kind of airport paradigm.

Vertical airports based on Electro-Magnetic Launch system technology (EMLS) may become possible in the future. This proposal breaks down the various functions of the airport into a kind of flexible urban component – “AERO SKIN” and integrates them into the urban space vertically. The vertical airport can wrap anything, just like human-built urban skin, and thus, can coexist with any types of urban space, such as public space, green area or buildings of various functions. The traditional airport paradigm will be completely changed. Read the rest of this entry »