Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Zijie Nie, Chen Shen, Jian Zheng
United States

Affected by global climate change, many countries and regions are suffering from sea-level rise problems, where people are losing their lands, plants and animals are losing their homes. The design is based in Kiribati, an island country in the South Pacific. This reef-preserving country is particularly vulnerable to the rising sea level issues, and its territory is thought likely to disappear within the next 60 years.

The design proposes to constructs a series of wall-like skyscrapers in the offshore waters and combats the problems caused by rising sea levels in three aspects.

First, by studying the erosion of the coast and the direction of the ocean currents, the design of the architectural massing is used to slow down the speed of the ocean currents flowing around the building. With such a method, the sand and mud in the water are able to deposit as sediment and gradually cultivate the new islands over time.

Second, with the design of skyscraper, land area submerged by seawater was transferred to the air, and thousands of residential units were built in the air to provide a place for people to live and use, protecting them from natural disasters such as hurricane and flood.

Thirdly, while constructing a vertical ecosystem to provide greening for people living in it, it can also become a seed bank for retaining plant diversity in Kiribati and other South Pacific regions. Meanwhile, a large number of artificial components located between underwater structures can be a place for coral reef protection and regeneration.

Finally, we hope that through this design, we will challenge the traditional architectural design thinking—generating land first, then architecture. It provides a new building mode for Kiribati and other regions faced with the same sea-level-rise problem—growing land with buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Thomas Gössler
Austria

With deforestation being one of the biggest human-driven environmental problems this tendency not only has to be stopped but needs to be reversed. Using conventional methods such a reversal could take decades. The aim of this project is to use skyscrapers in combination with modern technology to automate the process of reforestation and re-naturalization.

The problem of deforestation is publicly known and can be defined as the loss of trees induced by both humans and other causes. It potentially affects wildlife, ecosystems, weather patterns, and even the climate and is mainly caused by either the natural loss of trees due to climate change and increasing devastation, especially in hot and dry areas or the manmade reduction of forest area which includes farming, grazing of livestock, mining, drilling and accounts for more than half of all deforestation. In Malaysia and Indonesia, forests are cut down to make way for producing palm oil; whereas in Brazil cattle ranching and farms—particularly soy plantations—are the key culprits. Many organizations are fighting to plant new trees. But despite such efforts, between 1990 and 2016, 1.3 million square kilometers of forest have been destroyed. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Victor Hugo Azevedo, Cheryl Lu Xu
United States

At the beginning of the 20th Century, flying was one of the greatest achievements of humanity and the world was mesmerized about the possibilities that were about to open up. In that era of ingenuity, aviation was regarded as a romantic endeavor, a promise to tie people together and make the world smaller.

A century later, humanity is finally able to assess the magnitude of that feat that once was regarded as a miracle. Airplanes were at the centerstage of Great Wars, great shifts in geopolitical power, and gave rise to an ever-growing international elite of frequent flyers. The world of today is a different place, and the undeniable success of commercial aviation meant that flying airplanes has become one of the most substantial contributors to climate change.

A Tale of Two Issues
At the same time, we are in the middle of one of the biggest aviation crises for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing. Thousands of their newly designed 737 Max are unable to fly and are stored in airport facilities across America. What if they never fly again? What happens when the aviation industry slows down? And what to do with the significant number of decommissioned planes in storage facilities in the desert such as Victorville?

Meanwhile, on the ground, the world has a gigantic housing shortage and many marginalized social groups are unable to find a place to live. Not too far from the aircraft storage facilities, the county of Los Angeles has 60,000 people that have no place to live. A chunk of this population happens to be military veterans, who are denied the opportunity to start new lives as civilians due to the high cost of living and inadequate housing supply, as well as general stigma around post-traumatic stress disorder. How to spatially tackle this social problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Bryant Lau Liang Cheng
Singapore

Skyscrapers, as its name suggests; refer to the vertical ambition to reach towards the skies and reside among the clouds. The tallest building often soars over others dramatically; operating as a symbol of power and icon of might. This supremacy is unquestioned – yet the reign is often ephemeral and bounded by the constraints of time – since newer buildings can almost always eclipse this height in due time by harnessing newer technologies or regulations. A never-ending competition for height results – leading to emerging trends of taller buildings that are severely detached from the ground levels and out of human proportion; casting harsh shadows over mankind and existing as a built form of social oppression. In response to these conditions – this project proposes a time-based approach with individual and community involvement, to redefine the notion of the skyscraper as a social apparatus instead of a capitalistic one. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Ju Hwan Lee, Jin Ah Kim, Jong Min Choi
South Korea

Background
Among all environmental issues, air pollution is the most pressing and complex environmental problem nowadays. As WHO announced, most of the world’s population lives in an inappropriate air condition. But we concern air quality which is mainly related to inland regions despite water covers about 70% of the planet’s surface.

The ocean is not immune to these deep environmental issues. Lots of smoke from the land, ships going between continents, docking facilities, and HVAC systems in ships still use fossil fuels and emit smoke. Especially, the decrepit engine produces a large number of pollutants due to the use of low-quality fuel and its incomplete combustion. This contaminated air moves around the ocean and has already affected water quality, acidity and the marine ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Beomsu Kim, Sanghun Kim
South Korea

Change of Terra – Terraforming in Permafrost
If the greenhouse gas increases more than 940 ppm (parts per million) by the year 2100, the coastal and inland area that inhibits 750 million people will be submerged from the year 2050, and about 29 percent of the Earth’s surface will be desertified. This means approximately a quarter of people from all over the world will be affected by climate change. Also, since 2018, the rate of climate refugees constitutes about two-thirds (18 million) of worldwide refugees (28 million). Therefore, if a settled environment has been collapsed, people should migrate to a new base. We focus on permafrost, which is frozen northern half, as the people’s new base. If the global temperature increases continuously, Russia’s Siberian and permafrost (22.8*10^6 km2), which is more than double the area of the States (9.8*10^6 km2), will be able to accommodate a lot of climate refugees, and it will also get ideal climate.

However, the thickness of ice is about 80 m and the ground of permafrost, which is consisted of polygonal patterned wetland and ice-wedge, is still inappropriate to develop the infrastructure and natural forest. Moreover, new puddles and waterways, which were produced by global warming, accelerate the stratum instability and may act as a channel that makes carbon dioxide and methane go through to the air, and this will cause more serious global warming and air pollution. Therefore, a strategy is required to be able to establish the settlement at the unsettled land and atmosphere. We suggest the terraforming of permafrost by a design structured with a systematic mechanism. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Jiang Donglin, Yue Kaiyun, Tian Shaohong, Dai Mingqi, Ma Xinyue, Zhu Yilong
China

Tulou is a traditional residential building in Fujian Province. Its architectural form is closely related to local people’s farming activities and ancestor worship activities. But because it is built for defense purposes, all the space used is an inward closed space. The thick outer wall of the earth building becomes the space boundary, which confronts the external danger and provides shelter for the internal. The interior is open to the patio and ancestral hall, and life sacrifice activities are included under the protection of the wall. This building attempts to build a high-rise building on the top of the original earth building, and gradually reverse the internal and external relations and turn internal to the external.

The new building grows on the original earth building. The external wall of the new building extends upward from the original rammed earth wall, and the wall is gradually enlarged from the bottom to the upper window. At last, the wall is gradually transformed from the wall to the thin beam-column. The material is transited from the heavy rammed earth to the light modern steel column. The internal courtyard extends upward from the transparent to opacity and solid, and gradually becomes the cylinder structure of the new building. Through changes of the external rammed earth wall and the internal colonnade, the original inward space is gradually transformed into outward space from the bottom to the top. Under this change, the internal and external relations of the original space are replaced. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Finbar Charleson
United Kingdom

CONCEPT
The project proposes a timber high rise in downtown Vancouver combining public cultural programs with the technical and legislative processes of a successful land claim for the expansion of indigenous territory. The timber tower stands in direct dialogue with the steel and glass structures of downtown Vancouver, offering a contemporary interpretation of the traditional totems and Longhouses of the Northwest Native Cultural region, making a clear statement about the ambitions of the region’s tribes. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Jingxuan Yang, Jingwen Na, Tianhao Wu, Hangyi Guo
China

‘McFashion’, which is represented by H&M, ZARA, and GAP, has become a trend and spread all over the world. ‘McFashion’ is a sales model which always provides the latest clothes at the lowest prices. A ‘McFashion’ brand can launch more than 10, 000 saleable garments a year, and the average cycle from design to shelf is only about two weeks. But the debate over the environmental ethics of fast fashion is heating up.

According to a report, human beings over 100 billion pieces of clothing are consumed every year. Overall, 92 million tons of waste dumped into landfills each year comes from the industry. A separate report found that about 35 percent of microplastic pollutants are emitted while washing synthetic textiles, mostly by fast-fashion brands. It is clear that the environmental concerns caused by ‘McFashion’ should raise our attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Taiming Chen, Zhendong Long
United States

Abstract
What are the social trends and changes that are affecting the development of skyscraper typologies? What is the future for those existing super-tall residential towers that have similar forms and structure systems? What is the next-decade expectation toward residential skyscrapers? How will the skyscrapers respond to the increasing needs in urban density?

Design Gesture
In this project, we are exploring a new typology of tower design by bringing up the idea of “customization in mass-production” for those supertall residential skyscrapers. Architecturally, the design is to utilize the existing structure as the basis and add the new hanging structures in sky lobbies to allow the additional spaces to hang outside of the towers. Programmatically, individual needs, which are varied in time, become the focus of post-built design development. Residents can individually customize their cubic spaces as they need, and the building owner will hang them in front of the residents’ doorway. The fundamental concept in the project is about the users’ engagement in the after-built development process of the tower – the further tower shall have the capability of housing their changing needs architecturally and programmatically. Read the rest of this entry »