Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Amanda Gunawan, Joel Wong
United States

The future of cities
With continuous expansion, will cities reach a looming point of plateau where its growth starts to hinder its efficacy? In the first place, why do we live in a city? What makes living in a city so attractive? It is simply a hyper-efficiency consisting of a working system that is the result of the combinatory forces of great infrastructure and density, working tangentially to support growth. This growth makes a city abundant in opportunities but what then happens to a system whose demand and supply forces becomes imbalanced? There becomes an oversupply of inhabitants and a lack of infrastructure supporting it and vice versa- the state that most “great” cities are headed. Over-pollution and over-population will occur and efficacy becomes compromised with growth. When the drawbacks of automation start to outweigh its benefits, where do we go next and in what direction? Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Adam Fernandez
France

Badgir (In Persian literal translation:bâd « wind » + gir « catch ») is a traditional element of Persian architecture used from centuries to create natural ventilation and to refreshinside the buildings, more particularly in the living room area. These wind towers are vertical ducts looking as large chimneys allowing to capture and to direct the winds towards the interior of buildings. We can see them in important quantity in the desert area of the center of the country.

The interior of the tower is vertically separated into several ducts to allow the circulation air descending flow (bringing freshness) and air ascending flows (expelling hot air) currents thanks to the differential atmospheric pressures created. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Bilal Torğul, Mücahit Bilal Goker
Turkey

There have never been so many people on earth in history as right now. As everyone knows, with the industrial revolution, the standards of living raised and became more available. The result was the population explosion. In the last century, the world population increased fourfold. The unprecedented rate of population growth caused unequal income distribution. While some people increase their wealth,the rest became more and more poor. This economic progress formed classes among people. And the poor have been forced to live in worst. For the cities, which had these kind of differences, the slums were the inevitable end. So what can be expected for the next century?

This process didn’t happen in the exactperiod for all countries.  While some complete their demographic transition, others were at the first stage and until they complete the transition, an unbelievable income inequality occurred between countries. Last century, the richest countries were only 3 times richer than the poorest. Today the gap is like 100 to 1.That cause an unstoppable increase on amount of people live in slums,even though the rate of population growth has been decreasing. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Tony Leung, Miranda Chan
Hong Kong

In the age of “Level 5” (fully automated) autonomous driving, a vehicle (e.g. Toyota

E-Palette) can be adopted as Mobile Green house, travelling between farmers and buyers directly.

These vehicles can be charged at vertical “docks” equipped with PV charger and drainage system when idle. The best dock available will be selected by central computer and directed by GPS automatically to suit solar demand of different crops. The “dock” becomes a ever-changing organism with its own ‘metabolism’

Recent development in hydroponic technology makes vertical planting possible. Not only farmers but enthusiast or family can hire or own a mobile green house for weekend farming. The docking ports are connected by double spiral ramps; car lift and staircase are provided for services and pedestrian circulations. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Muhammed Aydem, Burak Arifoglu, Omer Faruk Demir
Turkey

In 1992, Edward Said wrote that the ever-increasing scale of displacement in the world marked the 20th Century as “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass migration”. Since then, there has been an even more unprecedented increase in the number of migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced persons worldwide. According to the UNHCR reports, by the beginning of 2018, 71.4 million individuals left their places to live elsewhere. This number included those who were forcibly displaced due to war, famine, natural disasters, political conflicts, violence, or human rights violations, as well as returnees and stateless persons. If this were the population of a country, it would be the 20th largest in the world.

We see this as an increasing problem of homelessness, not defined only by lack of shelter or space, but also by a lack of belonging to a place. We believe that architectural design should be able to offer solutions for people who find themselves, voluntarily or involuntarily, in such a condition. How can these people create their own lives without being restricted by states, authorities, institutions, or established socio-cultural norms of thinking and behaving. How can they transcend the borders that they are faced with? Can the borders of countries be interpreted again to provide a space where people can create their own lives and establish their own belonging? Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Tsung-Ying,Hsieh, Hsuan-Ting, Huang
Taiwan

Based on the report of urban planning in Singapore, our chosen domain is gene storage in 2100. Estimates based on bacterial genetics suggest that digital DNA could one day rival or exceed today’s storage technology. Gene Tower is like a home tree between citizen and a huge seed that symbolizes the gene carrier. Gene Tower provides a new strategy of gene storage for big data. Synchronously, it brings an idea of delighted sharing and environmentally friendly lifestyle to the rapid development of city. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

You Gundon, Lee Minwi, Kang Ryunhong, Moon Junho
South Korea

With the advent of a new era, cities must be able to accommodate more demands than they have in the past, and the role of cities has become even more extensive. Indeed, the city requires dense residential space, a common use space where people can be together, and green spaces. Facing such demands, the cities are changing rapidly, and the speed of the change is accelerating.

However, going through past experiences have revealed that rapid urbanization engenders various urban problems such as lack of residential space, slumming, harms done to existing urban context and tradition, and adulteration of environment. Many of Europe’s metropolises were able to cope with such challenges and slowed down rapid changes because they were able to accommodate the changes over long periods of time. On the contrary, in the cities of newly developing countries or other traditional cities where there is no sufficient infrastructure, it is difficult to control the speed of change and it is accelerating. These cities need a new approach because they have to cope with the changes and resolve those issues in a short period of time.

We propose a vertical urban space as a measure that traditional cities can adopt to overcome rapid urbanization and meet the demands of rapidly changing cities, all the while preserving tradition. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Piotr Yurchanka, Alexey Kunko, Vladislav Sidorenko, Dmitry Tkachuk
Belarus

In a pursuit of technological progress which allegedly improves our life we forget to pay due attention on what has supported our comfortable existence on this small planet for thousands of years.

Problem
Swamps are the”lungs of the planet”. The benefits they provide are comparable to the benefits of forests. Every swamp is an amazing organism. Like all life on Earth, it breathes, but how?

Swamps absorb carbon dioxide and constantly emit oxygen. Tons of pure oxygen.

The swamps are home to hundreds of different types of animals and plants. This is an unknown world, with its own laws and rules.

In the middle of the last century, the total area of ​​swamps in Belarus was 2,940 thousand hectares (14.2% of the entire territory of the country). After 60 years, the area of ​​swamps on the territory of Belarus has decreased by 3.5 times. Currently it is only 860 thousand hectares.

Unfortunately, mass swamp reclamation (drainage), which began in the middle of the last century, led to irreversible consequences, such as fires, drought, soil degradation and the complete destruction of certain types of animals and plants not only in Belarus, but also in all Eastern Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Honglin Li
United States

FILTRATION is a waste-management and waste-to-energy power plant skyscraper located in the “Eighth Continent”- it often refers to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. It spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. The size of the patch is estimated to be 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean, twice the size of Texas, thrice the size of California, the rubbish layer is on average 100 feet thick. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not the only vortex—it’s just the biggest. The Atlantic and Indian Oceans both have trash vortexes. Even shipping routes in smaller bodies of water, such as the North Sea, are developing garbage patches.

FILTRATION essentially is a highly modularized prefabricated waste-management and waste-to-energy power plant megastructure that contains several Material Recovery Facilities (MRF) and Water Treatment Plants (WTP) to recycle the floating garbage continent and clean the seawater in all levels from the different ocean across the world. The innovative not only for self-sustaining but also helping resolve the world energy crisis for this coming century. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2019 Skyscraper Competition

Karol Łącki, Dominik Pierzchlewicz, Szymon Ciupiński
Poland

In 50 years’ time there will be more rubbish than fish in the ocean.Without interfering in temporal activities, the world of marine fauna and flora will die. The most important step mankind should take is to stop further waste emissions, as well as to raise awareness of waste management. The world of architecture faces the challenge of counteracting to one of the most serious problems in the world. Read the rest of this entry »