Honorable Mention
2018 Skyscraper Competition
Jonathan Ortega
United States
Aviation has made the world a smaller place. A century ago it would take weeks to travel across a continent by rail, and months to traverse the oceans by ship; today, travelers can cross an ocean in a matter of hours and circumnavigate the globe in a few short days. As air travel has shrunk the world, however, aviation infrastructure has expanded exponentially. Today’s airports use a massive amount of space for terminals, concourses, taxiways, and runways. This growth is compounded by the surrounding roads and highways feeding into, out of, and around these sprawling airport complexes. Moreover, airports are often hemmed in by the surrounding infrastructure, limiting future growth and complicating current designs. The use of verticality of structures, while not new, opens up new opportunities for development and expansion of airports into smaller footprints, leaving more available land for green space as well as for other development possibilities. Future airports can take advantage of verticality to reduce their land use.
Verticality is not just for infrastructure; it is also the wave of the future for aircraft as well. Vertical takeoff and propulsion systems in future aircraft will minimize the need for the kinds of taxiways and runways that are omnipresent in today’s airports. Eliminating or minimizing the use of paved spaces will allow the available land to be used for alterative purposes, from green spaces and parklands to commercial and agricultural development. This reduction in paved spaces will have other benefits as well, including a reduction in the heat sinks seen in today’s cities and other developed areas. Read the rest of this entry »