Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Metamorphose
Axel Cailteux, Céline Hautfenne, Julie Neuwels, Delphine Termote
Belgium

Valdrade brings a new definition of a city dense space, based on 3 interdependent vectors: density, sustainability and diversity. We must consider the city as a true ecosystem, able to manage its self-sufficiency and its self-generation.Valdrade expands as an “upper city” above the existing “lower city” to enable a zero ground occupation and to compensate the deficiencies.

The lower city consumes whereas the upper city produces by the plug-in of self-sufficiency generators. So the entirety of the infrastructures, necessary to the city life, is replaced in the urban network. These infrastructures are currently off shored in suburban areas, participating to the urban sprawl and energetic expenditures. These plug-in create positive energy poles to compensate the current buildings over-consumption. They provide different ways of recycling, so that the whole cycle can slide back, in such a way that someone’s wastes become some other’s raw materials and sources of energy.
The self-sufficiency generators propose a photovoltaic skin and wind turbines for the electricity production, lagooning for the waste water purification and recycling area for the organic and paper waste recycling and production of recycled paper, compost and gas by methanization. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Hong Wong, SheungHok Lim
United Kingdom

In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population is living in cities than rural areas, that’s 6.6 billion of us. By 2050, this figure is expected to surge up to 9 billion. This had led to rapid urbanization in cities all over the world over the past several decades. However the form and spatial organization of skyscrapers (or vertical-strategy) have been majorly dominated by the structural and cost efficient of extrusion of floor plates and the definition of space by planes- floor plates, walls and ceilings.

This striated spatial definition and its arrangements had forfeited the future adaptability of skyscraper space for ever-changing needs and users group.

In this project, we are exploring the opportunities that individual space be composed from a unique cell-structural system, where like a cell could be split, replicated and combined – to form different spatial opportunities. Having to support this transforming space, an ever-evolving vertical transportation system has to be explored. Similar to any metro-system in cities around the globe, it can always be extended and re-routed, regions and zones are defined dedicating to specific functions (e.g. office/ retail) and inducing population cluster and growth.

In the dated horizontal urban planning (abundant in Asian cities), the striated and smooth elements often occur concurrently. The zoning for individual working, recreations and public entities are regarded as the striated. The smooth is the exact volume and organization of space for living and working entities that accommodate for ever-changing group/family size through time. As they are lease to different users through time and having to cope with the ever-evolving different needs, living and working components. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Coolie Calihan, Charles Johnson
United States

The advance of technology and science continues to redefine our lives with exciting and mesmerizing results. However, the rushing growth we have witnessed over the past century has left us with a global ecosystem struggling to survive. Increasing levels of pollution and rapidly expanding urban borders are eating up vital agricultural lands and forests – placing the world’s ecosystems under enormous strain.

This is a proposal for an archetype that aims to help restore the harmony of human existence on Earth. Now more than ever humanity must learn to live in balance with our natural world before we do more irreparable damage. This goes beyond building smarter and more efficient buildings. It will touch how we structure our lives and how we organize our cities. The site of this proposal is located on the dense urban waterfront of Rio de Janeiro and is to be completed in time for the 2016 Olympics. With a worldwide spotlight held on Rio, it is a perfect opportunity to draw  attention to innovations in sustainable architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Sarly Adre Bin Sarkum
Malaysia

Throughout history, through his need for civilization, man has created buildings that consume resources. The skyscraper is the epitome of this voracious consumption, its highly dense grouping of activities ie work, play, rest etc has become an ominous harbingers of our ecologically bleak future. As a reaction to the modern skyscrapers and its dilemmas the world’s eminent minds have created many variations of the skyscraper in the form of the antithetical subscrapers, groundscrapers and even depth scraper. Yet still they still struggle to achieve zero input/zero output in terms of resource production. There are greenscrappers which , though themselves are ecologically sound, are tied to and urban fabric and interconnection of production networks which are still contributing negatively towards the environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Deric Fourie, Dan Bernos, Michael Menuet, Pablo del Amo
France

Tower | city | towers is a city-towers project designed to give back to a land its natural dimension taking into account the constraints of the current city. Although it is conceivable on different kinds of lands, Tower | city | towers is here experienced in the city of Marseilles, second largest city of France located in the south-east. Port city of 240 km², Marseilles and its suburbs constitute a metropolis of 1,600,000 inhabitants and has a current density of 3,500/ km². The city has spread little by little by conquering the surrounding natural lands, the housing has scattered, becoming denser and denser, thus creating a disorganized, ultra-urban and totally artificial urban sprawl. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Adam Vukmanov
Austria

The goal of this project was to design a sustainable building that differentiates from current assembly of ecological developments. This is achieved with combining sustainable systems and other parameters within design process, therefore forming the building into harmonious and controlled complexity of geometry and space. The Trombe Wall system, Chimney and Wind tunnel effects are all traditional components here used in innovative way to generate exciting points on every level of the project.

The data of domestic environmental elements such as Wind and Sun are combined with functional organization of a building into a set of parameters that generate a modeling condition for a new “zero+ energy” high-rise typology. The result is a vertical, voluptuous façade pattern on the city horizon with diverse structural submatrix that reacts in multiple scales. In relation to the old urban fabric of Zagreb, Croatia, the tower follows existing rhythm of interference within each city block. It appears differently from each viewpoint, thus being a significant landmark in the mixed context of historic and modern architecture. On local level, building differentiates in all directions, creating unique interior-exterior spatial situations within fluctuated facade distortions on every floor horizon view. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Elena Batueva
Russia

The project of a high rise medical centre is planned to resolve problems connected with public medicine services in Moscow. The image of the building was formed due to the following three factors: the desire to get the highest possible amount of usable area within the city downtown – a crucial issue for municipal hospitals; the need of a structure solution that could provide the ultimate self-support in energy system; the necessity of linking hospital units in a way that will help to avoid all the traffic troubles existing in Moscow nowadays.

The system of health care in Russia is free, so the absolute majority of hospitals depend on the financial provision of government. In the center of Moscow many of them turn into shapeless and irrationally organized complexes that occupy huge areas of former manorial estates – places of historical and architectural value.  The lack of state subsidies and indifferent treatment of local executives often cause these precious buildings to lose their original form irretrievably. Furthermore, many of them don’t meet the modern requirements for hospitals. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Design Crew for Architecture
Nicolas Chausson, Gaël Desveaux, Jiao Yang Huang, Thomas Jullien
France

Skyscrapers are urban icons. In collective imagination, “skyscraper” means “city” because it is a solution that was invented to meet density issues in big cities. As we were looking for the redefinition of the term “skyscraper” through the use of new programs, we decided to look for somewhere else to implement a skyscraper. Obviously, it has to be the countryside. The main question we had to answer then was: why would we build a skyscraper in the countryside? What issue could justify the need to build skyscrapers in the countryside?

As you might know, although water is very present on earth, 97% is salted and 2% is blocked as ice. Actually, there is only about 1% left of liquid freshwater and the UNO and the World Water Council estimate there might be a crisis affecting half the worldwide population by 2030. Freshwater will be a major stake in the 21^st century. Indeed the production of a daily food intake for a human being requires 3000 liters of freshwater and the annual rate of freshwater needs is 64 billions cubic meters.

Farming makes up 70% of the worldwide freshwater consumption. Our proposal is a totally new building: an unseen response to sustainable development and the up coming stakes. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Kostas Grigoriadis, Alex Robles – Palacio, Irene Shamma, Pavlos Fereos
United Kingdom

The project is a housing proposal for the Hudson Yards area of New York, which is currently occupied by a train depot that forms a recess in the continuity of the ground plane at pedestrian level. Acting as a physical division, the depot prohibits any connections of the Midtown part of Manhattan to the Hudson River while also creating a programmatic boundary with transportation and industrial uses bordering the adjacent residential and commercial areas.

Urban Reef addresses these problems of localized ground discontinuity and programmatic and physical isolation within a larger urban area by proposing a highly connected three-dimensional network of housing integrated with commercial as well as recreational uses. Working to a brief of three thousand housing units, the normative isolated high-rise building type found in New York, is replaced by a series of mid rise buildings that incline to minimize structural spans and interconnect in order to maximize the area available for housing and communal space development. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Vincent Barué, Nicolas Boutet,  Olivier Brouard
France

The 70’s urban development, born from a political decision and flourishing economic period, has left us a harmful point of view for living in skyscrapers worldwide.

Faced with an increasing population, we tend to be more concerned with providing homes to inhabitants and stacking the apartments on top of each other at a good cost ratio rather than looking at the ecological and durable aspect of buildings. Over the years, each architectural era tends to declare that it is the right way to build cities, but today cities reveal the human work of the past decades, showing also some mistakes which were considered as the truth at that time. 

Presently, we notice that Carbon dioxide rates have reached a crucial level. We are now switching to a new building generation, taking into account the environment through thermal loss reduction. In many cities around the world, real estate prices are climbing and building renovations are thriving more than ever before. Almost 70 % of present buildings will continue to exist into the next century. Read the rest of this entry »