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 »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Ming Tang
United States

Interlock: Architecture + Nature
The central feature of this project is the design of a new skyscraper typology for ensuring it will provide a coherent natural environment without fragmenting the urban living from the natural world.  By interlocking the green soft tissue into solid architectural structure, this skyscraper reveals and reclaims the characteristics of cellular automation generated interlock forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2010 Skyscraper Competition

Thomas Favre-Bulle, Mathieu Hefti, Simon Potier
Switzerland

An interactive engine for the design of reactive architecture.

Many skyscraper projects are pixelated stacks of boxes. Typological Organizer is a robust architectural ‘engine’ that refers to such projects but also adds both complexity handling and real-time reactivity capability. The engine does this by setting up an automated process of spatialization driven by internal typological parameters and external environmental factors.

Topologies
For the specific purpose of this project, we chose to work on a purely housing program, but the process can be easily expanded to other program types, such as offices or commercial. The housing types are described as topological networks, with geometrical dimensions and formalized qualities. Each functional room (could be foyer, bedroom, great room, etc.) is a node in the network with specific given dimensions and desirable circulation connections. Each one can also be given qualitative connections to the exterior, like orientation sensitivity, wet connection to core or terrace adjunction.

Spatialization
The spatialization of the thus typologically-defined network uses a dynamic particle/spring physical simulation. A Java library has been specifically written for the purpose of the project, integrating open source content in the matter of physical simulation. Read the rest of this entry »