Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Natalie Ghatan
United Kingdom

Special Mention

The premise behind Urban Mountain is a high-rise geometry that can simultaneously accommodate a vertically-arrayed subsidiary ski community program, along with indoor and outdoor skiing amenities. The project was informed by examination of the modern city and the phenomena of urban densification, as well as analysis of varied sets of parameters and emergent behaviors. Indeed, the evolving condition of the urban quality of life and what measures can be taken to enhance it, are relevant to the Urban Ski Mountain. Taking into account the scenario of an intensified cityscape, with increasing stresses on air quality, open space for leisure, and general feelings of well-being, the importance of these commodities are no longer being taken for granted. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2008 Skyscraper Competition

Tassilo Hager
Germany

Special Mention

The beginning of the 17th Century was the advent for the first trade routes. It was because of its great geographical position, that New York grew fast. After the Erie Canal was finished in 1825, it opened vast areas of New York to commerce and settlement. It was the wind which carried the first ships to this place and it was the beginning of its financial, cultural, and political development. Sailing ships were able to transfer trade goods via the Atlantic to Manhattan, and about the Hudson River to the vast areas of New York. The early historical background of New York is the main idea of this project. To combine the early seafaring with necessary methods to save energy is an important element. It should be a self-sufficient tower, constructed with light metal. The buildings’ envelope should be able to catch the wind. A symbol of the early history of New York, which represents its energy-conscious future. Read the rest of this entry »

1st Place
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Somnath Ray
India

First Place

The skyscraper as a ‘modernist’ invention was a logical conclusion to the desires of a paleo-capitalist society, as an urban landmass approached its critical point of wealth and density of inhabitants. Imagined as a sign of cultural power and ownership, the skyscraper was typified in its ‘classical heroism’ from its logically consequent tabula rasa condition; as a formulation for a utopian blank slate on which a new building is conceived, free of compromise or complication after the demolition of what previously stood on the site. Read the rest of this entry »

2nd Place
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Yi Cheng Pan
United Kingdom

Second Place

The past decades have seen the creation of major cities from scratch, at break-neck speed, through the endless proliferation of Skyscrapers. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Dubai, Singapore are mere specimens of such a milieu that is set to perpetuate and grow.The mass production of this ubiquitous and definitive building type, that investors, planners, and government addictively rely on to achieve both market efficiency and the “landmark” effect in any new urban development, clearly exposes the very paralysis and inability of the state to imagine a new city that is not populated by high-rises. Read the rest of this entry »

3rd Place
2007 Skyscraper Competition

José Muñoz-Villers
Mexico

Third Place

Articulating the contemporary European city
“Although it owes much to its heritage in the American skyscraper, the contemporary “Euroscraper” is in need of a new expression, one that provides distance from the modernist orthodoxy of the 20th Century and is a critical response to the ornate and delirious notions of the 21st Century tall building that now proliferate in cities such as Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The European urban dilemma is that while rightfully holding onto the notion that cultural difference will continue to prevail throughout the European urban landscape, a new economic imperative must somehow become evident and explicit on the global stage.” Hani Rashid

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Eduardo McIntosh
United Kingdom

Special Mention

Alternatives to vertical circulation strategies within high-rises
The phenomenon of the “high-rise” can be read as a result of either high concentration of population or as a symbol of power and wealth. In any case, if we put structural issues out of the equation it is clear that the key element that enabled the birth of the skyscraper was the invention of the elevator. Therefore, it is ironic that the elevator is precisely what has totally limited the evolution of high-rise buildings in terms of programmatic and formal alternatives.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Anna Rita Emili
Italy

Special Mention

Sentina is an abandoned and degraded place situated in Italy’s west coast. The space dimension of this almost uncontaminated landscape needs a new construction that takes into consideration history and nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Eldine Heep, Gerhild Orthacker, Judith Schafelner, Elle Przybyla
Austria

Special Mention

Contemporary urban scenarios
The contemporary urban landscape, with its overlay of extensive freeway systems and infrastructures for mobility, can be viewed as an expanse of built form and its spatial residuum. These territories of voids are not planned in so much as they are generated by the changing morphology of the urban grid. Rather than resist or ‘correct’ these entropic tendencies that occur in the horizontal plane, the project seeks to embody them in a vertical, architectural scenario. As an urban model, the multi-functional high rise, with its mix of commercial, office, and residential programs, has the potential to dynamically engage in the spatial complexities that characterize the contemporary urban grid. By moving away from the notion of the fixed skyscraper, a functionally stratified structure that compartmentalizes program into predictable discrete zones, the proposal presents a systematic methodology for programmatic hybridization.

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Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Xavier Lagurgue, Günther Domenig
France

Special Mention

While the first skyscraper projects emerge on the circular Parisian highway, with the aim to densify the agglomeration and preserve the historical center, we propose to set up a network of towers which we call biotopes. The smallest ones are higher than the Eiffel Tower. It’s a “building provocation”, or as the artist Tatiana Trouvé would say, “a paradoxical injunction in which different types of urban organization, although incompatible at the first sight, are superposed”. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Mention
2007 Skyscraper Competition

Su Hou Chen, Melinda Sanes, Neil Cook
United States

Special Mention

Undeveloped land is scarcely available in Hong Kong, the densest urban area in the world. In the Western, Central and Wan Chai districts, this has historically led to the in-fill of Victoria Harbor and the creation of an artificial shoreline. This continued way of development replaces harbor with hardscape, further compounding the negative ecological consequences of unintelligent waterfront development, namely, added water pollution, increased impervious surface area, and reduced light exposure to the channel bottom. Read the rest of this entry »