Third Place
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Michał Spólnik, Marcin Kitala
Austria, Poland

How would the world be able to feed itself?
We live in a paradox – nowadays more food is produced than needed but the expansion of hunger is increasing. How is this possible?

Global food production relies greatly on an extremely small number of crop and livestock species. Grains are married to particular chemicals, becoming vulnerable to environmental changes, and lack immunity. Together with changes in how land and water resources are used, population growth, urbanization, and shifting food culture, this lack of crop diversity poses a threat to global food and nutrition security. For the sake of our society – and for the ones to come – we might like to rethink the ways we treat our land. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Haptic Architects, Ramboll
Tomas Stokke, Shonn Mills
United Kingdom, Singapore

The Regenerative Highrise is sited at Grønland, a multi-cultural inner-city borough of Oslo.

The proposed new highrise tower at Oslo’s Grønland metro station seeks to use large-scale development of the city as a means to repair or enhance the inner-city neighborhood. In the first instance, this is a site of unique potential, where the metro meets the river above and its adjacent cycle and riverwalk. As such the new tower becomes a vertical linkage of these existing and developing transport networks, most notably the increased use of the city’s waterways for electric ferries.

The tower structure reuses an existing highway viaduct at its base, creating active frontages spanning three levels: the canal and metro level; the high street, and the viaduct level. The base of the tower gives back to the city, providing cultural, leisure, and sports facilities for the inhabitants of the city. The highway viaduct is repurposed for leisure purposes, to ensure the embodied carbon of the existing structure does not go to waste.

The tower itself seeks to address the challenge of waste in the construction industry. Changing needs and standards often lead to relatively new buildings being demolished and rebuilt. The proposed tower employs regenerative design at its core, thus ensuring future flexibility for change.

A superstructure consisting of 3-story high structural decks, allows the tower to be reprogrammed over time. The triple-height sky villages are flexible and can accommodate a variety of uses, such as a single-story production space, two stories of office space, three residential floors, or even a row of terraced housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Yi Liu, Baichao Wang, Hao Zhang, YiHui Gao, ZongHao Yang, Shiliang Wang
China

Changchun is one of the most important cities in China. At the beginning of the last century, urban designers of Changchun carried out the road network system with reference to the theory of Howard’s “Garden City”. The urban transportation in Changchun is a system formed by multiple city squares as the center and roads as the axis, which initially established the main roads in the urban area of Changchun, and this urban layout is still in use today.

With the economic development and population growth of Changchun, the advanced urban transportation system can no longer meet the needs of the city. Although the city square connects several main urban roads, it is very easy to cause traffic jams in the surrounding area of the square during the peak urban traffic hours. For many years, Changchun is one of the cities which has the highest urban traffic jam rates in China. The main framework of the city cannot be changed, and we urgently need to create a new method and model to solve this problem.

This design distributed a number of transportation centers in the busy urban squares in Changchun. The interior of these transportation centers includes an urban cable car system that extends in all directions, a three-dimensional green landscape, and a number of residential and commercial space units. People gather here and take the cable car to any parts of the city. The vertical green landscape system can absorb the automobile exhaust air. The movable and detachable residential and commercial units enrich the center’s commerce system and provide citizens with a convenient urban life. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Ron Krakovski, Talia Tsuk
Israel

The main purpose of The Tree skyscraper is to provide accessible water to the villages of South Sudan. The Tree unifies the new community while providing it with water for agriculture, sanitation, and everyday needs.

South Sudan is located in northeastern Africa; it gained independence from the Republic of Sudan in 2011, making it the latest nation to be recognized by the United Nations. Conflicts have undermined the developmental gains achieved since independence and worsened the humanitarian situation. As a consequence, South Sudan remains caught in a web of fragility, economic stagnation, and instability a decade after independence. Poverty is ubiquitous and has been reinforced by a history of conflict, displacement, and shocks.

59% of the population of South Sudan lack proper access to clean water sources. Constant conflict and civil war, which began in 2013, Have led to the current water crisis in South Sudan. During the war, the nation’s water systems were deserted and demolished. 1 in 3 people use contaminated water daily, increasing the risk of infection by waterborne diseases. Currently, in South Sudan, 77% of children under the age of five die from diarrhea. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Zheng Xiangyuan
China

The population of Hong Kong has shown a continuous growth from 7,185,996 in 2015 to 7,496,981 in 2020. People have built skyscrapers in order to create more space on limited land. In the beginning, skyscrapers do provide more space for people, but with the increasing population, the number of skyscrapers will continue to increase, and eventually, they will fill the land of Hong Kong. How are we going to create new space for people to use when we can’t build new skyscrapers anymore?

Hong Kong is one of the cities with the highest population density in the world, its population density is 23.8 times the optimal urban population density. Only 1,106.66k㎡ of land carries 7,496,981 people, Nearly 80% of them live in coastal areas, which make up only 15 percent of Hong Kong’s total area. Over the past decade, Hong Kong’s population has grown by an average of 0.8% per year. Hong Kong faces a very serious population problem. As the population continues to increase, the average living space of people will continue to decrease. How to create more space in a limited area has become a serious problem for us to think about. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Yunheng Fan, Baoying Liu, Rongwei Gao, Junliang Liu
China

Urbanization is an important symbol of a country’s transition from a backward agricultural society to modernization, and China is undergoing an important transformation of urbanization. Migrant workers, a discriminatory and self-contradictory title, deeply reflect their status of “marginal people,” the main force of urban construction in China. They work in cities but do not have urban hukou, or household registration, and do not enjoy social security. They make great contributions to the city, they yearn for the city, but are not accepted by the city and are free from mainstream society.

The migrant worker community gathers these workers (often called “drifters”) together and the collective living allows them to gradually blend into the society. At the same time, the Urban Condenser serves as a cohesive device for the city, allowing urban residents and migrant workers to intermingle. With community, city, migrant workers, residents, and other dimensions of identity as the object, and with lifestyle, tourism, community mechanism, and other connections within the community as the link, the Urban Condenser builds a “super community” to stimulate social development. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Wang Changsi, Guo Fang, SiYuan Zhang
China

With the continuous expansion of the city scale and the continuous increase of the population, the “urban diseases” that are similar in the major cities have appeared. This design focuses on the problem of urban ecological distribution and utilization. The architect hopes to make the city natural through his own design. The organic combination of ecology and urban human ecology will form a self-sufficient urban ecological system that can make full use of clean natural energy to realize residential, office, commercial, and transportation activities.

The design is firstly designed as a single unit based on the needs of residents and is divided into two main functional systems: commercial and residential. The monomers in the two systems are designed separately, but they all follow the same rules: the spatial arrangement of the monomers is carried out through a parametric program, and all the monomers will be logically searched for their 3D spatial positions: 1. The secondary monomers are directed to Higher-level monomers that are close together, 2. The same monomers keep a sufficient distance, 3. There is a minimum distance between different monomers. Through these three logical building units, it will find its own reasonable position in the space. When the two systems are stabilized, structural reorganization is carried out to form a new complete system. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Christopher Tanihaha, Vincentius Kevin Aditya, Arnetta Hamijoyo, Christina Putri Larasati, Evan Januar, Gavrila Mandy Kahuni, Eugenia Jessica, Felia Alexandra Linoh, Luciana Augusta, Gregorius Christian, Reynaldi Daud
Indonesia

Sinking land has become inevitable. It is mainly caused by the increase of seawater level and got worse by the decreasing underground water table that is happening simultaneously. Sinking land causes land scarcity which makes coastal residents around the world lose their homes. According to BBC News in 2018, the fastest-sinking city in the world in Jakarta, Indonesia. Jakarta is sinking by an average of 1-15cm a year and nearly half the land now sits below sea level. The dramatic rate of sinking is partly down to the excessive extraction of groundwater for drinking water and everyday hygiene purposes by city dwellers. Piped water is not reliable and hardly available in most areas so people have no choice but to resort to pumping water from the aquifers deep underground. So the main goal is to be a buffer that acts as a vessel for ex-dwellers of the sinking city that also provides potable water for the remaining citizens on land at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Wanjing Wang, Zhenhao Chen, Minghui Sang, Xiaoran Xiong, Kaifeng Fan
China

According to reporters, Dunhuang’s first and last green barrier against sand storms run by Dunhuang Yangguan forest farm, which once owned about 20000 acres of Forests belt, has encountered large-scale “shaved head” in recent ten years. The sweat of several generations of local people have wasted, and the ecological disaster of “green retreat, sand advance, desert pressing” reappears in Dunhuang.

All the protective forest lands cut down in the forest farm are used to plant grapes with high water consumption and frequent disturbance of the surface soil layer. At present, grape production has become the pillar industry of the forest farm. However, the problem is that after planting grapes, it will not only fail to prevent and fix sand but also may consume the scarce water resources and aggravate the risk of desertification.

So we come up with the consumption- how can we galvanize the local economy and achieve the betterment of people’s lives without aggravating sand storms and harming present forest barriers through the form of skyscrapers? Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2022 Skyscraper Competition

Yu Liu, Junjie Hou, Jiaxi Shi, Hailin Wu, Ronghui Yang, Jiang An
China

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, masks were one of the most reliable and direct methods for people to deal with urban air pollution; in the past two years, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the portability of masks and their impact on blocking the entry of air through breathing makes it a must-have for people traveling.

With the development of China’s industry, the frequency of China’s urban PM2.5 index exceeding 400 has increased. Masks can effectively reduce the number of harmful substances people inhale when exposed to a high PM2.5 index.

The extensive use of disposable masks also brings pollution problems. First of all, the raw materials of masks are mainly non-woven fabrics made of high melting index polypropylene materials. This material is derived from petroleum, which will cause air pollution during the production process; secondly, waste masks will flow into the sea with rainwater without incineration, threatening the marine ecological balance.

Building space has been a place where human beings gather to engage in production and living since ancient times. How to reduce the pollution of masks to the environment while making more people less affected by COVID-19、PM2.5 and pollution through architectural design? Read the rest of this entry »