Second Place
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Yutian Tang, Yuntao Xu
United States

The Egalitarian Nature skyscraper imagines a new building typology driven by the human urge for nature instead of capital. It is a new kind of infrastructure conceived to serve the whole society. The traditional skyscraper is reimagined as a mountain range that provides a new way to experience nature within an urban environment. A zigzag-climbing path is developed along with abstract spaces that encourage an unexpected engagement between people and nature. Accessing the tower is not decided by capital but individual physical strength. Read the rest of this entry »

Third Place
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Charles Tzu Wei Chiang, Alejandro Moreno Guerrero
Taiwan

St. Louis, Senegal, located in the northwest part of the country, near the mouth of The Senegal River, has been home to fishermen for generations. It is a hostile territory where there are constant confrontations with the neighboring countries regarding the established fishing boundaries and territories. In addition to the political and social problems, the region is affected by the rising sea level. Such natural phenomenon has forced the community to move inland, away from the shore.

This proposal is based on traditional pillar structures, which are used to prevent erosion. These structures will serve as a foundation for the new vertical housing units. The project is also inspired by Senegal’s traditional wooden architecture that uses a complex arch system with tensile structures.  The system allows a high degree of adaptability and extendibility to create a new community by the sea challenging the rising sea level. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Xuejun Bai, Chucheng Pang, Lei Zhai, Yuyang Sun, Dianao Liu
China

With the accelerating process of urbanization, people’s demand for energy is increasing day by day. The existing oil, coal, and other energy can only be used for about 50 years, and their combustion will bring serious air pollution problems, such as urban haze, so the discovery and exploitation of new energy is imminent. Recently, more and more countries have found new clean energy combustible ice in the deep sea. Its reserves can be used by human beings for 1000 years, and it can only be converted into water and methane, so the exploitation of combustible ice is very valuable.

In addition, the problem of marine garbage is becoming more and more serious. It not only causes the damage to the marine landscape but also brings great harm to marine animals. Among them, most of the marine garbage is plastic garbage. Because of its structural characteristics, it will not be easily corroded by the seawater. Therefore, we come up with the idea of using local materials, turning plastic waste into 3d-printed materials, as our own building materials, and filling cracks in the seabed caused by combustible ice mining to prevent secondary disasters. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Ngo Thanh Ha Tien, Dao Duy Tung
France

According to the report of the Swedish Global Challenges Foundation in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, there’s a 5 percent chance that in the next 100 years, humans will be wiped out by a global pandemic or a nuclear war. A century ago, a strain of pandemic flu killed up to 100 million people—5 percent of the world’s population. In 2013, a new mystery illness swept the west coast of North America, causing starfish to disintegrate. In 2015, a big-nosed Asian antelope known as the saiga lost two-thirds of its population—some 200,000 individuals—to what now looks to be a bacterial infection. Faced the risk of Biological warfare (BW)—also known as germ warfare—which is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war; and the evolution of unidentified influenza, are we human beings on our way to meet the end of the world? Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Zijie Nie, Chen Shen, Jian Zheng
United States

Affected by global climate change, many countries and regions are suffering from sea-level rise problems, where people are losing their lands, plants and animals are losing their homes. The design is based in Kiribati, an island country in the South Pacific. This reef-preserving country is particularly vulnerable to the rising sea level issues, and its territory is thought likely to disappear within the next 60 years.

The design proposes to constructs a series of wall-like skyscrapers in the offshore waters and combats the problems caused by rising sea levels in three aspects.

First, by studying the erosion of the coast and the direction of the ocean currents, the design of the architectural massing is used to slow down the speed of the ocean currents flowing around the building. With such a method, the sand and mud in the water are able to deposit as sediment and gradually cultivate the new islands over time.

Second, with the design of skyscraper, land area submerged by seawater was transferred to the air, and thousands of residential units were built in the air to provide a place for people to live and use, protecting them from natural disasters such as hurricane and flood.

Thirdly, while constructing a vertical ecosystem to provide greening for people living in it, it can also become a seed bank for retaining plant diversity in Kiribati and other South Pacific regions. Meanwhile, a large number of artificial components located between underwater structures can be a place for coral reef protection and regeneration.

Finally, we hope that through this design, we will challenge the traditional architectural design thinking—generating land first, then architecture. It provides a new building mode for Kiribati and other regions faced with the same sea-level-rise problem—growing land with buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Thomas Gössler
Austria

With deforestation being one of the biggest human-driven environmental problems this tendency not only has to be stopped but needs to be reversed. Using conventional methods such a reversal could take decades. The aim of this project is to use skyscrapers in combination with modern technology to automate the process of reforestation and re-naturalization.

The problem of deforestation is publicly known and can be defined as the loss of trees induced by both humans and other causes. It potentially affects wildlife, ecosystems, weather patterns, and even the climate and is mainly caused by either the natural loss of trees due to climate change and increasing devastation, especially in hot and dry areas or the manmade reduction of forest area which includes farming, grazing of livestock, mining, drilling and accounts for more than half of all deforestation. In Malaysia and Indonesia, forests are cut down to make way for producing palm oil; whereas in Brazil cattle ranching and farms—particularly soy plantations—are the key culprits. Many organizations are fighting to plant new trees. But despite such efforts, between 1990 and 2016, 1.3 million square kilometers of forest have been destroyed. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Victor Hugo Azevedo, Cheryl Lu Xu
United States

At the beginning of the 20th Century, flying was one of the greatest achievements of humanity and the world was mesmerized about the possibilities that were about to open up. In that era of ingenuity, aviation was regarded as a romantic endeavor, a promise to tie people together and make the world smaller.

A century later, humanity is finally able to assess the magnitude of that feat that once was regarded as a miracle. Airplanes were at the centerstage of Great Wars, great shifts in geopolitical power, and gave rise to an ever-growing international elite of frequent flyers. The world of today is a different place, and the undeniable success of commercial aviation meant that flying airplanes has become one of the most substantial contributors to climate change.

A Tale of Two Issues
At the same time, we are in the middle of one of the biggest aviation crises for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing. Thousands of their newly designed 737 Max are unable to fly and are stored in airport facilities across America. What if they never fly again? What happens when the aviation industry slows down? And what to do with the significant number of decommissioned planes in storage facilities in the desert such as Victorville?

Meanwhile, on the ground, the world has a gigantic housing shortage and many marginalized social groups are unable to find a place to live. Not too far from the aircraft storage facilities, the county of Los Angeles has 60,000 people that have no place to live. A chunk of this population happens to be military veterans, who are denied the opportunity to start new lives as civilians due to the high cost of living and inadequate housing supply, as well as general stigma around post-traumatic stress disorder. How to spatially tackle this social problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Bryant Lau Liang Cheng
Singapore

Skyscrapers, as its name suggests; refer to the vertical ambition to reach towards the skies and reside among the clouds. The tallest building often soars over others dramatically; operating as a symbol of power and icon of might. This supremacy is unquestioned – yet the reign is often ephemeral and bounded by the constraints of time – since newer buildings can almost always eclipse this height in due time by harnessing newer technologies or regulations. A never-ending competition for height results – leading to emerging trends of taller buildings that are severely detached from the ground levels and out of human proportion; casting harsh shadows over mankind and existing as a built form of social oppression. In response to these conditions – this project proposes a time-based approach with individual and community involvement, to redefine the notion of the skyscraper as a social apparatus instead of a capitalistic one. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Ju Hwan Lee, Jin Ah Kim, Jong Min Choi
South Korea

Background
Among all environmental issues, air pollution is the most pressing and complex environmental problem nowadays. As WHO announced, most of the world’s population lives in an inappropriate air condition. But we concern air quality which is mainly related to inland regions despite water covers about 70% of the planet’s surface.

The ocean is not immune to these deep environmental issues. Lots of smoke from the land, ships going between continents, docking facilities, and HVAC systems in ships still use fossil fuels and emit smoke. Especially, the decrepit engine produces a large number of pollutants due to the use of low-quality fuel and its incomplete combustion. This contaminated air moves around the ocean and has already affected water quality, acidity and the marine ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Beomsu Kim, Sanghun Kim
South Korea

Change of Terra – Terraforming in Permafrost
If the greenhouse gas increases more than 940 ppm (parts per million) by the year 2100, the coastal and inland area that inhibits 750 million people will be submerged from the year 2050, and about 29 percent of the Earth’s surface will be desertified. This means approximately a quarter of people from all over the world will be affected by climate change. Also, since 2018, the rate of climate refugees constitutes about two-thirds (18 million) of worldwide refugees (28 million). Therefore, if a settled environment has been collapsed, people should migrate to a new base. We focus on permafrost, which is frozen northern half, as the people’s new base. If the global temperature increases continuously, Russia’s Siberian and permafrost (22.8*10^6 km2), which is more than double the area of the States (9.8*10^6 km2), will be able to accommodate a lot of climate refugees, and it will also get ideal climate.

However, the thickness of ice is about 80 m and the ground of permafrost, which is consisted of polygonal patterned wetland and ice-wedge, is still inappropriate to develop the infrastructure and natural forest. Moreover, new puddles and waterways, which were produced by global warming, accelerate the stratum instability and may act as a channel that makes carbon dioxide and methane go through to the air, and this will cause more serious global warming and air pollution. Therefore, a strategy is required to be able to establish the settlement at the unsettled land and atmosphere. We suggest the terraforming of permafrost by a design structured with a systematic mechanism. Read the rest of this entry »