2024 Skyscraper Competition
Honorable Mention

YiWei Chen
China

Urbanization is a dynamic evolution in which old buildings are inevitably metabolized to give rise to new ones. Whether they are metabolized or how they are metabolized, these heritage sites constitute the unique historical memory of the cities they inhabit, reflecting the urban landscape and cultural environment of their respective eras. Therefore, how do we decide which heritage sites in our cities should be metabolized or preserved? How do we define protected buildings? Determine protection levels? And who should define them? Is it the government, experts, or citizens? What criteria should be used to measure and evaluate them?
From the past to the present, most heritage sites that have disappeared from our history have permanently vanished, with only a few remnants remaining as ruins. Therefore, in our study of urban historical processes, we often have to piece together their outlines through fragmented literature. However, every building that has existed is part of the city and its cultural environment, and each has its value for protection and research. But our physical space, in its limited dimensions, cannot preserve all the buildings that have ever existed in the city.

For most developing cities, historical preservation has always been a challenging task. Governments are repeatedly enacting new policies to protect these heritage sites while cautiously developing new areas. However, when faced with choices, in most cases, cities tend to choose the future over the past, often resulting in the disappearance of urban memory. Faced with such historical challenges, what actions should we take?

“Heritage Mirage” proposes a new approach to heritage preservation. In today’s era of advanced AR, VR, AI, and human-computer interaction technologies, it combines digital electronic archiving technology with a heritage archiving system framework to construct the “Digital Heritage Archive Skyscraper” to address societal conflicts.

“Heritage Mirage” digitizes heritage sites in the city and transforms the stored visual information into new building materials, stacking them up like bricks in the virtual world to create a tower of civilization, serving as an archive of the city’s collective memory. The archives are categorized logically based on the electronic archiving process and social masses, constructing a comprehensive heritage archiving system to support societal collaboration. The system includes urban surveys, data conversion, archive assessment, and other protection processes, allowing individuals in society to participate in this system in virtual reality, leveraging their interests and skills to contribute to urban heritage preservation.

The construction model of the archive is based on users’ common behavior patterns when using the archives, deducing their priority access in electronic archives. Next, these priorities are converted into spatial coordinates, and the collected visual information of heritage is brought into the coordinates to form a spatial structure aimed at data archiving. In this structure, every spatial position represents specific information, and people can search for and locate historical information by moving through the space.

As urban civilization advances, “Heritage Mirage” will expand and grow over time with the accumulation of heritage data. Eventually, the archive will become a towering structure, and the past, present, and future of the city will transform from abstract concepts of time into visible space, coexisting within a skyscraper, becoming a projection of urban life!