2022 Skyscraper Competition
Editors’ Choice
Jerry Woo, Chujin Xue
China
Just as mankind are confused about the direction of development, a future of nature that science failed to foresee come quietly. With more than 70% of the land on the planet covered with sand and sea level rising sharply, the only moderate land left cannot support a huge population. When the former homeland is no longer livable, the day will come when human beings are forced to return to the sand like their ancestors did and live in an intensive way. Fierce as it is for burying thousands of lives, meanwhile, the sand also provided materials needed for construction. Transitioned from the “carbon age” to the “silicon age”, the sand-made community came into being.
The environmental background of this design is based on the current situation of increasing global desertification and climate anomalies. The initial conception of the design comes from the ancient Chinese saying “gather sand into a tower”, and also benefits from some understanding of the desert ecology in the movie “Dune”.
The sand-made community includes two parts, the ground and the underground. The ground mainly provide housing, natural light and sand. The underground part is mainly used for industrial production and agricultural planting. The entire building is assembled from prefabricated components of fixed modulus. Each town is connected adjacent to each other. Important resources are delivered through underground rock formations by the transportation network in all directions. For example, a large amount of liquefied hydrogen travel through the network as the main energy and the water generated from combustion is accumulated in the system and treated for industrial, agricultural and daily use.
Inexhaustible sand grains come with the wind are collected and sieved on the ground before smelted into a large amount of commonly used industrial raw materials. Uninterrupted production provide power for the operation of the technological community and avoids the ground being buried in sand.
The tower is pre-assembled below the ground before being raised to the ground and put into use. When severe sandstorm warning was received, the tower will be pulled down by the hydraulic power system and submerged under the surface to survive the disaster. The top of the tower is centrally equipped with signal receiving and light collection devices. The signal that communicates with outside world is directly emitted by the satellite. The light is transmitted to the underground with high efficiency and low loss through the optical pipe.
