Editors’ Choice
2025 Skyscraper Competition
Kim Min Sung, Kim Jun Ryeun, Park Do Hyun
South Korea
People rush to London. To accommodate everyone that has gushed into already saturated London, it modified its established density system. This naturally leads to an increase of floor space index and a redevelopment plan starting with old urban center that has lost its function.
Modern buildings are too easily demolished. Numerous buildings are forgotten in the name of development or redevelopment to fulfill the city’s density – whilst the cost, time and effort that are required to build a structure is neglected. The increase of urban density has been continuing for more than 300 years since the industrialization. Cities all over the world are trapped in this flow, continuously being smaller and higher. Major cities such as New York, London and Beijing has reached floor space ratio of 3300% today but sykscraper higher than existing buildings go up. Modern architecture has fallen into this viscious cycle of requidation and construction. At this point, we question ourselves. Is a building simply a vessel for accomodation? Should the memories and traces of people’s lives be rubbed off onto a flooding crowd? What will be the way to preserve various values as long as the building’s own lifespan while it exists in the same timeline as people? This will be a story about an architecture that ages with people’s memory – an architecture that freed itself from city’s hypertrophy and people’s desire system, an architecture that lasts for more than a century without being demolished with increasing population and rising buildings.
A redevelopment boom is happening in London. It can also be translated to the fall of London’s glorious 400-year-old memories. We hereby propose Neo-London’s next monument that will last two centuries. A project high up in the city center will age and be remembered with the changing London – the next Big Ben.
An architecture has a particular cycle. It as a clear process of under constriction, construction, used construction and demolition. Modern architecture is accelerating this cycle to respond to city’s raising density. As a result, numerous buildings endlessly repeat the cycle of construction and demolition regardless of the lifespan of its structure and function. Our project is to break the viscious cycle of redevelopment and fill in the empty space by constantly building.
To escape the cycle, we should build again and again. Therefore, we propose an architecture that could continuously grow its own density until the structural lifespan seizes. Studies show that an architecture’s structural lifespan is 200 years while a city’s redevelopment cycle is 30 years. We designed and planned 6 phases according to an overlap of 200 years and 30 years. While buildings are repetitively demolished and built, from small accomodations to buildings, time and commodities required are minimize and density reaches its limits. At the last phase – 200 years later – this building will remain intact with all its values while the buildings around it has lost its value of time, going through the cycle of construction.
