winners skyscraper competition , evolo 2020

Second Place
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.

Third Place
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.

Honorable Mention
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.

Honorable Mention
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—۵ 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?

Honorable Mention
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.

Honorable Mention
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.

Honorable Mention
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?

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.

Honorable Mention
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.

Honorable Mention
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.

Honorable Mention
Jiang Donglin, Yue Kaiyun, Tian Shaohong, Dai Mingqi, Ma Xinyue, Zhu Yilong
China Tulou is a traditional residential building in Fujian Province. Its architectural form is closely related to local people’s farming activities and ancestor worship activities. But because it is built for defense purposes, all the space used is an inward closed space. The thick outer wall of the earth building becomes the space boundary, which confronts the external danger and provides shelter for the internal. The interior is open to the patio and ancestral hall, and life sacrifice activities are included under the protection of the wall. This building attempts to build a high-rise building on the top of the original earth building, and gradually reverse the internal and external relations and turn internal to the external.

The new building grows on the original earth building. The external wall of the new building extends upward from the original rammed earth wall, and the wall is gradually enlarged from the bottom to the upper window. At last, the wall is gradually transformed from the wall to the thin beam-column. The material is transited from the heavy rammed earth to the light modern steel column. The internal courtyard extends upward from the transparent to opacity and solid, and gradually becomes the cylinder structure of the new building. Through changes of the external rammed earth wall and the internal colonnade, the original inward space is gradually transformed into outward space from the bottom to the top. Under this change, the internal and external relations of the original space are replaced.

CONCEPT
The project proposes a timber high rise in downtown Vancouver combining public cultural programs with the technical and legislative processes of a successful land claim for the expansion of indigenous territory. The timber tower stands in direct dialogue with the steel and glass structures of downtown Vancouver, offering a contemporary interpretation of the traditional totems and Longhouses of the Northwest Native Cultural region, making a clear statement about the ambitions of the region’s tribes.

Honorable Mention
Jingxuan Yang, Jingwen Na, Tianhao Wu, Hangyi Guo
China ‘McFashion’, which is represented by H&M, ZARA, and GAP, has become a trend and spread all over the world. ‘McFashion’ is a sales model which always provides the latest clothes at the lowest prices. A ‘McFashion’ brand can launch more than 10, 000 saleable garments a year, and the average cycle from design to shelf is only about two weeks. But the debate over the environmental ethics of fast fashion is heating up.

According to a report, human beings over 100 billion pieces of clothing are consumed every year. Overall, 92 million tons of waste dumped into landfills each year comes from the industry. A separate report found that about 35 percent of microplastic pollutants are emitted while washing synthetic textiles, mostly by fast-fashion brands. It is clear that the environmental concerns caused by ‘McFashion’ should raise our attention.

Honorable Mention
Taiming Chen, Zhendong Long
United States   Abstract
What are the social trends and changes that are affecting the development of skyscraper typologies? What is the future for those existing super-tall residential towers that have similar forms and structure systems? What is the next-decade expectation toward residential skyscrapers? How will the skyscrapers respond to the increasing needs in urban density?

Design Gesture
In this project, we are exploring a new typology of tower design by bringing up the idea of “customization in mass-production” for those supertall residential skyscrapers. Architecturally, the design is to utilize the existing structure as the basis and add the new hanging structures in sky lobbies to allow the additional spaces to hang outside of the towers. Programmatically, individual needs, which are varied in time, become the focus of post-built design development. Residents can individually customize their cubic spaces as they need, and the building owner will hang them in front of the residents’ doorway. The fundamental concept in the project is about the users’ engagement in the after-built development process of the tower – the further tower shall have the capability of housing their changing needs architecturally and programmatically.

Honorable Mention
Alberto Roncelli
Italy   Wildfires started immediately after the appearance of terrestrial plants, 420 million years ago. Natural fires can have beneficial effects on native vegetation, on animals and on ecosystems that have evolved with wildfires. The problem has arisen in recent decades, where we are facing increasing intensity in large fires caused by humans (arsons and climate change). In the case of large and heavy forest fires, it is common to have a totally destroyed ecosystem and, in some cases, the inability to regrow. In recent months we have dealt with the devastating cases of the Amazon rainforest and the bushfires in Australia with over 12.35 million acres of scorched earth and 480 million dying animals. Which role can architecture and architects play in this scenario? Can we suggest new approaches for ecosystem recovery?

Honorable Mention
Adham Sinan Abdallah Hameedat
Palestinian Territories-Bethlehem There’s no room for hope when there is no action. Actions are hope, amid impending danger of looming disaster. Alarms of demise are ignored. When hope is scarce due to inaction towards an immediate and radical response, comes carbon floss as a political statement to counter absurd/destructive reluctance policies, spurring and promoting hope for action as reassurance for humanity.

Honorable Mention
Yiran Fu, Zhen Meng
China The project is located next to the campus in Stockholm, where, as a result of the study, water pollution has been a persistent problem. What we want to focus on is the climate crisis and the relationship between building and environmental impact. Our design is a machine driven by wind power to absorb the pollution in the seawater while purifying the seawater and providing fresh water for the residential building on top.

This tower is a self-sustainable public infrastructure. At the same time, it also has the function of enjoyment. Tourists and residents can visit the process of the energy conversion process. This project shows that sustainability is not a burden but should improve the quality of people’s lives and could also be aesthetic and articulate to make a dynamic experience. It’s built right in the middle of the sea and is now part of everyday activities. The tower is ecologically, economically and socially sustainable.

Honorable Mention
Adam Fernandez
France MARS, a mythic red planet and God’s incarnation of the Roman wars are indispensable in the conquest of space today. This planet is situated in the sun’s zone of habitability, but it currently rests in an inhospitable state for humanity. Previously, this planet was known to have living conditions similar to those on Earth as it contained both oceans and an atmosphere. Today, Mars has lost its magnetic field and is struck by solar winds. As a result, Mars is deprived of atmospheric pressure and of water. This star has transformed itself into a cold and radioactive world with temperatures averaging -53° C.

Nevertheless, research is advancing and theories are claiming that it will be possible to colonize Mars by terraforming it. NASA developed a concept presenting the creation of an artificial magnetosphere located at the specific site, called Lagrange L1, which is between Mars and the sun. At this specific site, it is necessary to create an object that generates a magnetic field with an intensity between 1-2 teslas that is capable of protecting Mars from cosmic rays.

Honorable Mention Gu Jiaxi, Zuo Minghao, Mu Rongxuan. Feng Gang (Tutor)
China As an important type of urban architecture, shopping malls have been profoundly affected by the rise of e-commerce platforms in recent years. The existence and organization of their buildings are constantly changing. The cyber mall and the commercial space, in reality, are constantly interacting with each other and co-evolving. As one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms, Taobao fully demonstrates the strong demand and continued vitality of the Chinese market. Such a “skyscraper” in cyberspace has aroused our strong interest. We hope that by realizing Taobao, Representation to create a possible skyscraper to reveal the current connection between architecture and the information world.

We chose the project location over the highly contemporary Guomao overpass in Beijing, China. This highly dramatic and representative place will better accommodate and inspire the functional setting and contemporary attributes of our architecture.

The building consists of a pedestal connected to the urban transportation system, a mainframe, and numerous movable commercial cabins. The pedestal connected to the city ensures the stability of the entire building, and at the same time serves as a medium to transmit the energy required for the operation of the building; the mainframe is made of high-strength metal. Inside the frame is an elevator that can move in both vertical and horizontal directions. The track network constitutes the internal transportation system of the building; the movable cabin is the key to the building’s innovation and future. The unified modular combination ensures effective universality and integrates multi-functional such as retail, catering, and leisure. Commercial cabin movement is achieved by drone traction.

Honorable Mention
Zhong Chen, Wenheng Wang, Gengshen Zhai, Naiqiang Yu, Peng Zeng
China Background
Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated regions in the world. The per capita living area in Hong Kong is only 15 – ۲۰ square kilometers. Many people find it difficult to live here, but most people in Hong Kong are reluctant to leave Hong Kong. Housing prices are also not cheap in Hong Kong, the price of residential buildings in Hong Kong is higher than that in Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, New York, Singapore, and other cities, ranking second in the world after Monaco.

Under the daily impression of how prosperous and luxurious Hong Kong is, there is a group of people living in an environment that is impossible to imagine. “Coffin room” is one of them. The coffin room is divided up and down on the basis of the original plate room. It is converted into six small rooms, each of which is about 1.5 square meters. Some people can’t even stretch their legs when lying down. Another famous example is “cage house”, which is a sleeping place surrounded by barbed wire. It’s like a cage for raising livestock. These people living in the “cage” are called “cage people” vividly.

In order to improve the living environment and expand land use in Hong Kong, people seem to have racked their brains. A designer in Hong Kong has designed a kind of “snail house” with a sewer pipe as the shell. It covers an area of 9 square meters and is about 2.1 meters high. It is already a quite large house in Hong Kong where land is extremely valuable. In addition, the Hong Kong government has proposed the “Lantau Tomorrow” plan on land supply. It plans to build an artificial island of 1700 hectares in Lantau and provide up to 400000 residential units. It is expected that the first batch of residents will be realized in 2032.

Honorable Mention
Surush Ameli, Sharareh Faryadi, Laya Rafianezhad, Soroush Attarzade
Iran After thousands of years of living on the earth, have the man found a way to treat the mother of nature or is it still conflicting with it? Nature has always made all its sources available for mankind without any expectations! As a result of the development of technology and increasing the exploitation of nature, many problems and issues are occurring on the earth, climatically and globally; which cause the reaction of nature. According to the statistics of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, this reaction has been far increased. The reaction of humans to these disasters is a result of the interaction between natural and human forces. Sometimes this reaction is to deal with these disasters through technology and industry, and sometimes there is no way than giving up and facing many financial and life losses.

Honorable Mention
Xiangyu Zhang, Jingwei Tang, Qiuyuan Yang, Linxiao Li, Pengfei Li
China The Mekong River is the river of life in Laos which is the only inland country in Southeast Asia. Khone Falls is the largest waterfall in the world, which provides an important financial resource for local fishermen. In the rainy season, the waterfall brings an abundant variety of fishes which only clusters around the rapids of the Khone Falls. It is not only hard but also dangerous for fishermen to catch fishes there. In the dry season, the water flow is almost dry, which shuts off the supply of fishing on which its economy depends. Fishermen can only build bamboo dams and ropes that are used for fishing in the rainy season.

Honorable Mention
Johannes Schlusche, Paul Böhm, Raffael Grimm
Austria, Germany A fair distribution of resources is the basis of a well-functioning society. Pipelines seem to be an important part of such a distribution in the context of energy, but are always the focus of political conflicts and often encounter local dislike. A densely developed pipeline network with its infrastructure is an important requirement for the global economic system based on oil trading. The climate crisis we are currently facing must be reason enough for us to rethink these systems to get independent of oil and gas, which at the same time requires the development of new ideas for the reuse of these pipelines.

The European continent has a vast network of existing oil and gas pipelines like the transalpine oil-pipeline which connects the Italian seaport Trieste with Germany, special the metropolitan area of Munich. It is 470 kilometers long and has a dimension of 100 centimeters each tube. The network primarily serves to supply the refineries in southern Germany but is also connected to other metropolises in Europe via the extensive infrastructure. The towers are designed to be connected to this specific distribution system for alternative use of the pipelines. New systems for renewable energy generation have been known for a long time, but finally, they have to be implemented on a large scale. Decentralization and focus on resources in the respective areas should be in the foreground. Algae as energy resources are in their beginnings and are seen as high potential. Extensive research work has dealt with algae as an energy source in recent decades. As a biofuel, they are up to 6 times more efficient than e.g. comparable fuels from corn or rapeseed.

Honorable Mention
Yahia Ahmed Yahia Kheder
Egypt It doesn’t require many fires or many people to deforest a whole country over a certain period of the earth’s life. Deforestation drivers are; human impacts through deforestation, overexploitation, promotion of faster-growing tree species, clear cut forestry, improper management, air pollution, animal grazing, and many more (Euforgen).

There are different cases of countries used to be much more wooded and now become among the worst examples of deforestation. Basically, the soil is exposed in parts, then it starts washing away or blowing away. That is what we see in a very large part of many countries. Seeing those trees setting out there dead in the landscape without having money to do something with the land becomes a global challenge.

This proposal aims to maintain the evolutionary potential of forests’ trees. To support growing more forests and better forests, and to make the land more productive and more able to tolerate the pressures we put on it. Moreover, increasing forestry in developing countries raises people’s living standards and improves life’s conditions. Through providing firewood, food, building materials, shelters, and increases the potential sustainable green stack for the solar biomass.