A competition now in its 11th year, eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2016 Skyscraper Competition: a group of three top prizes and 21 honorable mentions culled from 489 entries. The award annually recognizes the vanguard of high-rise construction "through [the] novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations." Among this year's winners are a project that proposes digging down and creating a megastructure along the perimeter of Central Park, a skyscraper that acts as a hub for drones in future commercial applications, and a tower that takes advantage of the climate of Iceland as an ideal location for data servers.
First Place: "New York Horizon" / Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu
[This] proposal is a hybrid multi-functional mega structure. Not by building up, but by digging down, it reveals the bedrock (mountain) that was hidden under Central Park, and creates space along the new cliff. The ambition is to reverse the traditional relationship between landscape and architecture, in a way that every occupiable space has direct connection to the nature.
Second Place: "The Hive: Drone Skyscraper" / Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, Chengda Zhu
The Hive is an infrastructure project that can better meet the emerging demand for incorporating advanced Drone technology into daily life in New York City. The project was proposed as an alternative asset argument for the usage of the land on 432 Park Avenue, the project aims to create a central control terminal that hosts docking and charging stations for personal or commercial drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) in the center of Manhattan.
Third Place: "Data Skyscraper: Sustainable Data Center in Iceland" / Valeria Mercuri, Marco Merletti
Our project is a vision of how could it be a future green data center located in Iceland. A data center is often a large industrial building without a significant architectural connotation, a big anonymous container. The main issue of our project is to investigate a new morphological solution that could represent both the complexity and the importance of the building into which we keep our data. Above all, we conceive the data center’s configuration in order to maximize the use of the available renewable energies and also to allow the re-use in a sustainable way.
Honorable Mention: "Trans-Pital: Space Adaptive Skyscraper Hospital" / Chen Linag, Jia Tongyu, Sun Bo, Wang Qun, Zhang Kai, Choi Minhye
Honorable Mention: "Biomorph Skyscraper: Atmosphere Of The Place" / Jayong Shim, Dailong Ma, Tai Feng
Honorable Mention: "Air-Stalagmite: A Skyscraper To Serve As A Beacon And Air Filter For Polluted Cities" / Changsoo Park, Sizhe Chen
Honorable Mention: "Cloud Craft: Rainmaking Skyscraper" / Michael Militello, Amar Shah
Honorable Mention: "Return to Nature Skyscraper" / Nathakit Sae-Tan, Prapatsorn Sukkaset
Honorable Mention: "Sustainable Skyscraper Enclosure" / Soomin Kim, Seo-Hyun Oh
Honorable Mention: "The Valley of Giants" / Eric Randall Morris, Galo Canizares
Honorable Mention: "Global Cooling Skyscraper" / Paolo Venturella, Cosimo Scotucci
Honorable Mention: "Tower of New Arcadia" / Joseph Konrad Kosmas Schneider, Vincent Johann Moller
Honorable Mention: "Sensory Skyscraper" / Alexandr Pincov, Heng Chang
Honorable Mention: "Taiwan Babel Tower" / Lu Te Hsin
Honorable Mention: "Agora: Vertical Streetscape" / Alessandro Arcangeli, Filippo Fiorani
Honorable Mention: "Land-Escape" / Abolhassan Karimi, Amir Khosravi, Soudabeh Abbasi Azar, Shima Khoshpasand, Fatemeh Salehi Amiri, Maryam Nademi, Neshat Mirhadizadi
Honorable Mention: "Healing Matrix" / Jie Liu, Wen Sun, Hewen Suo
Honorable Mention: "The Displacement Or The Revolt Of Abandoned Architecture" / Ko Anthony Chun Ming
Honorable Mention: "Neza York Towers: Anti-Sinking System For Cities" / Israel López Balan, Gabriel Mendoza Cruz, Ana Saraí Lombardini Hernández, Yayo Melgoza Acuautla
Honorable Mention: "Towards Unity: Suturing Cyprus" / Lin Rujia
Honorable Mention: "A Core Issue Against Smog: The New Urban Air Infrastructure" / Fangshuo Liu, Xiaoyu Wu, Qianhui Liang, Jin Che, Shoda Tomoki, Pablo Mariano Bernar Fernández-Roca
Honorable Mention: "Hanoi Vertical Quarter" / M Architects Ltd. (Minh Phuc Nguyen, Linh Phuong Phan)
Honorable Mention: "Osteon Cumulus Vertical City: Kilometer-High City" / Layton Reid, Adrian Jimenez Escarfullery, Sakib Hasan, Bryan Ruiz, Milot Pivera
Honorable Mention: "Vertical Shanghai: Hyperlocal Monument Of The Global Housing Crisis" / Yuta Sano, Eric Nakajima
The members of this year's Jury are: Matias del Campo [principal SPAN], Thom Faulders [principal Faulders Studio], and Marcelo Spina [principal PATTERNS].
The 2016 Skyscraper Competition was sponsored by eVolo's media partners and v2com. For more on the project proposals, visit www.evolo.us.
Project descriptions courtesy of eVolo Magazine
