eVolo Magazine is pleased to invite architects, students, engineers, designers, and artists from around the globe to take part in the 2017 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for high-rise architecture. It recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of novel technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. It is a forum that examines the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and the city.
Perkins+Will has released plans for 98 Fourteenth Street, a 920 foot (280 meter) tall residential and commercial tower that, when complete, will become Atlanta’s second tallest building behind Pritzker Prize winning architect Kevin Roche’s Bank of America Plaza. The new tower is an integral piece of a planned development called the Midtown Art Walk, a half-mile pedestrian landscape featuring innovative architecture and interactive art elements between 2 transit stations in the district. The 74-story building will contain 382 luxury residential units and 180 corporate suites, as well as retail space on the ground level.
Competition Theme: Green – Eco - Future Building Systems and Lifestyle
The design intent is to create a system/network of eco-green elevated sky gardens within a soon to be realised super high-rise residential complex, with the aim of drastically improving the living environment and lifestyle of urban dwellers. This competition seeks young architects worldwide to provide innovative ideas to break the existing typology of the super high-rise and isolated lifestyles associated with high density urban living.
View of the southwest façade. Image Courtesy of Grupo Allard
Jean Nouvel has unveiled the design of his latest project: a 22-story tower located near Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. The skyscraper, dubbed Rosewood Tower, is part of Cidade Matarazzo, a 27,000-square-meter site containing historic buildings that once made up the Filomena Matarazzo maternity hospital. A heritage-listed site, the Allard Group is restoring the buildings and creating a cultural center, of which Nouvel’s new tower will be a central component.
Set to contain a hotel as well as residential units, Nouvel’s tower is designed to be a vertical continuation of the local landscape. Thus, the nearly 100-meter-tall tower develops at different levels, forming terraces and large gardens with small and medium-sized trees.
From commercial mixed-use to hospitality and social housing, Singapore- based WOHA reinterprets the skyscraper as a prototype for hyper-dense, green urban living. Their first major exhibition in the United States, GARDEN CITY MEGA CITY, opens March 23rd, 2016 at The Skyscraper Museum, and unveils twelve of their most recent vertical ecosystems.
Featuring architectural models, videos and renderings, the show contextualizes the firm’s towering endeavors as a stunning contribution to skyscraper design and a radical response to the Asian megacity. WOHA’s projects—in China, Bangkok, and Singapore, among others—address issues such as rampant population growth, preservation of tropical biodiversity, and the desire for
Chicago is one of the most architecturally rich cities in the world with the history of modernism embedded in its skyline. From the Willis Tower to the Aqua Tower, the skyscrapers of Chicago have led the development of tall buildings, the city becoming a breeding ground for innovations in structure and design. The Windy City has solidified itself among other metropolitan giants like New York and London as having one of the most recognizable skylines in the world.
This new infographic by Chicago Line Cruises offers a look at some of the most visible figures in Chicago’s skyline, with embedded information on each of the buildings. View the infographic after the break.
Mumbai, or erstwhile Bombay is the largest metropolis of India and an answer to the likes of Shanghai, London or New York. It is the financial capital and trade epicentre of the country, a city of lifestyles and narratives. The 'Maximum City' of Bombay is renowned all over the globe for the enormity and surrealism of BOLLYWOOD, which is the nickname given to the Hindi language Film Industry located in the city. The industry has come a long way and bloomed since its inception, to a multi-billion dollar industry, only second in capacity to its American cousin, Hollywood.
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has released a new research study called New York: The Ultimate Skyscraper Laboratory, which utilizes data to “develop graphic features showing the progression of tall building development in New York City.”
The Timeline of Skyscrapers in New York City Region 1906-2018 graphic illustrates “how skyscraper construction aligned with social or political events in history” in the context of key events, for example, building inactivity around the period of World War II.
The City of Amsterdam has selected MVRDV and OVG Real Estate to realize a new mixed use development in its Zuidas Business District - "P15 Ravel Plaza." Chosen through an international competition, the design calls for three asymmetrical towers grounded by office and retail, topped with housing and intertwined by an expansive public green space that wraps itself in and around the building.
"This plan effectively increases the attractiveness of Zuidas," said Klaas de Boer, director of Zuidas, Amsterdam City Council.
View of Woolworth Building and surrounding buildings (ca. 1913), via Wikimedia Commons
The Woolworth Building, an innovative and elegant early skyscraper completed in 1913, endures today as an iconic form on the New York City skyline. A historicist exterior sheaths a modern steel tower, embodying both the era’s modern spirit of progress and its hesitation to fully break from the past. Cass Gilbert, selected as the architect, believed the designer should “weave into the pattern of our own civilization the beauty that is our inheritance.”[1] An ornate monument to the growing economic dominance of New York City, the building was dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce.”
Michael Green is calling for a drastic paradigm shift in the way we build. Forget steel, straw, concrete and shipping containers; use wood to erect urban skyscrapers. In a 240 page report - complete with diagrams, plans, renders and even typical wooden curtain wall details - Green outlines a new way of designing and constructing tall buildings using mass timber, all the while addressing common misconceptions of fire safety, structure, sustainability, cost and climate concerns.
https://www.archdaily.com/443626/the-case-for-tall-wood-buildingsJose Luis Gabriel Cruz
UPDATE: SHoP Architects' ultra-thin, 100-unit apartment tower has now won approval from the New York City Landmarks Commission. Once complete in 2016, the 1,350-foot structure will offer luxury apartments that peer down at the Empire State Building and rise just above the One World Trade Center’s roofline.
Renderings from the architecture firm show Manhattan's skyline will soon welcome its newest "super tall" building, a strikingly skinny residential tower rising 411 meters (1,350 feet) on a puny 13 meter (43 feet) wide site just two blocks south of Central Park.
https://www.archdaily.com/435956/luxury-housing-reaches-new-heights-and-even-higher-prices-in-nycJose Luis Gabriel Cruz
Infinity Tower / GDS Architects. Image Courtesy of fastcodesign.com
California-based GDS Architects' new proposal, dubbed Infinity Tower, is designed to disappear from its Korean skyline. How? Cameras will be mounted at six strategic points; thousands of LED screens on the facade will then broadcast the real-time photos captured and logged by the cameras. Though no estimated completion date has been announced, the developers have received construction permits to break ground. More about this incredible vanishing act and how it's done at Fast Co-Design.
What do the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Kremlin, and the Burj Khalifa have in common?
Elevators from the Otis Elevator Company. The company, which is celebrating its 160th anniversary today, has an interesting history: it was founded in 1853, the year Elisha Otis invented the elevator safety brake. Before Otis' invention, buildings rarely reached seven stories (elevators were considered just too dangerous to implement).
But it was Otis' elevator that would allow for the creation, and proliferation of, the skyscraper - an explosion that would for ever alter the 20th and 21st century skylines.
Read more about the Otis Elevators influence on skyscraper design (and how Otis performed a death-defying feat to increase the invention's popularity), after the break...
Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird on It.” (“What a sad little tote bag. I know! I’ll put a bird on it.” Etc.)
It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. Many high-concept skyscraper proposals are festooned with trees. On the rooftop, on terraces, in nooks and crannies, on absurdly large balconies. Basically anywhere horizontal and high off the ground. Now, I should be saying architects are drawing dozens, because I have yet to see one of these “green” skyscrapers in real life. (There’s one notable exception—BioMilano, which isn’t quite done yet.) If—and it’s a big if—any of these buildings ever get built, odds are they’ll be stripped of their foliage quicker than a developer can say “return on investment.” It’s just not realistic. I get why architects draw them on their buildings. Really, I do. But can we please stop?
Find out why it's not a good idea to put trees on skyscrapers, after the break...
https://www.archdaily.com/346374/can-we-please-stop-drawing-trees-on-top-of-skyscrapersTim De Chant
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