eVolo 2016 Skyscraper Competition winners reimagine vertical architecture

By Justine Testado|

Thursday, Mar 24, 2016

Designers worldwide get to explore their own interpretations of what a skyscraper is in the annual eVolo Skyscraper Competition. The sky is indeed the limit for the competition, which gives participants complete freedom with their skyscraper designs. At the same time, entrants are challenged to re-examine the skyscraper's definition, purpose, and the potential for vertical living in the 21st century. Since the competition began in 2006, eVolo has received more than 6,000 projects that envision the future of building high. As expected, competition is tough every year. Out of 489 submissions this year, the jury chose three prize winners. They are:

1ST PLACE: "New York Horizon" by Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu | United States
2ND PLACE: "The Hive" by Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, and Chengda Zhu | United States
3RD PLACE: "Data Tower" by Valeria Mercuri and Marco Merletti | Italy

Twenty-one honorable mentions were also announced.

This year's jury featured: Matias del Campo - principal of SPAN; Thom Faulders, principal of Faulders Studio; Greg Lynn - principal Greg Lynn Form; and Marcelo Spina - principal PATTERNS.

Have a look at the winning entries below.

1ST PLACE: "New York Horizon" by Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu

Project excerpt: "As the busiest and most densely populated county in America, Manhattan has always been a big fan of skyscrapers. Limited by its street grid, however, space in New York City is often skinny and tall. One exception being Central Park, a 1.3 square mile urban park, giving New Yorkers a change to escape the busy urban life. However, only a fraction of them can enjoy Central Park’s natural environment on a daily basis, and most of the population either live or work beyond the walking distance from it.

Is there a way to make Central Park available to more people? Our 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."

2ND PLACE: "The Hive" by Hadeel Ayed Mohammad, Yifeng Zhao, and Chengda Zhu

Project excerpt: "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. The current air-zoning regulations are to be re-shaped in a vertical highway model around a tower. This centrally controlled model will be more appealing to the legislative sector as it adheres to the concerns about regulating drone traffic. The primary location of the building does not only gather the commercial power of Manhattan, but also stands away from the no-fly-zones set by the FAA."

3RD PLACE: "Data Tower" by Valeria Mercuri and Marco Merletti

Project excerpt: "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."

Keep scrolling down for a selection of notable honorable mentions that caught our eye: